Chen Yuxi knew something was wrong when the WeChat groups went silent.
For three years, she had been a short drama actress at Hengdian — China's answer to Hollywood, a sprawling 330-hectare studio complex in Zhejiang province where thousands of productions shoot simultaneously. Before Chinese New Year 2026, she was at her career peak: one of her dramas had cracked 100 million views, hit number one on the charts, and her daily rate had climbed to 3,000 RMB. She had fans who rode trains for 13 hours just to visit her on set. Life was good.
Then came February. The casting groups — dedicated WeChat channels in Hengdian, Zhengzhou, Xi'an, Qingdao, and Chengdu where crews post daily casting calls — went dark. No new productions. No audition invites. Before the holiday, she would pitch 10 roles and land 3. After the holiday, she pitched 10 and heard nothing. Not a single callback.
A director she had worked with told her plainly: 'Don't bother asking. My company is switching to AI dramas. I'm planning to change careers too.'
'The AI kill line,' Chen Yuxi said in an interview with Economic Observer, 'has reached short drama actors.'
By late March, she had accepted the fact of her unemployment. She cut her asking price by a third. Still no takers. She took a bit role as a special guest actress — a demotion from the lead roles she had grown accustomed to. 'Before, you play the female lead. Now maybe they offer you female number two. Before you were number two, now they offer you a special appearance. Take it or leave it.'
She is not alone. According to Chinese short drama industry media, real-person short drama production volume dropped 50% after Chinese New Year 2026.
What Happened Over Chinese New Year
The numbers tell the story with brutal clarity.
During the 2026 Chinese New Year holiday season, short dramas on Chinese platforms racked up 8.67 billion total views. Of those, 29.4% came from AI-generated comic dramas — nearly one in three. Within that category, AI 'simulated-human' dramas (realistic AI-generated content designed to look like live-action footage) accounted for over 80% of views.
According to DataEye, the share of AI productions in the top 100 comic dramas list surged from 7% last year to 38% in January 2026. In plain English: more than a third of China's most popular short dramas are now made without a single real actor.
The economics are devastating for human performers. An AI short drama costs roughly one-tenth of what a real-person production costs. The production timeline is 80% shorter. A palace drama scene that once required 200 paid extras — meals, transport, salaries adding up to tens of thousands of yuan per day — now needs one technician inputting prompts to generate 200 unique, compliant background characters.
The technology tipping point came just before Chinese New Year with the release of Seedance 2.0, a video generation tool that dramatically improved the quality of AI simulated-human content. Chen Yuxi had seen earlier AI comic dramas — stiff animations with mechanical voiceovers. The new generation, she admitted, could genuinely 'arm-wrestle' with real human performances.
The AI Actor Signing Wave
On March 18, while the casting groups were still silent, Shanghai's Yaoke Media — a respected production house behind hits like 'Selling Houses' and 'Prince of Lan Ling' — made a bombshell announcement: they had officially signed two AI digital artists.
Their names are Qin Lingyue and Lin Xiyan. They are not real people. Their faces were algorithmically generated from massive facial datasets. They have social media accounts. They will 'interact with fans.' They will star in Yaoke's first fully AI-generated drama, 'Qinling Bronze Mystery Chronicles,' scheduled for release in April 2026.
The same day, '#No Real Actors Below the Second Male Lead' hit number one on Weibo's main trending list AND the entertainment trending list simultaneously. Multiple producers and verified industry accounts had leaked that major Chinese video platforms were actively pushing a new production model: real human leads with AI-generated supporting cast.
The platform logic is coldly rational. Supporting actors lack commercial drawing power. AI actors require no salary, never have scandals, never clash on scheduling, never demand raises, and never get caught in tax evasion schemes. For platforms already burning cash in a brutally competitive short drama market, the math is irresistible.
36kr interviewed over a dozen film and television company executives about the trend. Some said 'inevitable.' Some said 'definitely happening.' Some were cautious about bubbles. One producer pushed the logic to its extreme: 'If supporting roles can all be AI, why keep real leads? Real leads plus AI supporting cast is already a weird hybrid. Might as well go full AI from the start.'
The Kill Zone: Mid-Tier Actors
The consensus among executives was chilling in its precision: top-tier stars are safe in the short term. Their commercial value comes from scarcity, brand deals, and fan economies that AI cannot yet replicate. But mid-tier actors — the working professionals who form the backbone of the industry — are facing extinction.
Wang Ran, CEO of Yikai Capital, stated publicly at the China TV Drama Production Industry Conference in March: mid-tier actors will be 'massively squeezed and replaced.' The extras and stunt-double industries will 'basically disappear.'
Multiple actors interviewed in Hengdian reported that post-holiday casting calls had collapsed. Project fees were slashed in half. Some actors received zero offers. Top-tier stars saw their rates cut by as much as 50%.
And then there is the data harvesting. Multiple sources confirmed that agents are approaching actors — especially struggling mid-tier and lower-tier performers — offering 500 RMB (about US$70) for their facial likeness rights. The faces are used to train AI models. For a desperate actor who has not worked in weeks, 500 yuan for a face scan can seem like easy money. It is, in the most literal sense, selling your face to the machine that will replace you.
