Chinese authorities have arrested dozens of writers of Boys’ Love (BL), or danmei, a genre of online homoerotic fiction featuring male protagonists, and typically created by and for women. This latest crackdown appears driven by a variety of factors, such as the patriarchal government’s efforts to control women and censor content that it considers sexually “deviant”; outdated and overly restrictive legal definitions of obscenity; and cash-strapped local police departments pushing the boundaries of their respective jurisdictions. Yi Ma and Eunice Yang from the BBC described the scope of the arrests and censorship:
At least 30 writers, nearly all of them women in their 20s, have been arrested across the country since February, a lawyer defending one told the BBC. Many are out on bail or awaiting trial, but some are still in custody. Another lawyer told the BBC that many more contributors were summoned for questioning.
They had published their work on Haitang Literature City, a Taiwan-hosted platform known for its “danmei”, the genre of so-called boys’ love and erotic fiction.
[…] Although authors of heterosexual erotica have been jailed in China, observers say the genre is subjected to far less censorship. Gay erotica, which is more subversive, seems to bother authorities more. Volunteers in a support group for the Haitang writers told the BBC police even questioned some readers.
[…] It made Beijing uneasy enough that discussions have been vanishing: #HaitangAuthorsArrested drew more than 30 million views on Weibo before it was censored. Posts offering legal advice are gone. A prominent Chinese news site’s story has been taken down. Writers’ accounts, and some of [their online] handles, are also disappearing.
After [popular “danmei” author] Pingping Anan Yongfu’s post went viral, she deleted it and wrote another, thanking supporters and admitting her writing had violated the law. She then deleted her handle. [Source]
CDT Chinese has documented several instances of censorship related to this crackdown over the past month. A Sanlian Lifeweek article discussing the justifications for prosecuting the authors of BL novels was censored on WeChat. A WeChat article by Wei Ziyou criticizing those judicial standards as being out of touch with reality was also censored. Last week, even former Global Times editor Hu Xijin ran afoul of platform censors with a Weibo post he wrote arguing that authorities should avoid setting overly broad definitions of pornography in order to avoid further contributing to what he called a phenomenon of “sexual recession” in Chinese society. Hu’s post was soon deleted. In other censorship news, the public WeChat account of the Chinese Rainbow Network, the largest Chinese LGBTQ+ group in North America, was blocked on June 22, and all of its content has become inaccessible on that platform.
Under Xi Jinping, Chinese authorities have increasingly restricted expressions of queer identity, sexuality, and community, including BL fiction. In 2018, a writer was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for publishing a BL novel. In 2022, Chinese media regulators banned BL dramas from TV. Oiwan Lam at Global Voices provided a short timeline of BL crackdowns and described how many victims of this latest wave of suppression were part of a Taiwan-based BL platform called Haitang Literature City:
“Haitang Literature City” is a simplified Chinese erotica platform featuring aesthetic Boys’ Love (BL) fiction as its primary focus. It was founded in 2015 and is hosted in Taiwan as an adult content site for users aged 18 and above in order to evade mainland Chinese internet censorship. Writers and audiences, primarily young women, must use a VPN to access the site. Subscribers must register an account and purchase a virtual currency called “Haitang coin” to access VIP content.
However, the site became the target of a crackdown in 2024. The security police from Jixi County in Anhui Province carried out a cross-regional operation. They arrested more than 50 writers, and many were charged for disseminating pornographic materials under article 363 of China’s criminal law, which scales the severity of the offence and sentence into minor (less than 3 years), serious (3–10 years), and especially serious (10 to life imprisonment).
As for the Haitang case, reportedly, for less popular writers who earned less than RMB 250,000 (approximately USD 35,000) from their writings, most received a jail term of less than 2 years with a 2-year probation period. But for popular writers, the sentence was up to 4–5 years.
[…] As a result of the crackdown, “Haitang Literature City” suspended its platform temporarily and removed its content and user accounts upon request. [Source]
BL literature allows many women authors and readers to explore their sexuality beyond gender stereotypes, and like online pornography more broadly, it has become an important tool in the construction, education, and discussion of sexual identities in a highly censored and conservative China. As a result, “Officials may think that these [arrests] can eliminate the social influence [of queer love stories] and give young people a more ‘positive’ sexual orientation, and in a way promote fertility rates,” Beijing-based lawyer Zhang Dongshuo told Australia’s ABC. Many netizens also questioned why writing BL literature is often punished more severely than writing and publishing heteroerotica, or committing financial crimes such as bribery, or even violent crimes such as rape. Vivian Wang at The New York Times wrote that a deeper motivation for authorities, beyond combatting “obscenity,” is controlling women and limiting freedom of expression as it relates to sexual identity:
To many people, the arrests also show how much the space for female and L.G.B.T.Q. expression has shrunk in China.
The scale of the crackdown is not entirely clear, partly because many authors have been afraid to talk about it. Also, discussion of the topic online has been heavily censored. But some observers say it appears to be the first time that Boys’ Love writers have been charged with crimes en masse, rather than merely censored or targeted individually.
[…] Cassie Hu, a China-based academic who studies Boys’ Love, said targeting it was a way “to control and highly supervise straight women” and reinforce the traditional, heterosexual family structure amid concern about China’s plummeting birthrate.
[…] More writers were arrested this spring, by the police in Lanzhou. This time, the authors were less well known, according to interviews with two lawyers involved in the cases, as well as social media posts. They included university students and a writer who had earned less than $30, according to a post by one lawyer, Zhao Yijie. [Source]
The severe punishments against BL writers are driven partly by 20-year-old sentencing guidelines for posting graphic content online, which under a 2010 ruling allows erotic material that attracts more than 5,000 clicks to be deemed a criminal offence. Another factor is “fishing the high seas” or “pursuit-of-profit policing,” whereby public security officials from one province or city cross into another to pursue “major cases” (with potentially lucrative outcomes) with no clear jurisdictional authority or public safety imperative. Police in Gansu and Anhui detained BL authors from other provinces, and RFA stated that cases in Anhui appeared focused on how much profit the writers made. Emphasizing this angle, The Economist wrote that “Chinese cops are cuffing erotica” and described it as a “perverse way to raise money.”
