Donghua and the Bilibili-Tencent Era of Chinese Animation

Heaven Official’s Blessing is the kind of donghua title that, ten years ago, would not have been visible outside China. Today it is licensed internationally, discussed on the same platforms that host Japanese seasonal anime, and treated by a portion of the global animation audience as a reference point for what Chinese animation has become. The transformation that made this possible is recent, structurally specific, and worth understanding on its own terms rather than as a footnote to the Japanese industry.

Donghua — the Chinese-language term for Chinese animation — is not a Japanese production tradition in Chinese language. It is a distinct ecosystem with its own studios, platforms, regulatory environment, and stylistic conventions. The fact that some donghua titles share visual heritage with anime reflects shared influences and cross-pollination, not a derivative relationship.

The state-policy and private-investment foundation

Donghua’s 2010s-2020s growth was anchored by two parallel forces. The first was Chinese state policy, which from the late 2000s onward identified animation as a creative-industry priority and channeled subsidies, tax incentives, and infrastructure support into domestic production. The second was private platform investment, particularly from the major streaming services that emerged as the platform economy consolidated.

The result was a domestic production base that scaled much faster than would have been possible under either force alone. Studios proliferated. Production budgets rose. The number of donghua titles produced annually grew through the 2010s into the 2020s at a pace the Japanese industry — much older and structurally different — has not matched.

The state-policy element comes with constraints. Content guidelines apply, and titles that touch on politically sensitive material, certain historical depictions, or themes outside official tolerances either do not get made or face friction in domestic release. Some donghua titles have been unable to release internationally for related policy reasons, even when international demand exists.

Platforms: Bilibili, Tencent Video, iQIYI

Three platforms anchor the donghua ecosystem. Bilibili is the most important of these for international visibility. Originally a video-sharing site oriented around anime and ACG (anime, comics, games) fan culture, Bilibili built itself in the 2010s into a hybrid platform: it licenses and simulcasts Japanese anime in China, it produces and hosts donghua, it operates a manga reader app, and it has equity stakes in animation studios. Its position as a bridge between Japanese anime and Chinese donghua audiences makes it structurally central to both markets.

Tencent Video, part of the Tencent conglomerate, operates as a more general streaming service with significant donghua investment. It has produced or co-produced many of the major donghua titles of the late 2010s and 2020s, often in partnership with novel-adaptation imprints from its parent’s literature platforms.

iQIYI rounds out the major three, with a similar profile to Tencent Video. The three platforms compete on titles, simulcasts, and licensing, the same way Crunchyroll, Hidive, and Netflix do in the anime space.

The major properties

Several donghua titles serve as anchors for the industry’s international visibility:

The King’s Avatar (Quanzhi Gaoshou, 2017-) is an e-sports drama adapted from a web novel by Butterfly Blue. The Tencent Penguin Pictures production was an early demonstration that donghua could mount production values comparable to Japanese TV anime, and the franchise has run through multiple seasons and a film.

Heaven Official’s Blessing (Tian Guan Ci Fu, 2020-) adapts a novel by MoXiang TongXiu, the same author behind the source material for The Untamed live-action drama. The donghua adaptation, produced by Haoliners Animation League and bcmay, became one of the most-watched donghua titles internationally, reaching audiences via Bilibili and licensed Western streaming.

Mo Dao Zu Shi / The Untamed (2018-), another MoXiang TongXiu adaptation, anchored xianxia (immortal-hero fantasy) donghua as a subgenre.

Link Click (Shiguang Dailiren, 2021-) is a contemporary supernatural thriller produced by LAN Studio. Its tightly serialized structure and emotional storytelling made it one of the breakout donghua titles for international audiences who came in skeptical of the medium.

Scissor Seven (Wu Liuqi, 2018-), produced by AHA Entertainment, found a global audience via Netflix licensing — one of the first donghua titles to reach Netflix’s main catalog as a flagship original.

Stylistic relationship with anime

The visual relationship between donghua and anime is more nuanced than a casual viewer sees. Some donghua titles draw heavily on Japanese anime stylistic conventions — character designs, animation timing, framing — because the productions hire artists trained in that tradition or because the source material was deliberately influenced by anime. Other donghua titles work in distinctly Chinese visual idioms, drawing on ink-painting traditions, Chinese opera, or contemporary Chinese illustration styles.

A meaningful technical difference is that 3DCG is more common in donghua than in TV anime. Many major donghua titles are produced primarily in 3DCG, with stylized rendering meant to evoke 2D animation. The Japanese industry has been more conservative in adopting full 3DCG for series; donghua adopted it earlier, partly because the production cost structure made it economical at scale.

The bridge position of Bilibili

Bilibili’s structural role merits emphasis. The platform hosts Japanese anime simulcasts for Chinese audiences, produces and distributes donghua, and operates manga and light-novel reading apps. It functions as a hybrid platform in a way that has no exact analog in the Japanese or Western markets — closest, perhaps, to a hypothetical fusion of Crunchyroll, Manga Plus, and a domestic Chinese production house.

This bridge position matters for what international audiences see. Many donghua titles that reach Western audiences do so through Bilibili’s international apps or through licensing arrangements Bilibili facilitates. The platform is the routing layer between Chinese production and international consumption.

The policy and international ambition tension

Chinese animation’s international ambitions exist in tension with its domestic regulatory environment. Some titles that succeed domestically cannot be released internationally because of licensing complications, content restrictions, or geopolitical friction. Other titles are deliberately produced with international audiences in mind, smoothing out elements that might travel poorly.

The mid-2020s have seen the tension intensify rather than resolve. Donghua’s international visibility continues to grow, but unevenly, and the question of which titles reach which markets is increasingly shaped by factors outside pure creative or commercial decision-making.

What is clear is that donghua is no longer a parallel industry the international animation audience can ignore. The 2020s have established it as a structurally significant part of the global animation landscape — one with its own producers, platforms, conventions, and constraints, distinct from the Japanese tradition it sometimes resembles.

The encyclopedia tracks major donghua titles alongside Japanese anime, with production information and licensing availability for the Arabic-language markets where donghua’s international footprint continues to expand.