As China cracks down on stories about men in love, female fans mourn the idealized romances

For Cindy Zhong, like many young Chinese women, a relaxing night used to mean curling up with a steamy story about two men in love. Then her favorite authors, and their tales, started disappearing.

Fans of the popular Danmei same-sex romance genre, written and read mainly by straight women, say the Chinese government is carrying out the largest crackdown yet on it, effectively neutering the enjoyment.

In the vast world of fantasy, Danmei is relatively straightforward: Two men stand in for idealized relationships, from chaste to erotic. Some scholars believe the stories appeal to Chinese women as a way to sidestep the country’s conservative gender values and imagine relationships on a more equal footing.

“Women turn to Danmei for pure love, especially as they face pressure from families, peers and society to get married and have kids,” said Aiqing Wang, a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool who studies Chinese popular culture and internet literature.

The once-niche Chinese literary subculture has seen a boom in recent years, with novels adapted into blockbuster television series and translated into Western languages.

Danmei — also known as “Boys Love” in English — has also caught the eye of Chinese authorities. At least dozens of writers have been interrogated, arrested and charged with producing and selling obscene materials in China in the past year, according to media reports and witness accounts online.

Some writers have stopped publishing or taken work offline. Websites have shut down or removed many stories, leaving the tamest behind.

“Chinese female readers can no longer find a safe, uncensored space to place our desires,” said Zhong, an educator in her 30s.

Writers have said they enjoy directing lives that aren’t their own.

“When I was writing, I felt so powerful that I could create a world,” said Zou Xuan, a teacher who used to write Danmei for fun and has been reading them for a decade.

From erotica to flowery romance

China’s government has been tightening its grip on the LGBTQ+ community, shutting down rights groups and social media accounts, despite removing homosexuality from its list of mental illness in 2001. Same-sex relationships are not criminalized.

Even though China’s censorship apparatus has long disapproved of same-sex love stories, the most popular Danmei stories have become bestselling books and been adapted into cartoons, video games and TV series. Adaptations often get around censorship by changing the characters to a heterosexual couple or presenting the relationship between male leads as an intense “friendship.”

The stories, usually published online by amateurs, are some of the most widely read fiction in China. Ranging from the flowery to the heavily erotic, they can include scenes of men fighting with a sword and a flute in ethereal ancient costumes or sex scenes in nature after rainfall.

Danmei is “a utopian existence,” said Chen Xingyu, a 32-year-old freelance teacher living in the southwestern city of Kunming. “I would be less happy without it.”

Some of the most popular stories, such as Heaven Official’s Blessing and Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, have been translated into English, building a global fan base and cracking The New York Times paperback bestseller list.

The stories’ language “is very flowery and poetic, which I really enjoy,” said Kayla McHenry, who works in a law firm in Pennsylvania and reads stories in translation.

But the author of those, Yuan Yimei, better known under her pen name Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, was sentenced in 2020 to three years in prison for “illegal business operation” after selling her self-published Danmei books. She was released on parole in 2021.

Silencing writers

It is hard to know how many writers have been caught up in China’s crackdown.

Danmei writers, mostly young females, claimed in social media posts that were later censored that they were detained and questioned by police in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, and expressed humiliation and fear that a criminal record could ruin their future.

An official at the Lanzhou Public Security Bureau declined to comment, saying the cases are under investigation. Gansu provincial police didn’t respond to an AP request seeking comment.

The Associated Press was unable to independently confirm the reports.

Even in Taiwan, beyond the reach of China’s censors, there are effects of the crackdown on the mainland.

Haitang, a major platform for the stories and headquartered in Taiwan, closed temporarily in June, warning writers not to continue writing “if the content does not comply with the laws and regulations of where the writers are located.”

The website recently returned with drastically fewer stories and writers. Readers noticed that stories saved in their accounts were taken down. It was unclear if the authors or the website had done it.

Another popular Danmei site, Sosad.fun, based outside China with at least 400,000 registered readers, shut down in April.

Neither website responded to emails seeking comment.

Despite the crackdowns, Danmei stories are still available in China, but fans say they’re tamer and lack erotic appeal. And with most of the best writers gone, they say that what remains just isn’t that good.

Some now publish overseas

Some fans said they have given up reading Danmei stories, but others chase the racy details that brought them to the genre.

“Stories I read in high school were much more explicit than those I read nowadays,” said Chen in Kunming. “I have to spend more time and try harder to find them. I need this content to fill my life.”

Chen said some authors are publishing their work abroad, leaving it to readers to get them into China and pass around paper books or digital files informally.

Other readers said they were turning to online comics translated from Japanese or Korean.

Despite the narrowing space for the same-sex stories in China, experts said women and their desires have changed in ways that won’t disappear.

“The awakening of female consciousness, the desire of reading and not being ashamed of what they want to read is irreversible,” said Xi Tian, an associate professor of East Asian Studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.