Entrepreneurs from China's Taiwan are taking the Chinese mainland's booming micro-drama industry as a new and promising opportunity to develop their businesses.
Micro-dramas has witnessed rising popularity in recent years in China. With vertical shooting formats, a social media style and a shooting period of only a week, the smartphone-friendly short series usually have chaotic plots and each episode lasts a couple of minutes at most.
In 2025, the micro-drama market value reached 67.79 billion yuan (around 9.8 billion U.S. dollars) in the mainland, where more than 3,000 micro-dramas were produced each month.
Zhengzhou, the capital city of central China's Henan Province, quickly emerged as a major micro-drama hub with a complete industrial chain spanning creation, filming, production and distribution.
The city is home to more than 800 micro-drama enterprises with nearly 40,000 employees, producing about 500 micro-dramas per month, according to a latest industry report.
The local government of the city has supported Taiwan compatriots' participation in the industry with policies covering aspects including funding, housing and education.
Drawn by the vibrant environment and the targeted policies, Zhuang Zifu, who had engaged in traditional media business in Taiwan for many years, came to Zhengzhou for new opportunities in 2025.
"The micro-drama industry is already very mature in the mainland, and is very professional in terms of equipment and personnel. And the production speed is very fast. It takes about 5 to 7 days, at most 10 days, to finish shooting one drama. Since last year, there have been more and more high-quality micro-dramas, even high-end ones. In the past, there were many Taiwan TV series which became popular all over Southeast Asia. I hope that, through cooperation between the mainland and Taiwan, we can further promote Chinese culture to the world," said Zhuang, who is now head of a micro-drama production company in Zhengzhou.
Zhuang said some of their dramas were a huge hit in the mainland last year and brought good profit. He said he planned to change an old office building into a micro-drama filming base, which is expected to be put into use in April this year.
"Typical Taiwan scenes will be created at this base, such as street scenes or home scenes, so that they will be used in dramas amid further cross-Strait exchanges to make Taiwan audience feel (familiar)," said Zhuang.
He hopes that within one year, his company would make 12 dramas related to cross-Strait exchanges and 20 on Taiwan stories.
"In this way, I think we can invite at least 50 to 100 more young people to participate in the shooting, which would be done not only by Taiwan teams like before, but through cross-Strait cooperation. To me that is of greater significance," said Zhuang.
Taiwan entrepreneurs enjoys micro-drama boom at mainland production hub
