The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry
Liang Ge
Open access | Research article https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494251326775
First published online March 19, 2025
Abstract
The Haitang Incident of 2024 exposed the precariousness of danmei (boys’ love) culture and its creators in China under the dual pressures of state surveillance and platform capitalism. I critically interrogate the Chinese danmei cultural ecology through ugliness – not as a state-imposed stigma but as a critical lens and a generative conceptual tool. Departing from previous scholarship’s binary framings of danmei as either resistance or escapism, ugliness reveals danmei as a site of struggles, where censorship, commercialisation and danmei creators and fans as affective communities entangle in unstable yet persistent ways. I interrogate the precarious position of Haitang Literature City authors, and reveal the ugly convergence of digital governance and economic exploitation. Furthermore, I explore the fragmentation of trust within the danmei community, where fear, survival and mistrust complicate solidarity. Centring ugliness as a productive analytic can move beyond the limitations of binary resistance narratives to better account for danmei culture’s messiness, contradictions and ambivalences.
In June 2024, some Chinese danmei (also known as boys’ love) writers reported through social media platforms that they, along with several other authors based in mainland China but publishing male-male homoerotic stories on the Taiwanese Boys’ Love (BL) website Haitang Literature City (hereafter Haitang), had been arrested by Chinese police and/or released on bail pending inquiries. Between late July and early August 2024, another group of Haitang writers was also detained and later prosecuted. These writers were targeted by the authorities after transferring their earnings to mainland China, facing charges related to obscenity and tax evasion. Unlike other major danmei platforms such as Jinjiang Literature City (hereafter Jinjiang), Haitang is distinguished by its primary focus on male-male erotic content. The highly explicit male homoerotic content on Haitang draws a specific audience of danmei participants who appreciate its intense sensuality. Beyond male-male erotica, however, Haitang also hosts a rich array of avant-garde danmei literature that radically engages with discussions on sexuality, gender, love, inequality, violence, the post-Anthropocene and more. A popular trope on Haitang, for instance, involves the depiction of the shou (the receiving partner in sexual dynamics, also known as uke in Japanese BL culture) as an intersex character from a poor family who works as a sex worker.
In contrast, the largest platform for danmei fiction, Jinjiang, has been known for its ‘clean’ and ‘wholesome’ male-male romances since the nationwide anti-pornography campaigns of 2014, which targeted the danmei genre extensively (Yang and Xu, 2017). A widely circulated phrase among danmei participants, ‘any intimate content below the neck is forbidden on Jinjiang’, highlights the self-censorship increasingly practised on the platform. Also in 2014, Jinjiang rebranded its danmei channel as chun’ai (literally ‘pure love’) to signify male homoerotic stories devoid of explicit sexual content (Hu et al., 2024). Consequently, Haitang has since become an alternative space for danmei creators and fans seeking to produce and consume danmei erotica.
The detainment and prosecution of Chinese danmei writers on Haitang, and the salient differences between Haitang and Jinjiang, and their respective users, underscore the broader Chinese cultural and political landscape that has shaped danmei platforms in distinct ways. Unlike Haitang, Jinjiang has opted for a ‘clean’ and ‘sanitised’ approach, aligning itself with the Chinese party-state censorship policies while still catering to a substantial danmei readership. This divide in digital spaces has prompted danmei creators and readers to constantly navigate different platforms based on content restrictions and community norms and to invent varied affective modes in their indulgence in the boys’ love cultural community. Emerged in mainland China during the 1990s, under the influence of Japanese dōjinshi (self-published derivative of existing works and created by amateurs) and boys’ love manga cultures, danmei has developed in tandem with China’s rapid digitalisation. Moving from early non-commercial online forums to commercial vertical websites on desktops, to mobile versions of sites, and now mobile apps, danmei has extended beyond novels and subgenres into multimedia forms, including comics, animation, live-action dramas, audio dramas, games, music and cosplay (Ge, 2024). Danmei represents the du jour dynamic and popular cultural landscape in post-socialist China.
