It has become a habit for many people to turn on their mobile phones and check their phones while commuting on the subway, during lunch breaks, or in the ten minutes before going to bed.
These chopped up time were quietly filled up by short dramas.
According to the "China Online Audiovisual Development Research Report (2026)", as of December 2025, the average daily usage time per capita of my country's online audiovisual users has reached 201 minutes, of which the average daily usage time per capita for micro-short dramas is 129 minutes.
Filling up the time is just one side of the skit.
The other side of short plays is that they are becoming a "popular literature" in the true sense.
An episode of two to three minutes, with constant flipping, can be watched while commuting, eating, or before going to bed. When people are down and tired, they need a little effortless warmth. Those short dramas about good and evil being rewarded and rebirth and time travel may not necessarily have profound truths, but they can allow people to take a breath and regain some strength in other people's stories. It's relaxing companionship.
This is why, in the short play, there are both "shuang" that makes people feel happy and "kiss" that makes people feel warm. From the steamed stuffed bun stall owner who relies on evidence to win justice in "Evil Will Be Repaid", to cool dramas such as "Good and Evil Will Be Repaid" and "Blade of Justice" where the title is the theme, to "Eye of the Sky" to expose the black-hearted factory, and "The System Lets Me Do One Good Deed Every Day" in which good thoughts are rewarded with repercussions, the likes and dislikes of ordinary people have always been written in the title of the play. For example, "Home and Away" captures the fireworks of reorganized families in the 1980s, and "Home with Love" depicts the mutual reconciliation and two-way redemption of dislocated families. These short stories about parents, which are easy to understand at a glance, have made the audience deeply empathize with the characters in the drama.
While getting closer to the lives of ordinary people, short plays also open the door to film and television creation to ordinary people.
The recently popular AI short drama "Armed into the Song Dynasty" tells the story of five modern people traveling to the Northern Song Dynasty with limited firearms. It has been updated for ten seasons and has been viewed more than 4 billion times.
The person who made this drama was not a big factory in Hengdian, but a team from an ordinary community in Xinxiang, Henan. The leader, Zhang Hansheng, 54 years old, whose online name is "Old Eleven", only came into contact with AI film and television for the first time in 2025. He was a freelancer before and had never filmed a day. Chief Producer Li Chaohua put it very bluntly: "We actually all come from the grassroots." There are dozens of people in the team, including online ride-hailing drivers, mothers with children, delivery people, and ordinary company employees. They usually work all over the world, and they all rely on online collaboration.
Some media lamented that AI has changed the entry ticket for film and television from "fighting for funds and hardware" to "fighting for creativity and talent", giving more ordinary people the opportunity to compete.
The short play not only brings fireworks to the market, but also quietly brings history and tradition to more people.
The short play "Green Plums on the Edge of the Inkstone", a short play written by a post-85s girl who taught herself AI hand-twisting in Wan Wan, is based on the "Manuscript for Nephew Commemoration" and focuses on Yan Jiming, who was mentioned briefly in the history books during the Anshi Rebellion, allowing this tragic historical figure to be seen by a wider audience.
At the same time, the short play also touched the hearts of audiences on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Not long ago, the Hongguo short drama topped the free download list of Apple and Google app stores in Taiwan, China, and continues to dominate the list. On social platforms, many Taiwanese netizens left messages saying that they are not only keen on watching mainland short dramas, but also discuss famous scenes with classmates and colleagues around them.
Although short plays are becoming a popular literature and art, "becoming" does not mean "maturity". It fills up the fragmented time and also gives more grassroots teams the opportunity to play. However, problems such as homogenization, deliberate exaggeration of contradictions, and batch “face-offs” also indicate that it is still growing extensively.
Recently, Hongguo Short Drama has disposed of more than 20,000 illegal micro-short plays. It is not only a management, but also a reminder: Popular literature and art cannot only rely on traffic and duration to prove itself, but also must be able to withstand viewing, retain characters, and maintain the bottom line.
