Chinese overseas investments in sports & entertainment surge 188% in 2016

The Legend of Zhen Huan, one of the most popular Chinese TV dramas overseas. [Photo/Mtime]

China's volume of international trade in cultural products and services reached $88.52 billion last year, achieving a surplus of $68.8 billion, new Ministry of Commerce statistics show.

The amount of exports in entertainment and advertising services was $5.43 billion in 2016, with a year-on-year growth of 31.8 percent, according to the statistics.

The volume of China's outward foreign direct investments in sports and entertainment industry reached $3.92 billion, with a staggering year-on-year growth of 188.3 percent, the statistics reveal.

Dalian Wanda Group, China's largest commercial property company, bought US film studio Legendary Entertainment for about $3.5 billion in January last year.

More and more Chinese TV dramas and novels are being translated into other languages and have been gaining popularity outside China in recent years, according to media reports.

Wuxiaworld.com, which claims to be the world's largest Chinese-to-English novel translation platform, says it is ranked as one of the top 2,000 websites in America, and has millions of page views every day.

The Bears, a translating group for Russia's social networking service VKontakte, said the audiences of Chinese TV dramas have grown prominently in Russia, Xinhua reported last year.

"A couple of years ago, one (Chinese) TV drama would have attracted between 100 and 300 viewers, now the number is in the thousands, if not tens of thousands," an administrator of the Bears told Xinhua.

This is the first time that the Ministry of Commerce has released statistics on China's trade in cultural products and services.

The Ministry of Commerce plans to cooperate with relevant departments to expand the channels available and introduce more cultural products with Chinese characteristics to the world, ministry's spokesman Sun Jiwen said on Thursday.