Contextualizing the Global Popularity of Poverty Porn

Alone. Low income. Unemployed. 40 Years Old. No friends. No partner. No kids. These are some of the keywords that decorate perhaps the oddest new export from China. Thumbnail after thumbnail on YouTube features seemingly ordinary people living in nondescript small cities and villages in the country, describing their everyday struggles and offering glimpses into their daily lives. Between trips to parks and supermarkets, touring apartments, working at their desks, and cooking simple meals at home, they talk about their lives in a crushing Chinese economy.

This is a dark corner of China's poverty porn, hosted on a website that no one in the country would have access to without a ready VPN connection. Despite the everyday content of the videos, the production is anything but. Multiple angles, carefully curated from both first-person and bystander views, are edited meticulously to be strung together and then overlaid with well-scripted background narratives in fluent, AI-generated English. The protagonists seem authentic, smiling at good food and meeting with family, and grimacing at the difficulties of making ends meet while exhausted from long days at work.

Foreign audiences are lapping these up. The grittiest videos are racking up views by the millions, with thousands of comments from viewers worldwide sharing their own simple living while expressing wonder at the differences with what the same money can get in China. The videos prompt more viewers to leave comments, with open questions in the narratives that ask about what ordinary lives are like where they are, and helpfully share specific figures about everything, from the cost of a village breakfast to the loans on a high-rise apartment.

Even cursorily glancing through these videos, it is clear that the protagonists are not involved in the production themselves. A 50-year-old village lady tending to her farm or the delivery rider working 12-hour days would never find the time to even look at shots featuring them, much less spend time strategizing which frames to keep and sequence. They are, at best, hired hands, lending their everyday stories to production companies, paid a pittance to appear on videos while the production team takes the biggest chunks of the YouTube earnings.

That arrangement reminds me of the mass production capabilities that China has mastered over the past decades and deployed to an increasing number of industries. A few years ago, microdramas became the go-to entertainment source, as companies sprouted around the country to take advantage of widespread smartphone usage and the availability of underused real estate to be turned into production sets. As AI took over the job of human actors in that industry and inundated the space with cheaply made clones, the movers and shakers are turning to more authentic storytelling.

That authenticity takes on a greater urgency in the backdrop of the sputtering Chinese economy. While the overall economy continues to grow thanks to cutting-edge technologies in AI and renewable energy sources, plenty without the skills and connections are left behind, eking out increasingly meager earnings in the gig economy. The poverty in the videos, thus, feels relevant and real, as is the case for the production companies and the "actors" themselves urgently pumping out the content to boost their own bottom lines.

As foreign-generated YouTube income flows insidiously back into China, it is all the more ironic that the primary viewers of these videos seem to be those mired in casual poverty wherever they happen to be. Rich people anywhere do not have time or the need to scroll through poverty porn to feel better about themselves. It is the poor themselves that need a yardstick to measure themselves by, either consoling themselves on their own relative fortune, or quietly envious that the Chinese poor seem to live better than themselves.

But whatever the motive may be, the format's increasing prevalence, popularity, and tendency to be imitated show that for now, it is riding the zeitgeist. The spread of cheap data, mobile devices, and the prevalence of English-speaking capabilities have made the voyeurism that underpins poverty porn truly transnational. The global wealth gap amidst the rise of an AI-controlling elite is making poor people anywhere outside a war zone relatable, familiar, and thus easy to empathize with. Selling poverty to the poor is a good business.