Qin Shuo and Li Liang had a quarrel, and the ensuing widespread debate has pushed the Chinese internet sector into its so-called "garbage time".
Humanity has actually entered the AI era. Most people are still completely unaware of this, holding old maps and arguing over who should own the house number of a building that is already being demolished.
First, let me repeat a tongue twister for everyone.
On October 28, Li Liang, Vice President of Douyin Group, responded to Qin Shuo on Weibo, and ended his post with a quote from a passage that he "could not remember which celebrity said":
"We know why you are talking nonsense, you also know why you are talking nonsense, you know that we know why you are talking nonsense, we know that you know that we know why you are talking nonsense, but you are just talking nonsense."
The five "talking nonsense" flow in one go. The person being referred to is Qin Shuo, a veteran figure in the financial media circle — founder of China Business News, operator of "Qin Shuo's Circle of Friends", a senior known for his gentle and refined demeanor.
What prompted the PR vice president of a giant platform to step forward personally, and prompted a figure like Qin Shuo to post a long WeChat Moments article, is four words: "ByteDance Time". So does the so-called "ByteDance Time" really exist? Kaison believes that after the second half of the game, everyone's "time" is nonsense, because everyone is going through a long "garbage time".
01 A two-day, three-round war of words
The story starts with a brokerage report.
Nomura Securities released the "Monthly APP Tracker Report on China's Internet and New Media" in September, citing data from QuestMobile: In July 2026, among the top 50 mobile internet apps by usage duration in China, Douyin overtook WeChat for the first time — Douyin accounted for 19.4%, while WeChat accounted for 18.8%; the total duration share of the entire ByteDance ecosystem reached 40.9%, while Tencent's ecosystem dropped to 29.1%. In the same period of last year, the gap between the two was only 3.3 percentage points.
What is more striking is Hongguo Short Drama. This free short drama app launched by ByteDance in August 2023 had 168 million daily active users in July this year, a year-on-year increase of 107%, exceeding the sum of iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video and Mango TV; the average daily usage duration per person is 125 minutes — longer than both Douyin and WeChat. From January to August this year, 430,000 micro short dramas were launched nationwide, 13 times the total number of last year, of which AI-generated dramas accounted for more than 90%.
On October 26, Qin Shuo raised a question based on this data: Is China's Internet shifting from "Tencent Time" to "ByteDance Time"? The article even cited Article 24 of the Anti-Monopoly Law regarding the presumption of dominant market position.
ByteDance got anxious the very next day.
On the evening of October 27, the official Hongguo account refuted the rumor of "40 billion yuan annual revenue"; Li Liang immediately reposted the statement and criticized: "This characterization is extremely unrigorous, total nonsense!" Short dramas and short videos are a fully competitive industry, no player can firmly occupy the first place, "the growth rate of Tencent's short dramas and short videos far exceeds that of Douyin and Hongguo".
On October 28, the two sides entered a seesaw battle. Qin Shuo supplemented the new data of August on his WeChat Moments — ByteDance's ecosystem accounted for 41.8%, Tencent's ecosystem accounted for 28.6%, the gap widened to 13.2 percentage points, emphasizing that "ByteDance Time" is only a description of the phenomenon, the proportion of usage duration is not equal to the proportion of user value, he also denied having written the drama review "The Fragrance Remains as of Old" that Li Liang praised, accusing the other party of misattribution and using malicious words.
Li Liang then published a long article pointing out the errors one by one: First, you cited the Anti-Monopoly Law saying that a 1/2 market share can be presumed to be a dominant position, but 41.8% is less than half; second, Nomura's caliber is only "the duration distribution within the top 50 mobile apps", it does not include long-tail apps, nor does it include PC-side usage, the report itself noted that it is a "tracking estimate", I am afraid the old gentleman did not even read the data handed to him carefully; third, if all apps under equity participation and control are counted, the total duration ranking first belongs to Tencent's ecosystem — according to your logic, China's Internet has been "Tencent Time" for 20 years, why didn't you call it that before?
02 The question was wrong from the very beginning
Let's draw the conclusion first: Technically, Li Liang won cleanly; but the real root of this debate is not the data, but the proposition itself.
The mistakes Qin Shuo was caught making are real. 41.8% is lower than the 1/2 threshold for presumption of dominant market position stipulated in the Anti-Monopoly Law; Nomura's caliber is only the duration distribution within the top 50 mobile apps, excluding long-tail apps and PC-side usage; if we really follow the logic of "counting all apps under equity control", the first place in total duration is Tencent's ecosystem — then China's Internet should have been called "Tencent Time" for the past two decades. The old gentleman's citation is indeed sloppy, and he has no one to blame but himself.
But Qin Shuo lost more than just the citation. Summarizing 40% of the total duration as "ByteDance Time" is wrong by its very naming — no matter whether the 41.8% data is accurate or not, the proposition does not hold.
The mistake lies in the premise: The time of Chinese internet users never belongs to any single company. Watching short videos is for entertainment, browsing e-commerce platforms is for shopping, ordering food delivery is for eating, using navigation is for commuting — these durations are fragmented tool usage, part of daily life services, not any kind of "time sovereignty". Naming the market share of a certain enterprise as the "time" of an era is equivalent to attributing the lives of all Chinese people to a single company. This is not industrial observation, it is crowning an enterprise; it has neither analytical value nor constructive significance for the industry.
At the end of the day, the internet in its current stage is essentially a toolbox plus an amusement park. It can transform retail, transform travel, transform social interaction, but it itself does not constitute the next generation of technology. The game of naming time after a company was last played by Sina in the portal website era — those old nobles who were crowned at that time are now just the background of the new world.
