As internet literature in China becomes an integral part of the country’s mainstream culture, British brands in China should take note
Internet literature in China has attracted over 500 million readers and created a rapidly expanding and lucrative commercial market both within China and beyond its borders. Through IP commercialisation, some of the most successful titles are gaining huge popularity and growing fanbases in their adaptions in different segments of the entertainment industry – from film and TV to gaming and animation.
The viral success of The Joy of Life, Nirvana in Fire, Empresses in the Palace and Candle in the Tomb TV series, which first started as online literature, heralds what the future holds. Last year, there were 29 million internet literature writers in China, attracting an audience of 550 million users.
To celebrate the commencement of the British Library x Yuewen three-year collaboration, Literature in the Digital Age, the China-Britain Business Council is pleased to support an exclusive event about internet literature in China featuring renowned web novelist Yuewen, along with special guests from the British Library and the UK IP sector, to explore and discuss these cultural phenomena.
Click here to register for the event
Ahead of the event, we are republishing a 2022 conversation between regular FOCUS contributor author Paul French and Megan Walsh, author of The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters (Columbia Global Reports), a book that pulls together all the strands of what China is reading right now – including which authors, genres and styles are popular, as well as how Chinese audiences are reading (online, e-books, hard copy).
I think the Chinese online literature market is fascinating because we don’t really have any equivalent in Britain. Can you give us a brief overview of China’s online reading platforms, the size and scope of what they’re publishing and how many people use them?
Chinese online fiction is, in short, the largest, self-generating industry of unregulated, free-market fiction in the world, and the quality is usually pretty poor. Still, it boasts impressive statistics. There are an estimated 450 million active readers and 17 million authors vying to catch and keep “eyeballs.” Most platforms, including Hongxiu, Jinjiang Literature City (Jjwxc), Qidian and China Literature operate a pay-per-chapter system, which has created a culture of serialisation. It has nurtured a rather dog-eat-dog approach to writing, with writers often plagiarising other people’s work and deploying sloppy clickbait tactics in order to keep updating and keep people reading. Novels are cancelled if they don’t attract enough visits, while the most popular romance and fantasy titles might be snapped up for highly coveted and extremely lucrative TV, anime or gaming adaptations.
Online platforms, the largest of which is Tencent’s China Literature, do not think of themselves as publishers, but instead IP cultivation powerhouses, in which the main aim of novel-writing is, basically, mercenary. China Literature sees itself as the new Disney, a media and entertainment behemoth that generates and capitalises on its own IP, with its own TV and movie production companies, including New Classics Media. While its growth has somewhat plateaued in China, it now has its sights set on international expansion, setting up Webnovel and Inkstone, platforms to showcase translated online Chinese fiction as well as a platform for international writers themselves — a canny move given how popular fan fiction is becoming these days. Webnovel is already very popular in the West, and mired in controversy, with poor regulations to prevent plagiarism and giving writers little opportunity to have a meaningful, individualised presence online.
It seems to me that online reading is where genre really exists in China – both familiar genres such as crime, fantasy and romance, as well as what you call “male oriented titles”, “face slapping books” and “xianxia” or immortal hero novels. Can you tell us which genres are most popular, which are unique to China, and which of them replicate what we have in the West?
The biggest overlaps between China and the West are fan fiction and teen romance. In terms of genres that are unique to China, traditional wuxia (the mythical world of martial arts heroes popularised by Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) and the newer fantastical realm of xianxia are the most notable. Like wuxia, xianxia novels take place in a mythic alternate reality, but it has shunned the camaraderie, moral compass and magical realism of wuxia stories and replaced it with dimension-bending worlds in which an often shameless, militantly individualistic protagonist spends thousands of chapters levelling up and smiting opponents to achieve his own immortality and omnipotence. As a result, xianxia is completely detached from reality. Often referred to as “cultivation novels,” xianxia narratives are plotted more like a computer game in which new weapons, superpowers and enemies differentiate one chapter from another. Amoral, self-obsessed hotheads are, of course, not to the taste of the CCP, who want self-sacrificing socialist heroes, and the crackdown on xianxia is already in full swing. Beyond this, there are in excess of 200 genres — things like tomb-raiding sagas, gaming or avatar-style romances and workplace politics — but created within the same climate as all the others, they tend to be deceptively, rather than thrillingly, diverse.