Notably, Danmei culture is an inherently dynamic yet ambivalent field: romance and erotica, the (self-)censored and uncensored, (commercialised) governance and (ungovernable) creativity, feminist potential and (internalised) misogyny, queer momentum and cis-heteronormativity – all coexist within this cultural ecology. Previous danmei studies, however, have often framed the culture as either a form of resistance to heteropatriarchy and state censorship or an escape from the gendered realities into seemingly genderless homoerotic fantasies. Such unitary framings may oversimplify the dynamic yet incoherent danmei cultural ecology, often projecting it within a dominance-resistance binary framework.
Thus, contrary to the optimistic views offer by previous scholarship, I propose that it is more productive to view the Chinese danmei cultural ecology through the lens of ugliness. In the following, I elaborate on the idea of ‘the ugly’ and why it is a useful lens through which to understand the complexities of danmei culture. I critically examine the fraught intersection of state surveillance and platform capitalism within danmei culture, revealing its inherent contradictions and vulnerabilities through the 2024 Haitang Incident. I offer two novel perspectives to approach the ugly of Chinese danmei cultural ecology/industry: an ugly site of struggles where digital surveillance and platform capitalism converge; a dynamic yet incoherent cultural community where (dis)trust implodes.
The ugly site of struggles: convergence of digital surveillance and platform capitalism
Danmei culture has been repetitively devalued as the vulgar, the distorted, and the ugly by Chinese authorities and state media (e.g. Guangming Daily, 2021). My framing of the ugliness however does not mean such a repulsive understanding: I am developing ‘the ugly’ based on my extending and reinterpreting the Chinese party-state version of it. The ugly is not just stigmatised, but also generative; the ugly is not just an aesthetic category, but a crucial conceptual tool. First, I am referring danmei culture as a persistent site of struggles, where regulations and desires come into constant tensions. Second, the ugliness per se cannot simply be erased or controlled – it always returns, haunting and destabilising the structures that seek to contain it. Danmei culture in China to date exists at the intersection of digital surveillance and platform capitalism, creating a precarious environment where creativity and commercial interests collide with the party-state regulation. In recent years, online danmei fiction has faced increasing censorship on domestic platforms in mainland China. In response, Haitang, a literary website with servers based in Taiwan, has emerged as a sanctuary for circumventing content regulation, attracting a significant number of danmei authors to continue their creative work on this platform. Haitang was established in 2015 and operates under Taiwan’s Longma Cultural Publishing House. As an online literature platform, Haitang primarily features women-oriented danmei works which contain sexually explicit content and other ‘R18’ content – designated as materials intended for adult audiences, including violence, incest and enforced mating. However, these commercialised danmei platforms, including Haitang (of which servers are based in Taiwan but a great mass of its danmei writers and readers is from mainland China), are operating within the dual pressures of state control and market-driven imperatives, rendering danmei authors and readers vulnerable to both legal prosecution and commercial exploitation – which has been painfully revealed in the 2024 Haitang Incident.
In June 2024, some Haitang readers were reporting difficulties with recharging their accounts, while at the same time, some Haitang writers had been arrested, including the most renowned Yuanshang Baiyunjian (hereafter Yunjian) on charges of ‘producing and distributing obscene materials for profits’. On June 21, Haitang officially shut down and restricted access to its content, publicly announcing a five-day maintenance period. However, information regarding the arrests remained tightly controlled, and most readers assumed the shutdown was routine. It was not until June 26, when the shutdown was further extended, that suspicions among danmei writers and readers on Chinese social media platforms arose. Discussions began to speculate that Yunjian had been arrested, leading to widespread rumours in the absence of official information. Speculation ranged from accusations of unauthorised printing of danmei works for profit in mainland China to allegations of tax evasion, money laundering and even political dissent. The crackdown sent shockwaves through the danmei community. Some authors then mentioned that authors’ financial records on Haitang could soon be scrutinised by the Chinese authorities. Warnings circulated online, advising authors earning over 10,000 RMB in royalties to urgently withdraw from the platform. This incident highlights the precarious position of danmei authors within China’s tightening regulatory environment. On June 29, Haitang resumed operations; however, most previous literary works on the platform remained locked and inaccessible to readers. Following the spread of news regarding the crackdown, some authors emailed Haitang’s editors to verify the authenticity of the reported arrests, but the editorial team refrained from disclosing any information. As a result, certain authors – either trusting the editors or holding onto a sense of false security – chose to unlock their works and continued updating their novels.
