The rationale for the crackdown is that the content is “indecent or obscene.” The Chinese Communist Party apparently does not appreciate depictions of sex and romantic love, at least not or especially not between guys (GlobalVoices, June 25, 2025).
China has launched a crackdown on so-called obscene online content with a mass arrest of erotica writers across the country who published their work on Haitang Literature City, an adult-content site hosted in Taiwan.
The censorship drill began when the public security police of Jixi County in Anhui Province arrested more than 50 writers in early 2024. Then, earlier this year, police authorities from Lanzhou City in Gansu Province revived the clampdown, which, to date, involves around 300 writers. Most of the arrestees are educated young women aged 20 to 30.
“Indecent and obscene content” has always been a target of online censorship in China. However, after Chinese President Xi Jinping established the upholding of “socialist core values” as a means to the country’s cultural security in 2013, all websites and platforms were required to tighten their censorship standards. Between 2015 and 2017, under a series of internet clean-up campaigns, the Chinese authorities shut down over 13,000 websites and compelled platform administrators to delete more than 10 million user accounts….
Haitang Literature City is a simplified Chinese erotica platform featuring aesthetic boys’ love (BL) fiction as its primary focus. It was founded in 2015 and is hosted in Taiwan as an adult content site for users aged 18 and above in order to evade mainland Chinese internet censorship. Writers and audiences, primarily young women, must use a VPN to access the site.
Less popular Chinese writers of the BL fiction posted on Haitang are reportedly being jailed for two years, more popular writers for four to five years.
Judging by the live-action dramas that are proliferating outside of China in Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, the real sins of much BL fiction include an excess of silly and bloated storytelling. The live action is often further marred by histrionic acting and by subtitles that make a guessing game of what is really being said in the language being translated.
At their best, though, the shows effectively dramatize familiar obstacles to love being overcome at last by hot guys. One of the most appealing BL dramas made in China is “Like Love” (2014). (You want the uncut version. If the two leads are about to do it for the first time and suddenly it’s morning, that’s the cut version.) The second season ends on a cliffhanger. I have heard but cannot confirm that a third season was prevented specifically by the new censorship rules imposed at the time by the Chinese government, which does not like love.
