（Singapore, 04.06.2025）Police from China’s Lanzhou city, Gansu province, recently launched a large-scale arrest operation across many provinces nabbing at least 300 young Chinese women, accusing them of penning stories that portray romance and sex between men for publication on a “pornographic” website in return for a fee, hence breaking the law against “profiting from obscene contents”, Chinese media reported.
Writings with homoerotic theme in China are called danmei literature (耽美文学), and the characters portrayed are usually male gay lovers. Due to strict censorship in China, many Chinese danmei writers, majority of them women, choose to publish their works on adult subscription websites in Taiwan, which falls outside China’s jurisdiction. The Taiwanese website implicated in the Lanzhou crackdown is Haitang Literature City (海棠文学城)。
Last year, authorities in Anhui province determined that such writings constituted the crime of “producing and distributing obscene materials for profit” and conducted the first arrests across provinces. Following that, other regions also acted, with offenders swept up in Chongqing city and the provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian, and Yunnan. But the operation by Lanzhou is apparently the largest in scale to date and has thus whipped up a firestorm of protests.
One point about the Lanzhou arrests that irked many is that the offenders could face very harsh punishment. A video has appeared online allegedly showing a few women confessing their “crimes” in a court, among whom at least one was said to have been sentenced to ten years in jail. But that video could have stemmed from the Anhui arrests, where about 50 women were taken in.
According to a media report, there was a rumour that the writers who made less than 250,000 yuan (about $45,000) from their works could be let off if they surrendered their illicit gains. However, a writer known as “Yunjian” was sentenced to four years and six months even after submitting the money, while “Ciqi,” another writer, who failed to raise her purported sum, is facing a likely five-and-a-half-year prison term.
Among those detained in the latest sweep were undergraduates and young professionals who have just joined the workforce. They apparently had not made significant gains from their “pornographic” works, the Chinese news website info.51 pointed out.
In fact, unlike the earlier cases which differentiated criminal liability based on profit amount, the Lanzhou authorities treated even unpaid writing or works receiving minimal tips as “having brought traffic to the platform and thus constituting profit as a whole,” the literary website wenxuecity.com reported. This interpretation has also led to public outcry over the loose definition of “profit.”
There is also widespread concern over the practice of “deep-sea fishing” (远洋捕捞) where police track down offenders in other provinces and regions with the aim of profiting from the massive fines from a larger haul. Many wonder this practice is lawful.
The Lanzhou operation has quickly sparked widespread debates among legal experts and the public, centring on what does the clause “profiting from obscene materials” actually means, whether the scope of law enforcement has been arbitrary and too broad, and what constitute creative freedom.
Lao Dongyan, a law professor at the Tsinghua University known for being outspoken against social injustices and defensive of labour rights, wrote in reference to the Lanzhou crackdown on the qq.com news site that sexual content in any piece of literary work should be holistically assessed to determine its literary and artistic value. “It should not be immediately labelled as pornographic,” she stressed.
She also emphasised that the criteria for identifying obscene materials and marking a case as “serious” must be updated to reflect the prevailing societal norms. She said the bar for “obscenity” was set very low before the pre-Internet age. “Standards which may have been appropriate 20 years ago could result in too easily classifying certain acts as crimes.”
“Unthinking law enforcement and judicial practices should be avoided,” she opined. “Many of the authors are students with no criminal history. Criminal liability should be established with great caution. If prosecution can be avoided, it should be.”