The only thing worthy of the word "time" at the moment is: AI Time.
This is not just another track or another trend, but an operating system-level iteration, just like electricity replacing steam. When AI starts writing code for people, reading medical images, providing customer service, correcting homework, and generating plans, what it changes is not which app takes a few more minutes of users' time, but the underlying way "how people use all tools". How humans and AI divide work, how attention coexists with AI, what children should learn, what adults should learn — these are the questions that are constructive to the industry, and worthy of public discussion time.
Humanity has actually entered the AI era. Most people are still completely unaware of this, holding old maps and arguing over who should own the house number of a building that is already being demolished.
03 The real highlight: This is garbage time
Looking at this debate along this line of thinking, its value becomes clear — it is itself a symptom that the industry has entered garbage time.
Garbage time on the court refers to the stage when the score is settled, the main players are off the field, and both sides are just killing the remaining minutes. The garbage time of the industry is the stage when incremental growth dries up, innovative narratives fade away, and giants compete for existing stock. The current state of China's Internet can be summarized in three sentences:
First, the cake no longer grows bigger. There are only so many internet users, there are only 24 hours a day, and there is only one screen on the mobile phone. If ByteDance takes 13 more percentage points, it means that all other players collectively lose 13 percentage points. In a zero-sum game, every minute of usage duration is snatched from others, which is why the 41.8% figure is so glaring.
Second, the commanding height of competition has degraded from "innovation narrative" to "duration narrative". In the era of incremental growth, industry leaders debated about the future — whether to focus on social interaction or e-commerce, to develop apps or mini-programs. What are they competing for now? Whose short dramas are more addictive, whose gold coin incentive mechanism better caters to human nature. The most vigorous growth engine in China's current internet industry is making hundreds of millions of people spend 125 minutes a day watching content themed on "counterattack, overbearing president, revenge, and slapping others in the face". This is more like attention siphoning than a productivity revolution.
Third, wars of words have replaced product wars. The most interesting detail is that Li Liang himself admitted that the growth rate of Tencent's short dramas and short videos has exceeded that of Douyin and Hongguo, and Tencent has also launched the "Green Bubble" short drama embedded in WeChat, using "green" to fight against "red". Giants copy each other, attack each other, fight in close quarters in anesthetizing pleasure, and then wait together for the next entry — but no one has clearly described what that entry will look like.
This is the typical feature of garbage time: involution in the existing stock, no new narrative has been established.
04 Where is the next wave of dividends
Jack Ma once said a widely circulated sentence: There is no era of Jack Ma, only Jack Ma of the era.
This sentence sounded like modesty back then, but now it is almost a prophecy. At the peak of Alibaba, everyone thought the e-commerce pattern was settled and "Alibaba Time" would last forever, but then Pinduoduo emerged from the sinking market, and Douyin took a share of the cake from live streaming e-commerce — the so-called "era" is just another name for the technical dividend of the mobile internet wave. When the dividend exists, you are the Jack Ma of the era; when the dividend fades, you are the former richest man of the company.
Applying this sentence pattern to today's debate, the answer is clear at a glance: There is no ByteDance Time, no Tencent Time, only the garbage time of the internet industry.
Qin Shuo and Li Liang are arguing over the naming right of "time" in the old world. But in an industry that has entered garbage time, how much is the naming right worth? When Sina dominated the portal era, no one foresaw "Tencent Time"; when Tencent owned the social moat, no one foresaw "Douyin Time" — old maps cannot measure the new continent, any gorgeous "time" in the stock era is just a footnote to the next chapter of history.
The only question really worth asking is: Where is the next wave of dividends?
The answer is nothing new: AI. In the past two years, almost all big tech companies have been telling the same story on their earnings calls — ByteDance has Doubao, Tencent has Yuanbao, Alibaba bets on Tongyi, DeepSeek has lowered the open source threshold to the floor price. The giants know it clearly in their hearts: The duration war of short videos is the final battle of the last generation, and AI is the admission ticket to the next generation.
05 Some people hold different views
Optimists say this is not garbage time, it is "the eve of a great war": the competition for the super AI entrance has just started, the data of Doubao is also frequently cited, and the story of Zhang Yiming becoming the richest man again hides the foreshadowing of the next generation of platforms.
This judgment is not necessarily wrong. But please note an awkward fact: the main force supporting the 41.8% duration share is still Douyin and Hongguo, not Doubao. The AI story is told in press conferences and market valuations, but the reality of duration usage stays in addictive short dramas. The window period between the old and new eras can be very long, long enough for everyone to mistakenly think they are still at the card table — this is exactly the most fascinating part of garbage time: it always looks like "the next scene is about to start".
History has already demonstrated this: In the last generation, the ones who got the tickets were WeChat and Douyin; in this generation, the fight for tickets has just started. The biggest value of garbage time is that it is long enough — long enough for all the misjudgers to have a chance to wake up, and long enough for bystanders to clearly see: who is the defender of the old era, and who is the ticket maker of the new world.
In fact, when the game enters garbage time, the audience can leave the stadium in advance. Go out for a walk — the real world does not only have mobile phones and the internet, the sunshine is free, and you don't have to watch ads. As for the next generation, let's sunbathe while waiting to see: whose new ship will blow its whistle first.
This wave of AI is large language models, and the next wave will be embodied intelligence and real-world models. By then, debates will be even more meaningless. Just get things done!
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Kaison Observation", author: Kaison, published with authorization from 36Kr.