The Backlash
The resistance is building, but it is fighting against a tide.
On Weibo, outrage erupted when users discovered that AI short dramas were using the faces of A-list celebrities Yang Zi and Xiao Zhan without any consent. The hashtag 'Reduced to AI Material — Where Is Yang Zi's Dignity?' went viral. Seedance 2.0, the very tool that had supercharged AI drama production, was forced to shut down certain features after mass allegations of celebrity portrait rights infringement.
Ji Guanlin, one of China's most celebrated dubbing artists — the voice behind Zhen Huan in the legendary 'Empresses in the Palace' and Bai Qian in 'Eternal Love' — issued a formal rights protection statement on March 20, calling out the mass AI cloning of voice actors' work. The renowned 729 Voice Workshop and other dubbing teams filed collective complaints about having their voices cloned at industrial scale with zero compensation.
Even Yu Zheng, one of China's most commercially successful drama producers, weighed in. He called the discourse 'marketing accounts peddling anxiety' and argued that AI is 'perhaps a passing trend' while real human performance will endure. Then, in the same breath, he admitted he is also making AI dramas himself. 'AI will only bring benefits to the film industry,' he added. 'It just happens to eliminate those without talent.'
The Talent Pipeline Is Broken
Beyond the immediate unemployment crisis, industry observers are raising a deeper structural alarm.
Chinese entertainment has traditionally operated on a clear pipeline: extras grind for years, graduate to supporting roles, accumulate experience and exposure, and the best eventually break through to stardom. Wang Baoqiang — one of China's biggest movie stars — started as a Shaolin Temple extra at age 8. Zhao Liying worked as a Hengdian background actress before becoming one of China's highest-paid leading ladies. Zhang Songwen toiled in obscurity for 20 years before his explosive role in 'The Knockout' made him a household name.
This pipeline is the industry's self-renewal mechanism. If AI eliminates supporting roles, where do tomorrow's stars come from? You cannot learn timing, emotional truth, or screen chemistry by watching a computer generate your performance.
As one executive told 36kr: 'If this really happens, it will hugely impact every student applying to arts school in China.'
The entire bottom half of the acting profession — the training ground, the apprenticeship layer, the place where raw talent gets refined into craft — is being algorithmically deleted.
The Numbers That Matter
China's short drama market exploded from 30 billion RMB in 2023 to over 100 billion RMB (roughly US$14 billion) by 2025 — a threefold increase in two years. It created an ecosystem of roughly 130,000 registered extras and actors in Hengdian alone, plus tens of thousands more across satellite production bases.
That ecosystem is now contracting at speed. iQiyi's CEO has announced that by summer 2026, fully AI-produced commercial feature films will hit screens — and that this is an industry-wide shift, not a single-company experiment. Platforms like Red Fruit (Douyin's short drama vertical), Baidu, Kuaishou, and Migu are all pouring resources into AI drama production.
Yet the disruption is not purely destructive. New jobs are emerging: AI performance directors, AI screenwriters, AI drama producers, AI prompt engineers — with monthly salaries reaching tens of thousands of yuan. Lingju Animation, a leading AI comic drama studio, saw its team explode from 30 to 700 people in just months, with market demand still far outstripping supply.
The question is whether these new roles will absorb the workers displaced from the old ones. A short drama actress who spent three years mastering on-camera emotional delivery is not automatically qualified to write AI prompts. The skills are different. The talent is different. The career that Chen Yuxi spent three years building — the fan connections, the on-set chemistry, the physical endurance of 27-hour shoots in freezing Zhengzhou winters — none of it transfers.
🔥 Our Hot Take
This is not a future scenario. This is happening right now, in real time, at industrial scale.
China's short drama industry just became the world's first mass-casualty event from AI displacement in the entertainment sector. Not theoretical. Not speculative. 50% production drops. Zero callbacks. Actors selling their faces for $70. The silence in those Hengdian WeChat groups is the sound of an industry being rewritten.
Hollywood should be watching very carefully. What happens in Hengdian's short drama ecosystem today will happen in Western entertainment tomorrow. The only question is how fast the technology crosses the quality threshold for longer-format content — and based on Seedance 2.0, that timeline just got a lot shorter.
The View From the Cliff Edge
Chen Yuxi spends her unemployed days taking walks. Her three years of savings will keep her comfortable for a while. But comfort is not what she misses.
She misses the fans who waited until 1 AM in the cold to see her finish shooting. She misses the thrill of opening night view counts. She misses being an actress.
'Before, in other people's eyes, you were a glamorous actress, a female star,' she said. 'In the future, you might just be an ordinary pretty girl.'
She has been watching AI short dramas. She thinks they still cannot match human performance — the moment when an actor truly inhabits a character, the improvised line that makes a scene real, the abstract leaps that only a human brain can make. She clings to this belief like a lifeline.
A few days ago, Douyin's parent company issued a statement saying it would continue investing in real-person short drama content alongside AI productions. Chen Yuxi screenshotted it and posted it to her WeChat Moments with four words: 'The industry won't disappear.'
She is still auditioning. She is still hoping. But in Hengdian's empty casting rooms and silent WeChat groups, the future has already arrived — and it does not need a human face to tell its stories.