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NewsMaterial4 min readDisconfirmAI Editorial

GovAI Researcher Qian Zilan: The '55% of China's Compute Generates Slop' Figure Is Unreliable, But Why Do People Scorn It While Being Addicted?

In October 2026, the claim that 'half of China’s AI compute is used to generate feel-good dramas' spread widely, prompting urgent debunking by official media such as the People’s Daily. GovAI researcher Qian Zilan points out that the figure of 55% has a dubious origin and is mathematically difficult to sustain, but the debate itself exposes a deeper social mechanism: the Chinese obsession with 'usefulness' has both driven massive demand for AI-generated slop and made enjoying it a source of shame.

2026-10-30 18:04 GMT+8

In October 2026, a claim went viral on the Chinese internet: 55% of China’s AI tokens were being used to generate short dramas and videos, while 58% of US tokens were used for coding and scientific research. The analogy—'China uses gunpowder to make fireworks, while the US uses it to make weapons,' drawn from an essay by Lu Xun in 1933—was revived to suggest that China was squandering its technological potential on entertainment. In a rare coordinated response, three state-affiliated outlets—the People’s Daily, Nanfang Commentary (the op-ed column of Southern Daily), and Beijing News—published rebuttals within the same week, attempting to extinguish this narrative.

Qian Zilan, a research scholar at GovAI studying AI development and regulation in China, argues that the core of this controversy is not whether the numbers are correct—though the 55% figure is indeed unreliable—but why a number with a questionable source triggered such significant anxiety. The figure originated from an investor roadshow held by digital-content company COL Group (中文在线) on June 3, and was subsequently cited in a report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) that can no longer be found on the agency’s website. ByteDance publicly refuted the claim, stating that video generation accounts for only about 10% of its own computing capacity. Qian’s rough calculations show that even if one includes all the tokens generated for the 430,000 AI micro-dramas released so far, they would account for only about 7.4% of the total; reaching 55% would require generating 75 times more footage than what is actually retained.

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However, the falsity of the numbers does not dissolve the real tension underlying the debate. Qian points out that Chinese society harbors a deep-seated 'obsession with usefulness': technology must serve productivity, and people must prove the value of their output. This logic runs consistently from Deng Xiaoping’s declaration that 'science and technology are the primary productive force' during the reform era to current regulatory guidelines on AI—the consensus is that AI should be an economic tool, not a toy or an emotional companion. Within this framework, using AI to generate feel-good dramas is inherently inferior to using it to write code, and entertainment is inherently inferior to production.

Yet ironically, it is precisely this extreme demand for 'usefulness' that creates a massive demand for the 'useless.' A 2024 survey found that 63.1% of Chinese micro-drama viewers watch to relieve fatigue and relax, while 40.3% are attracted because the content 'doesn't require brainpower.' With 851 million micro-drama viewers in China—roughly three-quarters of the internet population—and 90% of this content now AI-generated, people simultaneously curse these shows as 'brain-dead,' 'shoddily made,' and 'intellectually deficient,' yet cannot stop watching them. Qian believes this is not because people have too much leisure time, but because their energy is depleted after work, making even the appreciation of a high-quality work a burden.

The narrative structure of feel-good dramas perfectly fills this void: protagonists are humiliated and looked down upon, only to stage a comeback and slap faces—in a world where effort in reality does not guarantee returns, these stories offer 'certainty of success.' AI is perfectly suited to this demand: fixed tropes, no need for high quality, standardized production. The micro-drama industry had already found a profitable business model in human exhaustion, and AI simply made this formula more efficient. Qian cites Afra Wang’s metaphor comparing AI micro-dramas to China’s ghost cities—rows of nearly identical apartments standing empty—but she flips this perspective: in a society where every hour is filled with competition and others’ expectations, 'meaninglessness' is one of the few things not explicitly required to carry meaning.

Nobel Laureate Mo Yan admitted last October at a forum that he sometimes spends hours scrolling through short videos, only to criticize himself afterward for wasting time. His confession brought relief to commenters: 'So everyone does this.' But Mo Yan immediately added that what people should really be doing is reading books. This detail precisely illustrates the mechanism Qian describes: even the act of escaping the pressure to be useful is re-captured by the logic of usefulness.

Qian concludes that the shoddy production of AI slop deserves criticism, and an industry that profits from human exhaustion should rightly face greater scrutiny. However, the pleasure people derive from it does not need to be justified by its 'contribution to society.' Lu Xun’s original essay discussed the dual nature of technology—that electricity can both cure illness and be used for torture—yet today’s AI debate has only extracted the final paragraph, reducing complex tech-ethical issues into a simplistic question of 'whether it is used on the blade's edge.' Perhaps one sign that a country is no longer in crisis is the ability to enjoy fireworks without apology.

Sources

  • chinatalk.media↗
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