China is subsidising AI film studios, and Douyin is drowning in them

China has turned AI filmmaking into an industrial policy, and the first hard numbers of the experiment are in. In the first half of 2026, 221,900 new AI shows launched on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and 1,055 of them drew more than 100 million views, Reuters reported on September 25, citing the data firm DataEye. One in 210 cleared the bar.

The production side moved just as fast. The cost of making an AI short drama fell from 5,000 yuan per minute, about $747, to a few hundred yuan in the same six months, according to China's state broadcaster CCTV. The filmmaker Pan Xiaojun gave Reuters the comparison that makes it concrete: a normal wedding scene might cost 60,000 yuan to shoot conventionally.

Local governments are competing to attract the studios. Cities and industrial parks are promising tech clusters, subsidies and computing support, which Reuters describes as the playbook China used to build electric vehicles, solar panels and robotics into globally competitive industries. Zhu Zhili, who runs an AI film studio in Shenzhen and heads the AI-generated content department at China Wit Media, said officials used to be rare and now call constantly. He described the offer as cheap rent, a living allowance and computing support, and said he is approached by cities from major metropolitan areas to smaller localities, every day.

The caution inside the story is the one that usually follows state-backed expansion. Reuters reports fears of oversupply and a race to the bottom, and notes the industry is waiting for clearer copyright rules. Both concerns are the mirror image of the same fact: when a minute of drama costs a few hundred yuan, the scarce resource stops being production and starts being attention.

Other players are betting on the same shift at the premium end. On September 23, iQIYI unveiled the trailer for "Immortals Over Mortal Love," a 16-episode hybrid AI drama made on its own NadouPro platform, and the platform now carries more than 1,600 digital assets, 150 voice assets and 6,600 IP titles. The Chinese companies competing hardest for Western creators are also the ones paying prizes: PixVerse, whose PixLight contest carries a $300,000 pool, is running a global competition for pilots and screenplays that closes on October 31.

For creators outside China the numbers are a warning and a manual. The warning is that 221,900 shows and 1,055 winners is roughly the shape of any market where the cost of entry drops to near zero, and the winners are not evenly distributed. The manual is the one Zhu describes: rent, compute and a subsidy are the cheapest advantages available right now, and more than one government is willing to supply them.

A number worth watching in the next set of figures is the count above 100 million views, not the count of shows: if the second number keeps climbing at 221,900 a half-year while the first stays near a thousand, the overcapacity Reuters describes is already priced in.