By late July 2024, a second wave of arrests targeting Haitang authors began. For example, among those apprehended was the author Fayu, who had attracted police attention for continuing to update her work despite the initial crackdown. Unlike authors with lower earnings, who were summoned by phone for questioning, Fayu was directly approached by law enforcement at her residence. After being released on bail from the local police station, in a post on Weibo (on 3 August 2024, see Figure 1), she warned other Haitang authors: ‘My previous confidence has only led me to handcuffs and crippling debt’ and pleaded, ‘Do not make the same mistake! Please deactivate your accounts immediately!’ This public statement marked a turning point, drawing broader attention to the Haitang incident. Prior to this, most authors had refrained from publicly warning others, fearing that doing so could be interpreted as obstructing justice and result in legal repercussions. Consequently, warnings were shared only in private circles.
Figure 1. The screenshot of the author Fayu’s Weibo post (username anonymised).
As confirmation of the arrests spread, more authors urgently emailed Haitang requesting the permanent deletion of their works and the deactivation of their accounts. However, while Haitang processed the deactivation, the platform simultaneously unlocked and promoted some author’s works on its bestseller list, which triggered growing mistrust towards the platform’s actions. Readers and authors alike expressed outrage at Haitang’s conduct, accusing the platform of being irresponsible and endangering its contributors. Some danmei writers and readers speculated that Haitang deliberately resisted authors’ mass departures to protect its profitability. Many authors’ efforts to contact Haitang for clarification went unanswered, deepening suspicions about the platform’s role in the crisis.
This incident underscores the ambivalent dynamic between Haitang and its communities – a relationship that both fosters and capitalises on creativity. Such duality is epitomised in the danmei cultural sphere: while its thriving subculture continuously generates innovative expressions, the burgeoning danmei industry concurrently appropriates this very creativity. Notably, Jinjiang and Haitang both introduced the freemium business model, which offers users a free trial of an initial dozen chapters and charges a subscription for the following chapters at a premium rate. The introduction of the freemium business model has scaled up and attracted more uses because the subscription fees charged function as a sustainable source of revenue for Jinjiang and Haitang to pay and retain its contracted writers and optimise its digital systems, and for better capital reproduction. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as articulated by Zuboff (2019), sheds light on the way digital platforms monetize user data and engagement while simultaneously subjecting participants to pervasive monitoring and control. In the context of danmei culture, platforms like Haitang not only serve as creative outlets but also function as data-driven enterprises that leverage user behaviour to maximise profit. On the one hand, danmei writers and readers seek refuge on platforms beyond the jurisdiction of Chinese authorities, but on the other, they find themselves caught within the extractive logic of platform capitalism. The simultaneous promise of creative freedom and commercial success is thus undermined by the surveillance mechanisms embedded within the Haitang platform.
Moreover, the Haitang Incident exemplifies the convergence of Chinese party-state censorship and platform capitalism. As the Chinese government intensifies its regulatory control over online spaces, danmei authors are not only censored but also subjected to algorithmic governance that tracks their financial transactions, online interactions and readership metrics. This convergence results in an environment where authors are simultaneously surveilled by state authorities and exploited by platforms seeking to capitalise on their content. For instance, following the crackdown in June 2024, some authors were advised by many fellow writers to withdraw their earnings from Haitang due to fears that financial records would be scrutinised by Chinese authorities. However, Haitang’s administrators delayed account deletions, reportedly unlocking and promoting content to sustain their revenue streams (BBC News, 2024). This incident underscores how platform capitalism, with its focus on profit maximisation, can exacerbate the vulnerabilities of content creators, exposing them to greater legal risks while continuing to extract value from their labour.
