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Chinese Police Detain Dozens of Writers Over Gay Erotic Online Novels
Chinese Police Detain Dozens of Writers Over Gay Erotic Online Novels
58 comments
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New York Times
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Yea I'm taking this with a massive handful of salt. I was just in Beijing and queer couples were just walking around openly being couples. Also the only time in my life I was comfortable around police they were very much just average community members with public service jobs.
If this is true it's probably some dumbass with brainworms, but I'm not taking the pro genocide propaganda rag that is the NY Crimes at their word.
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According to 6th tone this is something that happens. The production, dissemination and sale of "sexual, pornographic and obscene materials" is illegal in China and this is disproportionately heavily enforced against people writing gay erotic fiction.
In 2018 a popular online gay erotica author was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for "producing pornographic and obscene materials", in 2015 another was sentenced to 3 years imprisonment
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Ya, even beyond the NYT's penchant for bullshit, the Florida Man concept should have us all remembering how easy it is for media to present narratives by reframing data.
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To comment on the validity of the cases here: there is no definite proof as far as we know, but at least a dozen of internet accounts on major internet platforms (Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Douyin etc.) claiming to be the victims have posted photographic evidence of their own identification documents, police arrest warrants, detention notices, attorney bills etc. A number of practicing lawyers have also claimed that they have been approached by the victims. This has been happening since June last year but the number of cases seem to have increased over the past few months.
It is highly unlikely that people post fake evidence like this for drama, at least not in China, and especially since this has turned into a hot topic on the Chinese internet gaining quite a lot of attention. You can get into serious trouble for that. Especially for practicing attorneys linked to their actual businesses. I find it unlikely to be fabricated. Maybe the scale and extent have been exaggerated, but I don’t think people would want to risk losing their careers just for fabricating drama.
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The question is not whether or not there are charges. The question is WHAT are the charges. It seems unlikely that people were charged for being queer.
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Rare China L
That fucking sucks. Don't they have rich people to execute, or something
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it's the new york times, the probability you are being lied to approaches 1
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Ah, I see the Radio Free Asia story is making the rounds of the mainstream media. Once again, I do not doubt there have been prosecutions of queer individuals over pornographic material, and it may even be disproportionally aimed at queer people, but calling it a 'crackdown' when it accounts for 12 books and an undefined number of people in a population that, given statistics, likely reaches into the 10s of millions with probably thousands of publications, is blatant exaggeration.
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If this is actually happening and isn't just Western media making shit up, I have to wonder if these online publishers aren't registering their businesses correctly or aren't paying taxes or something. If they're just self publishing and collecting """donations""" for their work, they're sidestepping legal business practices to make extra cash.
Wild speculation, of course, but that's my first instinct.
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While the making of lewd content is legal in China, profiting off of it is very heavily criminalized. And erotic books, as absurd as it may seem, are categorized the same as pornography. So by selling or profiting off of these works, these authors were breaking the law.
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So they aren't registering their businesses correctly, because they literally can't as the business is itself prohibited.
Then, because the sale of these works is prohibited, the authors sell under-the-table and collect untaxed income. Declaring income from their smut would be illegal, so they have to do fraud to hide it as income from other sources or just hide the income entirely.
And now they're guilty of multiple crimes, selling obscene works and tax fraud, and so we see the prison sentences.
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While the making of lewd content is legal in China, profiting off of it is very heavily criminalized.
That is how it should be. Sexuality for enjoyment not profit. I don't have a problem with this. Now if any of these people were not making money off this and just publishing it for free and got in trouble yes that would be something I'd be against and think it an area of improvement China needs to work on but also an understandable one given how rapidly Chinese society has progressed in just the last half century. I am confident that with time and effort by good comrades inside China that any such problems will in time be rectified. (Also I suppose I do have mixed feelings given the amount of capitalist exploitation China allows to disallow women to make money in this way which is relatively harmless and given they probably don't have great financial means... an imperfect situation all around)
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It’s a Taiwanese niche website for this kind of content (which can range from mild to shocking). The main audience are female and queer college students. They were writing erotic fictions btw, not producing some exploitative porn materials.
