Nine of Ten New Chinese Micro-Dramas Are Made by AI, Regulator Says

China's television and film regulator has put a number on the strange new economics of the micro-drama: 430,000 titles went online in the first eight months of 2026, thirteen times as many as in all of last year, and more than ninety percent of them were made with AI. The figures came from Wang Xiaoliang, head of the National Radio and Television Administration's online audiovisual department, speaking at a State Council Information Office briefing — as China Newsweek relayed on Weibo — and they arrived alongside two others: more than 800 million Chinese now watch micro-dramas, and the market passed 100 billion yuan in 2025.

For readers who have not been served one: micro-dramas (微短剧) are vertical-video serials built from episodes a minute or two long — revenge plots, billionaire-identity reveals, time-travel romances — released by the hundreds daily and monetized episode by episode or through in-app top-ups. The format's economics reward volume, and volume is what the AI turn delivers: no cameras, no crews, no location permits; a script-to-release pipeline measured in days. The question trending on Zhihu framed the regulator's briefing as a signal, and the answer Wang gave was double-edged: AI drama is fast and cheap, "opens new space" for creative expression — and brings challenges around rights protection and content quality that the administration intends to police, starting with a requirement that AI-made dramas be labeled as such.

The state of play is visible in Hengdian, the Zhejiang studio complex that has doubled for imperial Beijing and 1930s Shanghai for thirty years. crews there shot more than 1,100 vertical micro-dramas last year, and more than 600 in the first three months of this year alone — a pace that earned the town a new nickname, "竖店," the Vertical Store, a pun on its name's "horizontal" character. CCTV's weibo account relays the figure with a certain dry pride, and a China News Service video report shows both halves of the transformation in one frame: human crews racing to feed the vertical boom while, a wall away, AI production enters the same market. The dramas also now travel — the same report notes the format's overseas breakout.

Wang's announcement is, in substance, an industrial policy for the human side of that split. Real-person dramas are "the main force of premium creation," he said, and the administration will "strongly support" them — platform-level "real-person drama" sections, and, in his phrasing, "real money" (真金白银) behind a quality program meant to make good work find audiences and returns. It is a targeted intervention: the problem the administration describes is not that AI dramas exist but that at ninety percent of supply, and eight-figure annual output, the default viewing experience becomes the sloppiest version of itself.

What happens to a national screen habit built on 430,000-a-year supply is the question the briefing leaves open. The labeling rule now makes the machine-made visible; the subsidies test whether, given the choice between an infinite catalog and a labeled alternative, viewers will pay for the difference.