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.
Gray zone. Most content creators aren’t registering themselves as businesses, let alone some poor college students writing on a niche website earning some donations and subscription fees.
You can enter into a contractual relationship with the internet platform and you may be liable to pay personal income tax, but personal income tax is only a very small fraction of the Chinese government tax base that they are negligible for internet content creators except for the largest channels with millions of subscribers as well as high profile celebrities involved in contracts comprising tens of millions of yuan.
Most of the tax revenues in China come from value-added tax, followed by corporate income tax. These are where the tax evaders are at. I highly doubt they’re wasting resources going after some poor college students or even internet content creators for evading personal income tax.
The other possibility (again, assuming this is actually happening and the NYTimes isn’t just making shit up) is that they are wasting resources enforcing an obscenity law on amateur authors for writing slashfic. The tax angle makes more sense to me?
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.
Wouldn’t they also need to register as a business generating foreign income and pay taxes to their own government as well as paying taxes to the US?
Gray zone. Most content creators aren’t registering themselves as businesses, let alone some poor college students writing on a niche website earning some donations and subscription fees.
You can enter into a contractual relationship with the internet platform and you may be liable to pay personal income tax, but personal income tax is only a very small fraction of the Chinese government tax base that they are negligible for internet content creators except for the largest channels with millions of subscribers as well as high profile celebrities involved in contracts comprising tens of millions of yuan.
Most of the tax revenues in China come from value-added tax, followed by corporate income tax. These are where the tax evaders are at. I highly doubt they’re wasting resources going after some poor college students or even internet content creators for evading personal income tax.
The other possibility (again, assuming this is actually happening and the NYTimes isn’t just making shit up) is that they are wasting resources enforcing an obscenity law on amateur authors for writing slashfic. The tax angle makes more sense to me?