Also, plenty of Chinese content creators have their separate accounts on YouTube, earning American dollars through ads and subscriptions. All you need to do is to fill out the W-8BEN form and pay tax to the US Treasury as a foreigner (10% for mainland Chinese citizens, 30% for Hong Kong residents) and a bank card that accepts foreign currencies to receive the income.
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Yeah, making porn is illegal in China.
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They were writing erotic fictions, mostly female college students writing for a women/queer centric audience. There is no need for imprisonment (the law allows for up to 10 years or life imprisonment).
Actual, exploitative porn materials are dime in a dozen across Chinese internet despite the crackdowns. Maybe the law enforcement should get their priorities straight and focus on those instead.
This has actually spurred a large discussion among Chinese netizens recently on topics on morality, legal rights, the extent of punishment etc.
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They need to do Japan's style of porn censorship where it's a tiny black line on the tip of the penis, there censored and done!
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How is there a harsh crackdown while also massive department store sized place to buy merch and books? Why didn't they mention the 12 books that were censored? They did mention that publishing rules on that Taiwanese platform were more lax, is this crackdown on LGBT or on the fact that they were publishing though the ROC? Or was the content of what they were publishing though that house maybe not exclusively LGBT and possibly something else?
The whole thing smells a little fishy with the "this genre is being heavily censored, but is also still widely available, but the ones being censored are definitely being censored for the genre" line.
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How is there a harsh crackdown while also massive department store sized place to buy merch and books?
How is there a harsh crackdown while also massive department store sized place to buy merch and books?
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It’s probably not the gay eroticism that’s the concern.
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Now I'm actually curious what the real story is, there's something happening here, but it's pretty clearly just being used as propaganda in this article.
The cop saying "you should have known you'd get in trouble for publishing this" should make it pretty obvious that whatever they were publishing specifically is likely very different from the standard "Boy Love" genre.
I'm kinda leaning towards the content in question containing explicit stories about young boys, but without the police reports or source material we can't know
Edit: Here's clip from that first article she links
It is worth noting that in the past, those who dared to try out such "sensitive" TV series were small-time actors who were neither famous nor famous, but now the gay dramas have gathered famous actors and big productions. Industry researchers believe that the entry of leading companies and leading artists indicates that gay culture is moving from subculture to the public eye, and these signals are milestone events in the history of the development of domestic gay culture.
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"Male-male CP (pairing)" and "male sex economy" are new themes in the entertainment market. Now "selling homosexuality" has become a common phenomenon in the industry. The so-called "selling homosexuality" means selling "rotten culture", and "rotten culture" refers to a subculture that is fantasized by the audience and is between men, with ambiguous or love stories as the main content.
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In recent years, the academic community has paid attention to and studied the impact of danmei culture on the gender cognition, marriage and love views of young people. For example, the article "Analysis of the Current Status and Influencing Factors of Sexual Identity of Some Adolescents in Hunan Province" surveyed the sexual identity of 1,260 adolescents in the province and found that 2.9% of boys considered themselves homosexual, 4.9% considered themselves bisexual, and 12.4% were uncertain about their sexual identity; for girls, the proportions were 2.4%, 12.4%, and 14.3%, respectively. 37.5% of people knew about "danmei" or "fan fiction", of which 32.3% said they "liked" it, and 11.9% said they admired the same-sex love described in literary works.
I think what's happening here is that the "Rotten Culture" is being conflated with homosexuality in general. I'm not sure exactly what the subgenre is, but it seems like it's more about pornographic material than anything. If homosexuality was so condemned, I don't think you'd have a massive industry rush to invest tons of money into gay focused media. You definitely wouldn't have almost 25% of young people respond that there either gay, bi, or unsure if there was serious consequences to saying that.
