China Power | Economy | East Asia

China Is Building a Global Infrastructure for Its Cultural Industries

When a cultural industry expands overseas, that usually means exporting content. China is increasingly exporting the infrastructure behind entertainment products.

On September 4, Lingang New Area in Shanghai launched an AI micro-drama overseas service station, with initial service points in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. The initiative is designed to help Chinese companies navigate overseas regulations, localize content, and connect production with distribution in foreign markets. The service station covers the full export chain including content development, production, translation, and distribution. Rather than simply helping companies sell finished dramas abroad, it brings several stages of the export process into one system. 

Online literature, games, and micro-dramas are increasingly described in China as the “New Three” of cultural exports. All three can be adapted, translated, and distributed through digital platforms, making the process of taking them overseas simpler.

In July, Guangxi Publishing & Media Group launched FLYTOTO, an AI-powered platform for short-drama co-creation. The platform connects Chinese production teams and creators with audiovisual institutions in Southeast Asia. FLYTOTO offers tools for script analysis, automated video production, and multilingual translation, alongside computing and distribution support. The platform was launched alongside the 2026 China-ASEAN Micro-Drama Competition, which includes both live-action and AI-generated micro-dramas. 

For China, the cultural industry is moving beyond the export of finished content to the systems that allow content to be produced, adapted, and distributed across markets. 

This shift did not begin with AI micro-dramas, although they provide the latest examples. China Literature, one of China’s largest online publishing companies, launched its international Webnovel platform in 2017, initially bringing Chinese online fiction to readers abroad through translated works. Webnovel has since expanded beyond translation. The platform now hosts original fiction by writers outside China, while providing the translation, publishing, and monetization systems around their work. By the end of 2025, China Literature said Webnovel had 537,000 international writers and 830,000 original works from........

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