Bronze artefacts pulsate with quantum energy as mythical beasts become steampunk monstrosities in two of China’s AI-generated micro-dramas, where technological innovation meets cultural revival with breathtaking visual flair. As Western creative industries hesitate at AI’s ethical boundaries, China embraces the technology to transform its ancient legacy into futuristic storytelling that serves both commercial interests and Xi Jinping’s vision of cultural self-confidence.

A massive bronze tree pulses in unearthly light, its metallic branches suddenly alive as ancient symbols cascade across its surface. In the distance, a man in archaeological gear stares in disbelief as the artifact’s nine bird-like ornaments ignite one by one, tearing open a vortex in spacetime.

Meanwhile, across another dimension, a steam-powered ship battles mechanical flying ray-fish. Their scales reflect rainbow light before transforming into metallic predators. Their captain stands defiant at the helm, clutching half a mirror that reveals ghostly visions of a lost vessel still sailing through eldritch waters.

These vivid, otherworldly scenes are not drawn from grand-scale Hollywood blockbusters, but from two Chinese internet dramas broadcast exclusively through social media channels, Douyin 抖音 (TikTok’s Chinese cousin) and Kuaishou 快手: Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse 三星堆 : 未来启示录 and Strange Mirror of Mountains and Seas: Breaking Waves 山海奇镜之劈波斩浪. The first re-frames the mysterious Sanxingdui archaeological site as a quantum portal left by an advanced ancient civilisation; while the second re-imagines creatures from the mythological Classic of Mountains and Seas 山海经 as steam-punk monstrosities wreaking havoc in a seaside village in an alternative imperial China.

Both narratives unfold in a spectacular visual feast where bronze artifacts come alive with mechanical precision, ancient Chinese symbols transform into binary code, and mythical beasts rendered with meticulous detail battle elaborate steampunk contraptions in swirling vortices of light and colour.

Yet something feels off.

The captain’s eyes never quite focus on the horizon he supposedly surveys. When the archaeologist speaks passionately about preventing dimensional collapse, his facial muscles twitch with uncanny irregularity, his lips moving a fraction too slowly for his words. During a spirited confrontation with the mechanical Taotie beast, our hero’s limbs move with a fluid perfection that paradoxically feels inhuman. Characters’ skin textures shift imperceptibly between shots, hair physics obeys laws slightly different to our own, and background elements occasionally betray their digital nature through impossible geometric precision.

These aren’t production flaws so much as signatures — playful hints that neither Sanxingdui nor Strange Mirror were crafted by human hands. Indeed, both works are entirely AI-generated, from their intricately detailed ancient bronze artifacts to their sweeping steam-powered naval battles, their scripts composed by algorithms, visuals rendered by neural networks, and editing assembled by machine-learning systems with minimal human oversight.

Chinese daring, Western hesitation: divergent attitudes towards AI and the arts

These uncanny aesthetic signatures reflect a sharp divergence in how Chinese and Western creative industries approach AI-generated content.

Since the advent of generative AI in 2023, innovators in China have embraced automation to enhance visual storytelling, driven by a bold vision to overcome the limitations of human-generated special effects.

For Chen Kun (陈坤), director of Strange Mirror, the motivation to explore creative applications of generative AI stemmed from his bemusement at the limitations of visual effects in conventional cinema. At the 2016 premier of The Great Wall 长城 – celebrated director Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 first foray into blockbuster territory starring Matt Damon, Willem Defoe and Pedro Pascal – Chen questioned why more resources had not been invested into rendering the image of Taotie 饕餮 (an ancient mythical beast) to be more tactile and communicative. Zhang’s answer was telling: ‘budget constraints’. ‘If even China’s top directors are limited in their special effects’, Chen pondered, ‘this must be an enormous source of pain for the traditional film and television industry’.

And since 2023, China’s burgeoning AI sector has taken to remedying this ‘pain’ with impressive alacrity. In December 2023, Beijing-headquartered digital production company Bona 博纳established its AI-Generated Movie/Series Production Centre AIGMS制作中心 – a project that birthed Jimeng 即梦, the AI system behind Sanxingdui,just six months later.

With the assistance of generative AI spanning script development, storyboarding, video-editing and visual enhancement, Sanxingdui’s 52 minutes of footage required just five months to produce, while a 10-person team took just two months to generate 12 minutes of near-flawless visual content for Strange Mirror using the Keliang 可灵 AI model.

