State Media Asks What China's Short-Drama Apps Are Doing With 129 Minutes a Day

Hongguo, the free short-drama app owned by ByteDance, has spent the week on Weibo's trending list under a hashtag that doubles as a confession: "scrolling Hongguo short dramas until dawn" (红果短剧刷到天亮). The app's rise is no longer niche — a widely shared graphic this week put it among China's four largest apps by daily active users, at roughly 168 million, putting a drama-streaming service in the company of WeChat and Alipay.

The joke was that people cannot stop. One Weibo user tried the app out of curiosity after seeing the hashtag and reported that he could not get through a single episode — "maybe I'm just an old-timer now," he wrote, using the slang 老登. But the more serious commentary arrived from the country's media this week. CCTV carried a Beijing Youth Daily feature titled "Why short dramas are easy to fall into and hard to climb out of", and The Paper published a commentary on what it called the "ByteDance time" controversy — the question of how much of the public's attention algorithms, infinite scroll and autoplay are quietly assembling.

The numbers in that commentary are the substance. China's internet audiovisual users now average 201 minutes a day in such apps, according to the 2026 China Network Audiovisual Development Report — and of that, short dramas alone account for 129 minutes a day, already more than long-form video. What was once filler between tasks has become, in the report's framing, a primary container for the country's daily attention.

For the site's readers, Hongguo is a familiar protagonist. The app's operators have begun building brakes into a product that works by removing them — it now shows rest and sleep reminders to viewers who binge too long — after an earlier wave of Weibo warnings against downloading an app that keeps users watching. The economics have shifted just as fast: nine in ten of China's new short dramas are now made with AI, which keeps unit costs low enough that a free, ad-supported app can out-scale paid rivals.

What The Paper's commentary adds is the demand that goes with the diagnosis: platform responsibility, it argues, should not stop at compliance — at age gates and usage reminders — but reach the design of the recommendation loop itself. That is a soft standard with no enforcement mechanism attached. The test of whether it means anything will come the next time a short-drama app redesigns its autoplay button, or does not.