Chinese cops cuffing erotica writers in perverse money-raising exercise

The Age

28-06-2025

'In my 20 years of life, I never thought my first flight would be to a Lanzhou police station.' So wrote one young woman who, in the past few weeks, says she was ordered to leave her home and report to authorities in the faraway capital of Gansu province, in the parched northwest.
Her supposed crime was profiting from posting erotic stories on a website dedicated to danmei – online fiction that depicts romantic and sexual relationships between men, but which is largely written by (and for) straight women.
Most authors earn a pittance for posting danmei online, but a lucky few inspired hit TV shows (though with the naughty bits excised) before a crackdown on making them in recent years. One such programme, The Untamed, has racked up more than 10 billion views since it first aired in 2019. But danmei writers are also attracting unwanted attention from the authorities as part of a troubling trend.
Cops from the sticks are finding ways to slap charges on Chinese who have never once come within a thousand miles of their towns. In China, tackling entrepreneurs and private firms in other forces' jurisdictions to make money is known as 'fishing in distant seas'. In March, Li Qiang, China's prime minister, said 'profit-driven law enforcement' had to stop. But scooping up writers of erotica continues.
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Though Chinese authorities are deeply conservative on matters of sex and sexuality, several lawyers and danmei writers suspect that money-raising may be the real goal. Chinese police forces depend upon a mix of national and local funding. But the country's property crash has left local governments in the lurch as they can no longer rake in so much revenue from selling land-use rights to developers. Meanwhile, some local authorities have grown increasingly adept at finding other funding: last year China's tax haul declined by about three per cent, while money raised by fines and confiscations rose by 15 per cent.
In recent months, at least four other danmei writers say they were approached by cops from distant parts of China. In December, police from a poor, rural part of Anhui province announced the results of an investigation into 36 people for online obscenity and raised 11 million yuan ($2.3 million) in fines. They sentenced one well-known danmei author to more than four years in prison. She had to hand over all her earnings from writing – about 1.8 million yuan ($384,000) – and pay another 1.8 million yuan as a fine.
'Why are some people who commit sexual assaults in real life not punished so severely?' asks one erotic writer, pointedly. 'People should have full freedom of thought, including freedom of sexual fantasies,' writes Chen Bi of the Chinese University of Political Science and Law, who is offering legal aid to arrested authors.