The Western creative arts industry’s approach to generative AI, meanwhile, appears hamstrung by trepidation — at least by comparison to its Chinese counterpart.

In 2023, for instance, members of the Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) launched industrial action to protest the use of generative AI in screenwriting and the unregulated reproduction of actors’ likenesses —legitimate ethical concerns that have yet to impede generative AI’s rapid integration into content creation in China.

By the time UK-based AiMation Studios released Where The Robots Grow — the world’s first AI-generated feature-length film — to a muted, lukewarm reception in October 2024, Sanxingdui had already amassed over 140 million views across all platforms in China.

The micro-drama phenomenon: a genre in flux

Yet despite the Chinese authorities’ relative ambivalence towards reining in AI-generated content’s assimilation into the media ecosystem, Sanxingdui and Strange Mirror are examples of a novel medium that the Party has taken tremendous efforts to police: the micro-drama 微短剧.

These fast-paced dramas – broadcast exclusively to social media platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, Aiqiqi 艾琪琪, and Youku 优酷 – feature episodes lasting just five to fifteen minutes and seasons spanning 12 to 100 episodes. They unfold at a dizzying pace, favouring shock value over narrative depth to capture an attention-starved audience.

As Chinese consumers remained glued to their mobile phones during stringent lockdowns between 2020 and 2022, the short video market expanded almost ten-fold from 1.1 billion to 10.7 billion renminbi.

From a purely financial perspective, micro-dramas promise enormous return for comparatively meagre investment. According to analysis from market consultancy iResearch 艾瑞咨询, micro-dramas typically demand a production period of just two to three weeks, compared to between two and six months for long-form internet serials. Likewise, a micro-drama series costs on average between 200,000 and 3 million renminbi to produce, whereas long-form internet serials require budgets that often exceed tens of millions. In 2023 alone, the micro-drama market eclipsed 20 billion renminbi – a figure equivalent to 66% of China’s movie box office that year.

The frenzied, unregulated popularisation of the micro-drama form from 2020 to 2023 spawned hundreds of thousands of new productions of varied subject matter. Their content, however, tended to favour quick thrills and formulaic tropes over artistic merit. Contrived, hastily-produced fantasy series (with such colourful titles as The Whole Town is Stunned, as Mother-in-Law Sends Her Eldest Grandson to Hell震惊全城，婆婆送大孙子下黄泉) ran rampant. Amoral celebrations of material wealth (Showdown: The Richest Man in the World is My Dad 摊牌了，世界首富是我爹, for example) sprung forth. Lewd romances (see I’m Surrounded by Beauties 美女把我包围了) abounded.

This apparent trend towards depravity alarmed China’s state-controlled media and puritanical censorship authorities. ‘Vulgar short internet dramas have targeted the elderly’, decried an editorial in the state-owned Economic Daily 經濟日報, ‘leading countless senior citizens to become addicted and waste away their money’.

‘These profane cultural products’, the piece went on to argue, ‘not only incite the elderly to experience intense emotional fluctuations – which is of course not conducive to their physical and spiritual well-being – but also occupy space on the market for high-calibre content appropriate for people of their age’.

This moral panic prompted China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (‘SARFT’ 广电总局) to launch a ‘special rectification campaign’ to sanitise the micro-drama landscape of ‘profane, bloody, violent, low-calibre, and vulgar aesthetics’ in November 2022.

In the months following this directive, more than 25,000 micro-drama series were deemed by the SARFT to have ‘exaggerated family conflicts’, ‘provoked class conflict though contrived plots’, and ‘promoted harmful views on dating and marriage’, and were thus promptly stripped from the internet.

The SARFT’s pious moral crusade appears to have (at least momentarily) stunted the growth of the micro-drama industry; the rate of its expansion contracted from 235% in 2023 to 35% in 2024.

Yet running parallel to the SARFT’s rectification campaign was a commensurate effort to invigorate the production of micro-dramas of perceived greater moral value. The SARFT’s notice also carved out a more positive role for micro-dramas in the media landscape, committing to ‘collecting and celebrating excellent online audio-visual content in keeping with the Chinese Dream’. The China Netcasting Services Association has since characterised the creators of micro-dramas as ‘the cavalrymen of the arts and literature 文藝輕騎兵’.

