2026 Rongmei Awards Ceremony Held in West Bund

2026 Rongmei Awards Ceremony Held in West Bund, Emerging Short Drama Screenwriters Shine Amid Industry Structural Transformation

The 2026 Rongmei Awards Ceremony took place in Shanghai West Bund recently. Focusing on the creative ecosystem of the micro-short drama industry, the ceremony honored a group of outstanding screenwriters with blockbuster achievements and innovative capabilities. Among them, Lu Fanqian (Ma Na), Ba Wan Chun and Zhang Keyangzi were jointly awarded the 2026 Most Promising Screenwriter of the Year. Meanwhile, leading industry screenwriters including Fu Shengwei, Bai Yang, Yu Hang, Gongzi Yan and Liu Xiaotian received awards on the same stage, demonstrating the robust talent lineup of both rising stars and seasoned creators in the 2026 short drama sector.

Lu Fanqian (real name Ma Na), one of the recipients of the annual promising screenwriter award, is a Hong Kong Chinese and a current PhD candidate in Law and Philosophy at Fudan University in Shanghai. As a burgeoning screenwriter thriving on the Hongguo Short Drama platform, she specializes in creating live-action and AI short dramas featuring intense conflicts and stunning plot twists. Combining her academic background with rich practical experience, she excels at building vivid character relationships and compact dramatic conflicts within limited episodes, endowing her works with strong theatrical tension, emotional appeal and outstanding commercial potential. Her representative works have achieved remarkable market results. It’s Not My Cruelty, co-written with Ba Wan Chun, hit a heat index of 53.14 million on Hongguo Short Drama. Her solo work Tear Off the Facade of the White Moonlight gained 52.74 million heat, winning massive audiences with its trending tropes of white moonlight, stand-in relationships and truth revelation, as well as its refreshingly satisfying narrative. Her phenomenal AI short drama Don’t Panic, Father, the Lucky Star Is Here reached an overall network heat of 213 million, setting a benchmark for the AI short drama genre and fully proving her outstanding capabilities in content planning and blockbuster creation across dual tracks of live-action and AI short dramas.

Ba Wan Chun, another award-winning emerging screenwriter, has long been engaged in frontline short drama creation. With a keen insight into audience preferences and emotional needs, he crafts scripts with tight rhythms and well-placed dramatic highlights that perfectly fit mainstream market tastes, and has repeatedly collaborated with emerging creators to produce high-heat hit works. Zhang Keyangzi, a young promising screenwriter, stands out with original plot concepts and solid writing skills. His creative style aligns closely with the industry’s refined development trend, earning wide recognition for his huge growth potential.

Other award-winning screenwriters have also built distinctive industry reputations with their classic works. Fu Shengwei, winner of the Golden Spider Annual Micro-short Drama Screenwriter Award, has created perse hits such as Thriving Life Back to 1993, Ordinary Joys of the 1980s and Full Marks in Gaokao, Panicked Parents, covering comedy and suspense genres. Bai Yang rose to fame with Langya by False Name and put forward the industry viewpoint that short dramas should shift from mere emotional stimulation to in-depth emotional resonance, establishing himself as a leading industry creator. Yu Hang’s blockbuster work Summer Fendela achieved over 16 million RMB in revenue sharing on Hongguo, and he has shared professional creation experience at multiple industry summits. Gongzi Yan, a platinum-level online literature writer who cross-border into short drama screenwriting, saw her work Waiting for the Moon in Nanchenghit 71.5 million heat on its launch day and exceed 200 million views on Douyin within five days, setting a typical successful example of IP adaptation from online literature to short dramas. As a mentor of the Youth Working Committee’s blockbuster short drama training program, Liu Xiaotian has maintained an ultra-high profit rate for his works amid the industry’s widespread profit difficulties, with his practical creation methodology widely recognized by insiders.

Insights released at the ceremony reveal profound structural changes, opportunities and challenges in the 2026 micro-short drama industry. Platform support continues to increase dynamically. The Douyin Short Drama Copyright Center has launched a screenwriter settlement program, adopting a guaranteed revenue plus profit-sharing model for signed scripts and adding a new A+ rating system. It has opened up online matching and independent negotiation channels, with a maximum incentive of 1.5 million RMB for top-tier projects, and currently hosts approximately 140,000 settled screenwriters.

Verified by market data, eight core categories remain high-traffic tracks: modern family, modern romance, counterattack and growth, ancient and Republic of China styles, urban social life, urban daily life, Republic of China history and suspense. The AI short drama sector maintains rapid expansion. In the first quarter of 2026, around 128,000 micro-short dramas were launched, with AI-generated works accounting for over 95%, though no national-level blockbuster has yet emerged. By contrast, live-action short dramas have built differentiated competitive barriers through sincere emotional expression. IP adaptation remains the core source of blockbusters, with online literature IPs contributing about 70% of works with over 3 billion views. Lightweight short-story IP adaptation has accelerated, which can be completed and launched in as fast as 14 days.

Meanwhile, two prominent industry trends — widening profit gaps and tightened supervision — cannot be ignored. Industry revenue differentiation has become increasingly severe: top inpidual screenwriters earn over one million RMB in monthly revenue sharing, while many small and medium-sized studios suffer continuous losses. The production cost of AI comic dramas has dropped sharply from 3,000 RMB per minute last year to 600–800 RMB per minute. The official implementation of the Micro-short Drama Development Management Measures in September requires all AI-generated micro-short dramas to be clearly labeled and prohibits platform algorithms from inducing user addiction. Hongguo Short Drama removed 8,689 non-compliant AI dramas in August alone, marking the end of the industry’s unchecked growth era.

The collaborative model of "top screenwriters + leading artists" has become the mainstream refined development strategy. Statistics show that the overall output of live-action short dramas declined in August, with "fewer but higher-quality works" becoming the core competition threshold, and screenwriters gaining greater discourse power in project production.

For creators intending to enter the short drama screenwriting track, industry insiders suggest focusing on the screenwriter settlement program of the Douyin Short Drama Creator Center, and cooperating with IP-rich platforms such as Yuewen and Tomato Novel to access core resources for script adaptation and project collaboration.