AI Romance Between Monkey King and Lin Daiyu Tests Limits of Remixing the Classics

The Monkey King takes a frail, sharp-tongued young woman by the hand and shows her around Beijing Zoo. In another clip, the pair stroll through Disneyland. She is Lin Daiyu, the tragic heroine of "Dream of the Red Chamber." He is Sun Wukong of "Journey to the West." The two characters never meet in Chinese literature, but in a wave of AI-generated videos they have become one of the internet's most talked-about couples.

Fans call them "Sheng-Dai CP," combining a character from each name: "sheng" from Sun Wukong's title, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, and "dai" from Daiyu. The clips keep the two figures as audiences remember them from the much-loved TV adaptations of 1986 and 1987, silk robes on one side and a monkey suit on the other, then drop them into modern life.

The trend has run into China's campaign against what regulators call "AI-altered" videos. On October 8, short-video platform Kuaishou said in its 12th notice on the issue that it had taken down related content, singling out AI edits that create "improper romantic links" between characters from the two novels. The platform said it handled 2,544 such violations in September alone.

WeChat's security team has removed more than 26,000 AI-altered short videos this year, tech outlet Mydrivers reported on October 9. Examples included Lin Daiyu uprooting a willow tree, a feat of brute strength borrowed from the classic "Water Margin," and Guan Yu of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" brandishing modern firearms.

The crackdown dates back to January 1, when the National Radio and Television Administration launched a month-long nationwide campaign. It targeted AI versions of the Four Great Classical Novels and historical, revolutionary and hero-themed dramas that "seriously deviate" from the originals, along with dark remakes of children's cartoons. The regulator said it would keep the effort going for the long term.

Yet the Sun-Lin pairing has drawn a more sympathetic hearing from the Party's flagship newspaper. A commentary in People's Daily on October 9 noted that some viewers condemned the match as absurd and feared it would blur cultural memory, while others were moved by it.

The writer, Lin Ling, said the videos owe their popularity to a long-held sense of regret over Lin Daiyu's fate. In the novel, the gifted, fragile orphan dies young and heartbroken. Rewriting her ending, one netizen said, finally gave the tragedy "a comedy spin-off."

What young fans admire, the commentary said, may not be romance so much as a way of living: emotional steadiness, mutual support and a meeting of minds. It quoted another online comment: "Classics don't fear remixes. They fear not being loved."

The piece also drew a line. Labeling a video "pure fiction" does not license creators to carve up an original at will, it said. There should be room for playful reinterpretation that respects legal rights and public order, but "red lines" for content that mocks heroes, revels in gore or vulgarity, or distorts basic understanding of the works.

It ended with a challenge: a clip that trends for two or three days and then vanishes is not all that is owed to the classics.

The pairing is not entirely new. In May 2025, Liu Xiao Ling Tong, who played the Monkey King in the 1986 series, was asked about fan-made clips of the couple at the Beijing International Film Festival. He pointed out that "Dream of the Red Chamber" was once titled "The Story of the Stone," while Sun Wukong was born from a rock, and said he found the idea "quite interesting."

What has changed is the technology. Fan edits once meant painstaking cutting of old footage, while AI tools now let almost anyone generate new scenes with far less effort. That has turned a niche joke into a flood of videos, and handed platforms the task of deciding where affectionate tribute ends and distortion begins.