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The term“boys' love” –“BL” for short – is usually used to describe the East Asian variety of this literature. The genre has been around at least since the late 1990s and has gained in popularity over the past two decades.

Boys' love fiction is typically written by women and read by heterosexual women. That fact has sparked extensive discussion , both among scholars and among practitioners and fans, about the extent to which calling it gay erotica is appropriate.

One argument against this labeling is that erotic fiction about male homosexuality actually written by gay men for a gay male readership tends to look very different. Boys' love stories tend to present an idealized and unrealistic version of gay male sexual relations.

Indeed, Bucknell University East Asian studies scholar Tian Xi has argued that“homosexualizing” boys' love fiction is problematic, as it reflects heterosexual women's fantasies rather than the lived experience of gay men. Others have gone further, labeling boys' love“anti-gay .”

In China, the conflation of boys' love with homosexuality has, to some extent, given more social visibility to the gay community there. But it is doubtful that the women who were arrested this time would all agree to the label“gay erotica” to characterize their writing, which poses the question: Why does Western media do so in its reporting of the crackdown?

Books are big business

So why are writers of this type of fiction being arrested in China? Online fiction is big business in China, and Beijing has an economic and ideological interest in controlling the sector.

Large, Chinese-based commercial websites such as Qidian and Jinjiang Literature City offer access to novels across a range of popular genres. The most popular authors in this format have made millions of dollars from not only subscriptions, but also the sale of their intellectual property to the makers of online games and TV series.

According to a recent report compiled by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there were more than 36 million works of literature available on Chinese websites in 2023, including 4 million or so that had been published that year.

The online reading sector was worth around US$5.5 billion, while the market for the intellectual property derived from online fiction was worth some $27.5 billion.

In short: Chinese literature generates big profits, creates jobs and provides entertainment. The Chinese government wants to support it and also sees it as a potential source of cultural“soft power” to rival Japanese manga or South Korean boy bands.

Porn: A scourge of capitalism

But from the Chinese government's perspective, boys' love literature – which consistently ranks as one of the most popular genres, if not the most popular – poses a problem.

For ideological reasons, Chinese authorities want to suppress what they consider“unhealthy” or obscene content, even if it sells well. All types of pornography, gay and straight, are considered a scourge of capitalism for which there should be no place in socialist China .

A line of boys' love books at Kinokuniya Bookstore in Japantown, San Francisco. Wikimedia Commons

For the past few years, authorities have been successful in strong-arming the largest websites into monitoring their own content to make sure that anything erotic is significantly toned down, to the extent that boys' love fiction has disappeared from all of those sites, even if the genre can still be found hidden in other categories.

However, there is little that the Chinese government can do to prevent aspiring Chinese erotica authors from publishing their writings on websites outside its jurisdiction.

Disappearing cases

Problems can arise for boys' love writers when they get paid for their writing, and those payments are then remitted back into the country. The recent arrests, for example, appear to have involved women who had published their work on the Haitang portal in Taiwan and had received income from those works.

Haitang is known for publishing much more explicit boys' love fiction than what can be found on websites in mainland China. The works in question were probably considered obscene by Chinese authorities, and citizens who earn money from obscene publications are breaking Chinese obscenity laws.

In China, commentators tend to see these laws as outdated, both because of the severity of the prescribed punishment – up to 10 years in prison – and because the amounts of profit considered illegal are based on income levels from the 1980s.