China’s most tear-jerking Qingming short this year was made by AI

A 5-minute AI short just made millions of people in China cry — and that might be a bigger signal for the future of film than most AI demos.

The short is Paper Phone, made by Shenzhen-based WAI using Kling AI, Kuaishou’s video generation model. It tells a very simple Qingming story: a little boy wants to buy a paper phone so he can “video call” his late grandmother. That’s it. And it absolutely wrecked people.

What’s interesting is that the tech itself is no longer the most surprising part.

Kling launched in June 2024, and in less than two years it has moved from “wow, AI video is getting good” to something much more commercially serious. Kuaishou says Kling now serves over 60 million creators globally and has generated more than 600 million videos. Its AI business revenue reportedly exceeded RMB 300 million in Q3 2025, and by December 2025 Kling had already reached a USD 240 million annualized revenue run rate.

The newest Kling 3.0 line pushes things even further: better character consistency, reference-based generation, multi-shot storyboarding, native audio, longer clips up to 15 seconds, and much stronger control over cinematic sequences. In short: the “can AI make usable film footage?” debate is basically over.

Which means the real gap is shifting elsewhere.

Not who has access to the model.

Not who can write the longest prompt.

But who can still make people feel something.

That’s what Paper Phone gets right. The reason it hit isn’t because it’s AI-made. It’s because it understands grief, ritual, memory, and the emotional logic of Qingming in a way that feels culturally real.

As AI video keeps improving, “good visuals” are becoming cheaper and more available.

Human taste, emotional judgment, cultural specificity, pacing, restraint — that’s where the edge is moving.

The tools are getting democratized very fast.