Why AI-Made Comic Dramas Are Suddenly Everywhere on Chinese Phones

The week's top trending question answers itself. "Hongguo AI comic-dramas — why are they everywhere?" floated up Weibo's list not because anything happened, but because enough people noticed the same thing at the same time: look at almost any Chinese phone and something machine-made is probably playing on it. Hongguo — Red Fruit — is ByteDance's free short-drama app, "manhua ju" are its comic-styled animated serials, and the newest stock on that shelf is increasingly not drawn by anyone.

The scale is the story. The National Radio and Television Administration's own figures, collected by 36Kr, count 430,000 micro-dramas released in the first eight months of this year — thirteen times the total for all of last year. The China Network Audio-Visual Association reports that in the first quarter, new AI-made short dramas outnumbered new live-action ones twenty to one. A production line that once needed writers, actors and cameras now runs on prompt lists, and the shelf space has absorbed it all.

The supply exists because the demand is mapped with uncanny precision. One 36Kr writer observed that the genre reads its viewers as shrewdly as a scheming court minister: dragon-king son-in-law revenge fantasies for middle-aged men, tales of wicked mothers-in-law reforming for wives, stories of wicked daughters-in-law seeing the light for mothers-in-law. The new AI wave has intensified the targeting, spawning niches such as "Marry a Delivery Driver" and the street-stall owner who slaps down a crooked rival.

For many viewers the result is less delight than a low hum of unease. "Hongguo is honestly a little frightening," one user wrote in the week's most-liked post on the topic, liked nearly 10,000 times. "Every screen in my family is playing AI comic dramas. I glance at a stranger's phone on the street — an AI comic drama too. ByteDance is a bit scary, honestly — it has monopolized so much." Others put it more bluntly, asking who is going to rein in today's AI short dramas — a question with no institution currently assigned to answer it.

The money, though, has already voted. Kling, the video-generation unit of short-video platform Kuaishou, is preparing a Hong Kong IPO that could come as early as 2027 and raise at least a billion US dollars, according to a Bloomberg report carried by 36Kr, with CICC, Goldman Sachs and UBS lined up as underwriters. A private round this summer pulled in Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu and the state's artificial-intelligence industry fund, valuing Kling at roughly 122.8 billion yuan — more, on paper, than Kuaishou itself was worth at October 9's close. The micro-drama flood is a large part of the business case: it is the proof that generated video sells at industrial volume.

This site has tracked the format's AI turn as it happened — the human actors being crowded out of their own boom, and the grandmother billed 226,800 yuan for micro-dramas she did not understand she was buying. What is new this month is respectability: a Zhihu question about one AI comic drama, praised for its "true-to-life, finely detailed" art style, has drawn 1.67 million units of heat — the form now produces titles people discuss, not just consume.

Making a show, in other words, is approaching free. Finding the eyes to watch it is the business — and the eyes are what Red Fruit, with its recommendation engine, owns.