The Costumes Are on the Actors: Inside Zhengzhou's Short-Drama Boom
A Henan newspaper investigation found actors in Zhengzhou — China's 'vertical Hengdian', home to 40,000 short-drama workers and four in ten of the country's releases — pay for their own wardrobes, nearly thirty costumes per drama. The detail lands as AI-generated dramas flood the market.
The costume bill for China's short-drama boom, it turns out, is paid by the actors. That is the detail from an investigation by the Henan newspaper Dahe Daily that has been moving through Chinese social media this week — a small, telling fact about labor in the country's fastest-growing entertainment format.
Dahe Daily's reporters sat down with two actresses working in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital that has earned itself the nickname "vertical Hengdian" (竖店) — a riff on Hengdian, the vast studio city where most of China's costume dramas are filmed, adapted for the vertical phone screen. The scale behind the joke: Henan's short-drama studios rank among the country's top three by output and account for roughly forty percent of national production capacity, the paper reported. For every ten short dramas released online, nearly four are made in Zhengzhou. Close to 40,000 people work in the industry there, and seven in ten of them are younger than thirty.
The investigation's hook is the wardrobe. Most roles, the actresses explained, require performers to supply their own clothes — including suits and period pieces that exist only to be worn on camera — and a single drama can demand nearly thirty costume changes. The expenses recur with every booking, and the report describes actors timing their purchases to e-commerce sale festivals, when discounts run deepest. Su Yu, one of the two actresses profiled, began picking up short-drama work as a student and pieced together a graduate degree half-shift by half-shift before going full-time; four or five years took her from background parts to leads. Li Tutu, her colleague, came to it without drama-school training, off the strength of one chance audition.
The costume detail landed just as the industry's bigger numbers were circulating. A question high on Zhihu's hot list this week itemized the flood: some 430,000 micro-dramas went online in the first eight months of the year, with AI-generated works exceeding ninety percent of the total, and the broadcast regulator signaling support for live-action production instead. The site covered this market's economics earlier in the month — hundreds of thousands of titles, one breakout in two hundred — and The Paper reported that an AI-produced series, a long-form Journey to the West sequel, has begun drawing genuine television ratings.
Read together, the two threads describe an industry running at full speed on two kinds of precarity. The synthetic supply curve is racing upward while the human performers at the bottom of the live-action tiers absorb production costs from their own pockets — the wardrobe department, in effect, is freelancer-funded. The regulator's push for real actors suggests the human side of the market is not being wound down; if anything, the state's preference could give the Zhengzhou cohort a floor of demand to stand on.
What to watch is whether conditions formalize as the industry consolidates: pay structures, costume allowances, contracts — the apparatus that crews on full-scale film sets take for granted. The actresses still hunting down discount wardrobes between shoots are betting the boom outlasts the fad. The nearly-thirty-costume invoice is what that bet costs at the moment.