BEIJING—Police in China have arrested at least 30 writers, nearly all of them women in their 20s, for violating the country's punitive pornography and obscenity laws, reports the BBC. Many of these people are out on bail awaiting trial, but some of the authors remain in custody.
One user, going by the handle Pingping Anan Yongfu on the Chinese microblogging social network Weibo, told the BBC, "I'll never forget it—being escorted to the car in full view, enduring the humiliation of stripping naked for examination in front of strangers, putting on a vest for photos, sitting in the chair, shaking with fear, my heart pounding."
The New York Times offered similar reporting at the end of June. Author of the report, Vivian Wang, a Beijing-based correspondent for the Times, recollected the experience of a Chinese graduate student who lives in the southern part of the country. The student, via Wang's reporting, said that she wrote a self-published romance novel.
She published the novel in 75 chapters, following two male characters who fall in love and engage in sexual encounters. She earned $400 from readers who paid for access to the novel. Now, the graduate student is facing criminal conviction and potential incarceration, notes Wang.
The reporter refers to 12 others, mainly women, who had similar issues with the Chinese national police in their respective provinces.
What Yongfu and the graduate student from Wang's report have in common is that they fictionalized two male characters in a form of literature known as "danmei." The term in Mandarin literally translates to "addicted to beauty," but refers to the online subculture of "boys' love" and is related to the Japanese manga-originated fan subculture "yaoi."
One study published in the peer-reviewed journal Communication and the Public further specifies, "'Danmei' is the Chinese term for boys’ love, a genre of male–male romance created by and for women and sexual minorities."
China has approached enforcing its obscenity laws against danmei internet forums, including subreddits on Reddit, in a manner that is punitive and draconian.
"Since 2010, forms of arrest and criminalization have intensified against danmei writers and creators," asserts a moderator on the subreddit r/DanmeiNovels. In the same social media post by this moderator, they refer to another peer-reviewed study published by the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
The study highlights that much of the crisis is linked to "state surveillance and platform capitalism."
"[This] crackdown not only revealed the legal precarity of danmei creators but also exacerbated fragmentation within the danmei cultural community, exposing fragile networks of trust, economic instability, and the unpredictability of platform governance," the researchers in this study conclude.
"While previous scholarship has often framed danmei within a resistance-compliance binary, these events suggest that such a dichotomy oversimplifies the intricate negotiations, contradictions, and affective struggles that define the danmei cultural ecology," they add.
