Chinese internet censors have targeted dozens of writers of online erotic fiction across the country since June, in a bid to crack down on “pornographic” content, according to multiple mainstream and social media reports.
A “special task force” arrested the writers after they published on the Taiwan-based adult fiction website Haitang Literature, Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily News and Taiwan’s Pacific Daily newspapers reported.
The task force started with distributors of online erotic fiction, then moved on to target writers who had earned at least 300,000 yuan (US$41,000) from their work, according to posts to the gaming bulletin board NGA cited by the AO3 fan-fiction site on Reddit.
Online fiction, including fan fiction and erotic fiction, has mushroomed in China in recent years, according to a survey by government-backed news outlet The Paper in March.
By the end of 2023, readers in China could choose from among nearly 35 million works of online fiction, with some work already adapted into movies and TV shows, the report said.
Last year, the Chinese online fiction market was worth around 40 billion yuan (US$5.48 billion), according to Statistica.com, with daily life, science fiction, fantasy and history topping the list of most popular genres.
“One of my friends is an author, who was released on bail, called me from a new phone and told us to be prepared,” the NGA user wrote in a post dating back to June, before the story appeared in the newspapers.
“Later, others also reported that their friends had been affected,” the post said. “We compared details and confirmed that this is a nationwide crackdown. Moreover, the website’s [Chinese] distributor is indeed in trouble and can’t be reached.”
Haitang writers
In the months that followed this post, social media reports have been emerging of authors arrested for publishing erotic fiction.
Top Haitang Literature author Yuan Shang Bai Yun Jian, a pen-name, was sentenced to four years and six months' imprisonment, according to a Dec. 17 post on the WeChat account Age of Aquarius, Singapore’s Lianhua Zaobao reported.
Another Haitang author with the pen name Yi Xie was handed a one-year, five-month suspended sentence, while a writer with the pen name Ci Xi was jailed for five years and six months.
The reports said some writers had been given harsher sentences because they had been unable to return the money they had earned from their writings.
While details of the charges haven’t been made public in every case, many of the writers were contributors to Haitang Literature, and were widely assumed to be targeted for “disseminating obscene electronic messages,” which carries harsher penalties, the more a person is judged to have earned from their online activities.
China’s state-controlled media haven’t reported on the arrests, and details have mostly emerged in social media posts, sometimes from family members of those detained, or from the authors themselves who have taken to Weibo to try to crowd-fund the money to pay their fines to avoid a harsher penalty.
Chinese online fiction platform Jinjiang Literature City recently also reported that it had been summoned by consumer protection officials in the eastern province of Zhejiang, but said it had refused to turn up, accusing the authorities of “fishing,” the Lianhua Zaobao reported.
‘Profiting from obscene material’
Celebrity lawyers have been warning their followers via livestream that “profiting from the distribution of obscene material” is a crime that can extend even to writers who share their work for no fee.
The crackdown has prompted online writers to rush to delete or hide their work from other online fiction platforms, including Feiwen and PO18, according to the Reddit post.
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“Online literature has become hugely popular because the barrier to entry is low,” Si Yueshu, who has been writing fan fiction in Chinese since high school, told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. “Anyone could do it. All they needed was to want to.”
Si has had her own battle with censorship over the years, including having her work suddenly deleted without warning.
One of the biggest difficulties is that the lines keep shifting.
“You can’t actually know what you’re allowed to write and what you’re not allowed to write,” she said, adding that she only publishes on overseas platforms now, to try to evade censorship. “And something that was allowed before could stop being permissible at any time.”
A long-time online fiction fan who gave only the pseudonym Li Hua for fear of reprisals told RFA that many authors write erotic content because that’s what drives traffic, and gets them into a highly competitive industry.
“Authors who make a living from online writing are very hard-working,” Li said. “Very successful authors usually upload three chapters a day, or more than 10,000 words, and the most they can make is around 20,000 yuan (US$2,740) a month.”
And for many writers, it’s more of a labor of love.
“A huge number of authors don’t actually make much at all -- I’ve seen some authors who make 0.10 yuan (US$0.13) a day,” she said.
Nothing ‘below the neck’
Nowadays, it’s even harder to get traffic, as explicitly erotic content is banned.
“You used to be able to get away with [euphemisms like] ‘they went 100 rounds,’ or ‘they found perfect harmony’, but even that’s not allowed these day,” Li said. “You can’t write about anything below the neck.”
That’s why the authorities are arresting writers who post on Haiting Literature, which is based in democratic Taiwan.
The Chinese equivalent, Jinjiang Literature, has been reduced to censoring anything considered remotely erotic or even politically sensitive with AI-generated blank boxes in lieu of Chinese characters, with often hilarious results, according to Li.
For example, a sentence containing the words “down” or “lower” and “body” will generate blanks even if the overall meaning is very far from erotic.
Likewise, phrases referencing love and nature will be censored because the two words mean “sex” when combined a certain way.
The censorship is also spilling over into other forms of fiction.
As online commentator Xiao Wu points out, plenty of Chinese contemporary and classic literary fiction gets sexy at times.
“Romance novels will inevitably involve some kind of erotic content,” he said, citing explicit content in Nobel literature laureate Mo Yan’s Big Breasts, Wide Hips, Chen Zhongshi’s White Deer Plain and the novels of Jia Pingwa.
Meanwhile, demand for even erotic-adjacent (known as “borderline” content) continues to rise, said Xiao Wu, who has been approached by editors luring him with the prospect of writing something that pays much better than op-ed pieces.
“There’s a pretty low barrier to entry for reading this stuff for ordinary Chinese people who just want to relax,” he said. “Anyone with a cellphone and internet connection can enjoy it for a few yuan (around a dollar), while going out to sing karaoke with their friends could cost them hundreds of yuan (tens of U.S. dollars).”
“There aren’t many ways to let off steam in this highly repressive society, so this is a fairly low-cost route to happiness,” Xiao Wu said.
Li Hua agreed.
“Sometimes all I want is pure, sensory stimulation, and it’s only around 100 yuan (US$13) a year,” she said. “I think it’s just human nature.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Joshua Lipes.