Clearly, the Party is keen to see certain sorts of fiction dominate – “saints and martyrs” as you say – and are also rather distrustful and wary of online reading platforms. What’s emerging in this new, somewhat more controlled, cultural moment, and is anyone buying it?
I think the popularity and scale of online fantasies has taken the Party by surprise, and they are desperately trying to reclaim control of production and content. Several websites, in particular Jjwxc, which hosts the majority of danmei novels, have had to undergo “rectification” and commit to a higher socialist rating in terms of the content they host. The government has set up its own University of Online Fiction, devoted to realism and patriotic narratives, and commissioned “Red Stories” in which it has been claimed that superhero narratives can simply be mapped on to the stories of China’s red heroes from history. I genuinely don’t know how popular these propagandist novels will be – it is arguably one of the hardest things to gauge. The government don’t want to see its socialist heroes floundering in fact or fiction. But certainly, just as many action movies have done in the West, screen depictions of China being the world’s moral, technological and military trailblazer have been incredibly popular in recent years. Whether or not patriotism works on the page too, and I suspect it doesn’t, we are yet to see.
Are reading tastes national, or are the cities reading differently to the countryside and younger readers differently to older readers? How segmented is the market?
I genuinely don’t think I can answer with any authority, but I can say what I imagine to the be case. There is obviously still a huge divide between rural and urban residents in terms of access to quality education and opportunity. By extension, there are big differences in lifestyle for those living in third or fourth-tier cities compared to those in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that those with less economic mobility and perceived cultural capital were more likely to be drawn to escapist fantasies, while self-help titles dominate reading habits in the bigger cities. Many fantasy readers refer to themselves with a degree of ironic pride as diaosi (variously translated as “penis hairs” or “losers”); they are only too aware of the stark difference between the superheroes and irresistible heroines they read about and their own lowly status. But this is, of course, all relative. Young people who fail to ace the gaokao and get a high-earning job in Shanghai are also likely to feel the strain, and seek consolation in fiction, in computer games, in movie theatres.
In many ways, the internet has democratised reading tastes in a way that wasn’t imaginable even ten years ago. The internet has meant that a steel worker can make money writing fiction by night, and it has nurtured the growing trove of wonderful migrant worker poetry published on various online platforms that, steeped in cultural and literary references, suggest that many of these apparently “uncultured” rural workers are in fact better read than the urban elites who invariably binge trashy fiction on their daily commute. As far as the older generations go, the literary types are incredibly well versed in both Chinese and translated world fiction, but have a penchant for social realism. Ge Fei wrote an interesting novella called The Invisibility Cloak (translated by Canaan Morse) about the few middle-aged eccentrics who go against the flow, whilst everyone else is moving in the same, homogenising direction of wanting more money and more stuff. If there were to be a national taste, the restless desire to change one’s fate at this time of economic ascension, either through hard work, graft or idle fantasy, has probably had the biggest impact on the kinds of books people are reading and writing.
What or who are you reading right now? Can you suggest a few books to us, preferably translated, that are useful for getting a handle on contemporary Chinese literary tastes?
For a mix of titles reflecting various aspects of Chinese literary (and not so literary) culture, you could try combining something like The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke (trans. Carlos Rojas), Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry (trans. Eleanor Goodman), I Shall Seal the Heavens by Er Gen (trans. Death Blade), Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by MXTX, In the Name of the People by Zhou Meisen (trans. Emily Hein), A Perfect Crime by A Yi (trans. Anna Holmwood) and Invisible Planets: 10 Visions of the Future from China (trans. Ken Liu).
