The AI Drama Boom's Two Faces: A Student's 3 Million Yuan and an Actress's Lemon Tea Stand
A mechanical-engineering junior in a Suzhou dorm says his AI-made comic dramas have earned over 3 million yuan, while in Hengdian, a short-drama actress who once worked ten thousand-yuan months now sells hand-shaken lemon tea to pay rent because the filming days have dried up. The same boom is producing both.
Xiao Tianle is a third-year mechanical and electronic engineering student at Soochow University's future campus. He works from his dormitory, from a single computer, and — according to a profile Daily Economic News put on Weibo this week — his AI-made comic dramas, a form called manju, have earned more than 3 million yuan in under a year. His five-person team once produced three series in seven days. One breakout hit collected 1.5 billion views and brought in over 2 million yuan on its own. In August he registered a company in Wujiang, a district of Suzhou, and he now spends his time between coursework and meetings with investors.
Across the country, in the film-studio town of Hengdian, a short-drama actress named Song Nianhuan is keeping a different ledger. A Zhihu essay circulating this week counts her shooting days over the past half year: one day, one day, two days, nine days, zero, zero. She came to Hengdian from rural Guizhou three years ago, quit a job that paid her more than 10,000 yuan a month, climbed from 100-yuan-a-day extra work to lead roles in short dramas. Now the casting groups on her phone — she counts more than a hundred — have gone quiet as friends leave the industry, and she sells hand-shaken lemon tea from a street stand to make rent, calling out her pitch into the winter cold.
The two figures are not connected, except by the same force. AI-generated video has dropped the cost of making a serial drama toward zero, and China's short-drama platforms — above all Hongguo, ByteDance's free-drama app — have built the distribution to monetize whatever gets made. The genre's newest phenomenon is a series called Chixie Ru Song, in which a modern special-forces unit travels back to the Song dynasty with all of its weapons intact; a 36Kr report on the hit notes that every character and frame is AI-generated, the series has stacked up more than 12 billion views across platforms, and it has already run roughly ten seasons of a hundred episodes each — a thousand episodes of television no human production line could have shot in the time. In the manju form, animation-style "comic dramas" are cheaper still: no sets, no actors, no camera.
This site has followed the displacement question as studios cut their entry-level jobs, watched regulators move against face-theft and cloned voices, and noted that nine in ten new short dramas are now AI-made. What the student and the lemon-tea seller add is the human arithmetic on each side of that ratio. As Song Nianhuan's Zhihu chronicler observes, when an AI drama is filmed by nobody, the wages that used to feed a Hengdian ecosystem of extras, grips, and hopefuls simply don't get spent. Xiao Tianle's company is real, and so is the stand outside Hengdian's gates. The question Chinese readers are asking — and that the industry's regulators are now circling — is whether a boom this profitable still needs to employ anyone at all.