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.
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.
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.
New York Times
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.
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
Yea ok that’s dumb, unless it’s CSA material people don’t deserve to be imprisoned because they made or wrote porn.
Its not just ‘they wrote porn’, they did so and distributed it online, for money. Of this was some passion project, a general freedom of expression, they could be distributing it anonymously and freely. I’m doubtful anyone’s being arrested for their homebrew erotica - you’ll never take me alive
we’re being coerced into arguing semantics about the rights of petit bourgeois ‘artists’
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Yeah all the queer Chinese people I’ve talked to about this have told me the only issues they’ve had is with their family members being homophobic about them specifically. Many people I’ve talked to didn’t have this experience because their parents were fine with it, so it’s not everyone’s experience, but it does seem to be the most common manifestation of homophobia, directly from family to the person being discriminated against.
Apparently there is even some conversion therapy type outfits that parents put their kids in
You’re right it’s incredibly safe to be openly gay in the streets of ‘western’ cities, but speak to ‘western’ queer people about how their families reacted to them coming out and you’ll see that conservative attitudes are still very prevalent, especially amongst older people.
😇 lol sorry, tbh my parents are coming around but its been a decade of work, forcing myself to family events and continuing to be myself
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.
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.
Rare China L
That fucking sucks. Don’t they have rich people to execute, or something
it’s the new york times, the probability you are being lied to approaches 1
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I’m sorry, but this is in fact real, it’s incredibly well known in the Chinese queer and publishing scene. Just because China has so much to look up to, doesn’t mean it’s a perfect place or a place not still growing from the contradictions it arose out of
Plenty of well known information is false
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.
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.
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.
Damn, those laws are fucking awful.
Those erotica authors were no angels, did you know they were doing tax fraud?
And erotic books, as absurd as it may seem, are categorized the same as pornography.
Why would that be absurd? If it’s 1) some form of media, and 2) meant mainly for sexual gratification, it’s porn. Like that’s the literal definition.
well an erotic book is qualitatively different from exploitative pornography.
Yes, but the exploitative aspect is only one of the arguments against pornography. There is also the argument that it atomizes and alienates people from each other by allowing effortless consumption of sexual gratification instead of having sex with another person, and that will apply no matter the medium.
think the order is the wrong way around there. or i can go catch covid from one of the plague rats and die trying to get laid
Okay? Now it doesn’t matter what I think obv but IMO it’s weird to have a government enforce laws & prohibitions that in effect say “hey queers, you’re not allowed to fantasize about this, find someone to fuck idk”. Legislating to fight the exploitative nature of esp. live pornography? Cool, good. Legislating against this nebulous sense of atomization from personally consumed fiction…?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favor of it, and in fact I have a fairly recent post history arguing against it, but I’m paraphrasing arguments I’ve seen others make and upvote here on Hexbear.
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)
how carceral
That is how it should be. Sexuality for enjoyment not profit. I don’t have a problem with this.
You don’t have a problem with sentencing people to 10 years in prison for writing and selling gay smut?
“Porn is inherently fascist” is a sentiment that has been both expressed and significantly upvoted here on Hexbear before the mods got it for SWERFism.
Porn is not inherently fascist, though. The way that pornography exists as an industry in our current time is exploitative and fascist, because we live in a fascist/capitalist society.
Im of the belief that pornography for the purpose of sexual gratification has basically always existed in some form or another. Fascist country creates fascist porn.
I do think 10 years is quite excessive but I also think western media would lie about that so I’m going to assume that with good behavior and reform they’d probably actually be out in much less than half that.
Secondly I don’t presume that this was per se special punishment because of the orientation, non-hetero nature of the works and that the law provides for the same for straight works. I admit there are likely problems with selective enforcement as with any law like this that runs into existing societal biases and prejudices so I think that would be another argument in favor of leniency but again I don’t really believe that sentencing is necessarily accurate or the whole story.
Thirdly we don’t know all the details about the ages of the characters or any aggravating factors about the content or the nature of payments or whatever.
Even half a year in prison for something that small is absolutely barbaric
“Making art shouldn’t provide a living if it doesn’t fit my sensibilities”
We shouldn’t be trying to restore profitability to art. Not taking a side either way concerning the porn stuff, but it’s extremely bourgeois to think the problem with art under capitalism is importantly that the artists aren’t getting enough money to do it.
I’m sorry but I think this take is ridiculous. Producing art is labor, and every laborer should be entitled to a living. That idea gets scoffed at a lot, but art has the potential to be an incredible expression of human experience. I’d argue that authors and songwriters are in the same boat, using a form of expression to appeal to other people. Obviously if your art sucks people wont want it, you are mostly at the whims of your audience if you are lucky enough to have one.
Producing art is labor
That doesn’t really mean anything. Marxism is about social labour, not just work. It’s more important that people are able to survive and do art outside capitalist production than it is to try to make art profitable for workers in capitalism. All you’re doing is creating/sustaining labour aristocrats and petite-bourgeois sentiments in society. Especially when we’re talking about fucking explicitly-pulp smut literature here, which is definitely not something we need or want the state to be funding.
Notice Cuba, DPRK, etc. aren’t funding that.
DPRK film director:
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?
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
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
Yeah, making porn is illegal in China.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
…
“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.
…
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.
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.
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.
Boooo!
Oh hey is it time for another porn struggle session?
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,”