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So the first time I heard about this story was from a Radio Free Asia article. As such, I'm not inclined to believe it, and reading this article hasn't really changed that. This one, like the RFA one I read a couple weeks ago, is heavy on "social media users said" and light on actual evidence. I'm curious about what the truth is and why these people are being arrested. My guess is that it's less to do with the subject of their writing and more to do with the particular path towards monetization they've chosen. Especially given the number of photos in this NYT article that are labeled as photos of Boys' Love merch. You'd think if this kind of thing were banned in China it would be difficult to find so many photos of it.
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And I know that the NYT is capable of doing more in depth journalism when they decide to. They could try maybe sending journalists to China/hiring Chinese journalists, and actually digging?
Interview people who’ve been arrested for this, find out what exactly it was because of, look at police records, interview cops who’ve arrested people for this or ask the higher up cop about it at a press conference or something. You know, all the stuff you would normally do for a story taking place in the US?
But no it’s in China so all we need is “people on social media said,” no further investigation needed. Like, do they think those things aren’t possible in China? They very much are. China is a normal country with normal procedures regarding journalism and police information. You could actually investigate this and write a real article.
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An author was raided in sydney this year for a 'romance novel' she wrote
it turned out to be pretty damn pedophillic, here's a crap source
You will have to excuse me if i am sceptical of the intentions of the author of this NYT article
Vivian Wang
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent for The New York Times, based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country's global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people. Previously, she was based in Hong Kong and New York City. In 2021, she was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in public service for coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. She grew up outside of Chicago and graduated from Yale University.
Lol
To many people, the arrests also show how much the space for female and L.G.B.T.Q. expression has shrunk in China.
theyre stories written by straight women, for straight women, nice try tho! I actually dont feel great about hets writing steamy erotic novels about le gays.
i will never not be extremely sus on ivory tower journalists, theyre either feds, or being manipulated by the feds to publish articles justifying the feds.
Wang was previoisly awarded for her coverage of COVID in china, and if you google her name and corona virus you find plenty of 'the peasants are revolting against the emporer' kind of articles, 'the chinese are covering it up' 'we looked at gps data to get the real story'
these articles very rarely cite any regular people who live in China, its generally experts from the usa all the way down.
anyway, my point is, remain critical, approach things with caution, honestly i feel pretty sad someone would post this here without any sort of analysis. inadvertanly promoting the face value 'theyre killing queers'
need i remind you how the NYT reports on Palestine?
sorry this is cranky i havent had coffee
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theyre stories written by straight women, for straight women, nice try tho! I actually dont feel great about hets writing steamy erotic novels about le gays.
Same! Bad vibes! No different from straight men being like
about lesbians.-
If I recall correctly, one of the big reasons yaoi became so popular with women in Japan was because they felt gay relationships, or at least the sorts of fictionalised gay relationships featured in manga etc, were free of the rigid gender roles in more traditional romantic stories and Japanese society in general
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Boooo!
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Oh hey is it time for another porn struggle session?
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here's another article on it: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-12/police-in-china-arrest-female-writers-over-homosexual-novels/105403258
regulations said the "production, reproduction, publication, trafficking, dissemination" of any obscene works that generate more than 5,000 clicks online, or that make profits of more than 5,000 yuan ($1,072), should be treated as a crime.
On Chinese social media, people have accused police of "offshore fishing" — a phrase that refers to local police who have allegedly summoned suspects from other parts of the country for questioning for financial gain. ... The phrase "offshore fishing" was censored
"It seems that they have detained writers from poor family backgrounds who haven't made much money as well," Mr Zhang [lawyer] told the ABC. ...
Professor Wang Pan, who studies Chinese social media and pop culture at the University of New South Wales, said boys love fiction became a target of censorship and crackdown as it gained popularity in China.
"Officials may think that these cases can eliminate the social influence [of homosexual love stories] and give young people a more 'positive' sexual orientation, and in a way promote fertility rates,"
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Hexbear users claim to unconditionally support queer rights and then try to run defence for this shit.
I guess only western queers deserve to be defended from state violence.
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