How an AI Micro-Drama About Saving the Song Dynasty Paid Off a 54-Year-Old's Debts

The 54-year-old behind China's current breakout drama never went to film school and has never met most of the people who made it. Zhang Hansheng, a serial entrepreneur whose earlier ventures all failed, spent a year teaching himself AI video tools; the result, "Armed Entry into Song" (持械入宋), a drama about an armed squad that time-travels to the Song dynasty, now tops the AI chart of Hongguo, ByteDance's short-drama platform, with 6.6 billion cumulative views and — after a production budget of about one million yuan — actual profit, which he used to clear his debts. The provincial broadcaster China Blue News' post on the story was liked more than 7,000 times, and Douyin's vice president Li Liang publicly praised it as a work of "grassroots creation" by people with no professional training.

The show's appeal, according to the online dissection that followed its rise, is that it refuses the usual short-drama cheat codes. Where most hits hand the hero a "system" that dispenses power, this squad's rifles jam, its ammunition runs out, and its protagonist — who wants to enter government service — must first settle his household registration, save up for books and sit the imperial exams. The premise is pointed: the squad arrives in 1122, five years before the catastrophe of 1127, when northern armies sacked the Song capital, an event Chinese viewers still rank among the country's great historical grievances. The drama is, in effect, an AI-generated rebuttal to a 900-year-old national memory.

Just as striking is how it was made. The industry watcher 风中的厂长, whose breakdown of the show spread widely, noted that the production team works entirely remotely — including stay-at-home mothers in Xinxiang, Henan, and ride-hailing drivers — a cloud collaboration that needs no big-city studio and, in his view, will become the norm. A parallel story this week made the same point: a 33-year-old laid-off software tester told Henan's Dahe Daily he had retrained on AI video tools and now earns a living from shorts with millions of views, joining a field our site examined when Chinese micro-dramas got their own English word.

The boom has now reached the regulator. This week, in a statement carried by state media, the National Radio and Television Administration said it would continue supporting micro-dramas made with real actors while moving to "standardise" AI-made ones — a signal that the technology's wild-cowboy phase is being brought under production rules.

The same week produced an unintentional verdict on how deep AI writing has sunk into the culture. On the Mango TV variety show "Friendship Reunion", actress Wang Zixuan delivered a tearful speech about being "embarrassed but not shameful" after confronting a former friend; within a day, viewers had matched her wording to an AI short drama called "The Girl Who Was Laid Off", with a widely shared side-by-side analysis putting keyword, sentence-structure and core-idea overlap at 80 to 90 percent and search results pushing the match higher. Whether she or a team wrote it, the charge that a person's "sincere words" sound machine-made is itself new — and the debate running on Baidu's hot board shows no sign of settling.