China tied micro-drama filing duties to production budget

What was announced or recorded

On 5 February 2024 the General Office of China's National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) signed a notice, numbered 广电办发〔2024〕35号, on further coordinating development and security to promote healthy growth of the online micro-drama industry. The notice credits an earlier 2022 rectification drive with raising standards, but says over-commercialised 'mini-program' micro-dramas still posed a prominent content-risk problem, and sets out a more detailed management structure to address it.

What the documents establish

The notice creates three review tiers set by declared production budget. 'Key micro-dramas' — those with a special subject, a total investment of RMB1,000,000 or more, platform promotion on a home screen, or a voluntary declaration — must be filed centrally with NRTA. 'Ordinary micro-dramas', budgeted between RMB300,000 and RMB1,000,000 and not otherwise promoted, are filed with provincial-or-higher broadcast authorities and must pass content review. 'Other micro-dramas', under RMB300,000, are reviewed and registered by the distributing platform itself, which must periodically report the titles it has cleared to its local regulator. Every tier must display a licence or registration number in its opening titles in a specified format. Titles already online without registration had until 31 May 2024 to be reported to provincial regulators; from 1 June 2024, unreviewed and unregistered micro-dramas could not be distributed online at all. The notice also requires platforms to appoint an editor-in-chief responsible for pre-broadcast review and complaint handling.

Announced versus delivered

Compared with the 2022 notice's broad promoted-or-not split, this instrument is more operational: it names sums, a labelling format and a hard calendar date. What it does not do is report results — it does not state how many titles fell into each tier, how many met the 31 May reporting window, or how many were removed after 1 June. Those figures, if they exist, sit in later disclosures this notice does not itself provide.

What to watch

This is an editorial observation rather than something the notice states: production-budget thresholds create an incentive to declare a budget just under RMB300,000 or RMB1,000,000 to land in a lighter review tier, a pattern this notice provides no data to confirm or rule out.

• Does a title's opening credits carry a licence or registration number in the specified format, and does its prefix indicate national or provincial registration?
• Is the declared production budget plausible given the tier it claims, since classification and review burden both depend on that figure?
• If the title predates this notice, was it reported to a provincial regulator by 31 May 2024, as the transition provision required?

The notice shifts compliance responsibility down to the cheapest and most numerous titles, the same 'other' category the 2022 notice had struggled to reach through the mini-program channel, by making the distributing platform answerable for their review and registration.