The proliferation of generative AI in China this year has created unprecedented access to micro-dramas’ means of production. In February, tech billionaire Zhou Hongyi 周鸿祎 released sci-fi micro-drama The Old Red-Clothed Uncle Takes Me Time-Traveling Using AI 红衣大叔用AI带我穿越 – a 60-episode series that he forthrightly confesses was authored entirely by DeepSeek. According to analysis from the Huanqiu Net 环球网 newspaper earlier this month, a small team of creators are now able to produce a micro-drama serial of 100 episodes within just 15 days. On this Chinese New Year alone, over 400 micro-dramas were released across mainstream channels.

State media has been quick to trumpet praise for micro-drama-creators judged to have harnessed the power of generative AI for good, assimilating their works into the righteous mainstream. Weeks after DeepSeek’s launch, The Paper 澎湃新聞 published its inaugural bi-weekly “Micro-Drama Review Column 微劇評專欄”, noting that ‘the enrichment and refinement of content creation in the micro-drama industry is becoming an increasingly apparent trend’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the AI-assisted micro-dramas reviewed by The Paper are laden with pro-Beijing political undercurrents. Macao Story 澳门故事, for instance, recounts the triumphant tale of the reintegration of the former Portuguese colony into the PRC in 1999, and is thus lauded for its efforts to illustrate ‘the shared pulse of Macau and the motherland’ and put forth ‘a compelling contemporary model for narrating national pride’.

Fantasy as a vehicle for cultural self-confidence

The Party’s fingerprints are not quite as immediately apparent in Sanxingdui and Strange Mirror – two works of fantasy seemingly far-removed from China’s immediate-term political reality. Both works are nonetheless steeped in reverence for Chinese history, and in turn embody a sense of national self-confidence that the Party seeks to inspire.

Sanxingdui and Strange Mirror‘s efforts to imbue the modern micro-drama with tales from antiquity reflects a growing interest in Chinese history within the creative arts industry under the direction of Xi Jinping.

In a speech to the Symposium of Literature and Art in 2014, Xi positioned the twin pillars of ‘creative transformation’ and ‘innovative development’ (or ‘double creation’) at the heart of his Party’s cultural strategy. Despite its proclamation to innovate, this approach was largely retrospective in character. Xi stressed the need for Chinese artists to draw from cultural traditions, selectively re-interpret them to incite patriotic vigour, and craft a unified national identity rooted in history yet aligned with Party values.

By encouraging artists to revitalise China’s cultural tradition, Xi seeks to inspire ‘cultural consciousness and self-confidence’ in service of his perennial political mission to engender ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. ‘Without a flourishing, vibrant culture’, he declared, ‘there can be no national renaissance’.

Sanxingdui and Strange Mirror embody this instrumentalist vision of the artist’s role both as innovator and champion of Chinese history.

Both works reimagine ancient artifacts as sophisticated technologies. In Sanxingdui, bronze relics function as quantum communication devices, revealing an advanced ancient civilisation that mastered time-space technology. Strange Mirror transforms creatures from the Classic of Mountains and Seas into bio-mechanical hybrids with steampunk elements. These creative interpretations transform static museum pieces into dynamic storytelling vehicles.

The works establish a distinctly Chinese science fiction aesthetic – employing bronze oxidation green with quantum blue in Sanxingdui, and cinnabar red with mechanical copper in Strange Mirror – visual languages that deliberately distinguish themselves from Western science fiction conventions. Even character movements incorporate cultural signifiers, blending poses from ancient statues with traditional Daoist gestures.

These narratives serve the Party’s aims by positioning Chinese history not as antiquated folklore, but as a sophisticated repository of knowledge that pre-empted modern scientific breakthroughs. Rather than portraying China as lagging behind technologically, they suggest China’s ancient wisdom contained insights that Western science is only now beginning to comprehend. Thus, seemingly apolitical fantasy becomes a vehicle for advancing Xi’s vision of cultural rejuvenation – where creative works actively contribute to a national identity that draws strength from its historical foundations and affirms China’s central position in global civilisation.

As the boundaries between myth and technology blur, these AI-generated micro-dramas signify more than just a technological innovation; they are a potent reflection of China’s cultural ambition. With each pixelated twist of ancient history, China is weaving a new narrative — one that positions its past not as a relic, but as a stepping-stone to a powerful future. In the fusion of artificial and national creativity, these AI-assisted fantasies articulate a vision of national self-confidence and cultural rebirth – a digital renaissance where history, myth, and technology converge to re-define the norms of storytelling.