This escalating crackdown not only exposes the legal vulnerabilities faced by danmei authors but also highlights the structural risks embedded in China’s tightening censorship of non-heteronormative cultural production. The incident reflects the broader intersection of state regulation, digital surveillance and the suppression of marginalised voices in contemporary Chinese media landscapes. The state’s increasing censorship of non-heteronormative cultural expressions, including danmei literature, not only constrains creative expression but also enforces dominant gender norms and marginalises alternative voices. This crackdown illustrates the intersection of state surveillance, digital censorship, platform capitalism and the suppression of cultural spaces that challenge heteronormativity and patriarchal structures.
These measures demonstrate the productiveness of looking at danmei through ugliness as a critical conceptual lens, which differs from the state descriptor of danmei content as ‘ugly’. Rather, my usage of ugliness as a lens through which to examine the ‘ugly’ contestations around danmei that exceed containment highlights the very dynamics of ugliness – where exclusion and marginalisation does not lead to erasure but instead fuels new modes of adaptation and resistance. The state’s attempt to sanitise digital spaces paradoxically reinforces danmei’s persistence, as communities constantly find more ways to navigate and reconfigure their creative practices under increasing scrutiny. In this sense, ugliness is not merely the condition of being censored or devalued but a generative force that continuously re-emerges, destabilising the structures that seek to suppress it. The ongoing tensions between regulation and creative survival mark danmei as a site of struggle, where ugliness embodies both exclusion and endurance, risk and possibility.
The fragile bonds of (dis)trust in the danmei cultural community: fear, survival and the ugly politics of fragmentation
By late December 2024, the Haitang crackdown had led to the arrest of over 50 authors. As verdicts began to surface, varying outcomes reflected the authors’ perceived levels of involvement. Authors involved with sums under 250,000 RMB generally received suspended sentences. For example, the author Yixie was sentenced to 1 year and 5 months in prison, with a 2-year suspension. In contrast, high-profile author Yunjian received a harsher sentence of 4 years and 6 months in prison despite actively returning her profits received from Haitang, while other authors who were unable to repay their earnings, faced even longer sentences – for example, the author Cijuan received 5 years and 6 months (BBC News, 2024). All convicted authors now carry criminal records. In attempts to mitigate their sentences, many sought to return their earnings, viewed as ‘illicit profits’ by Chinese authorities.
Legal interpretations from the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate’s 2010 Judicial Guidelines (Interpretation II)1 stipulate those individuals producing or distributing obscene electronic content for profit face fines or property confiscation, with fines ranging from one to five times the illicit gains. This legal framework created insurmountable financial burdens for many authors. To repay fines, some authors, upon release on bail, were forced to resume writing under stricter conditions. Thus, some of them signed contracts with domestic commercialised platforms like Jinjiang, focusing on sanitised literature devoid of R18 content. Since August 2024, over a dozen authors publicly appealed for donations on Weibo, providing evidence such as arrest notices, medical reports and photos of their living conditions to prove the legitimacy of their requests. Public support allowed some to cover fines, but not all succeeded.
Yunjian had spent over a decade writing millions of words on Haitang, establishing a significant presence within its community. Despite months of borrowing money and fundraising, her family was unable to cover her legal debts, leading her sister to seek public donations. However, this outpouring of support also sparked scepticism. Some users on Weibo mocked those donors, suggesting they were gullible and would one day be tricked into buying health supplements when they get elder. In response, loyal readers formed a group on Douban (a Chinese-language social media platform which accommodates a multitude of interest-based group pages) ironically called the ‘Health Supplement Enthusiasts’ to discuss and track the Haitang incident. Amid rising distrust and online hostility, many Haitang authors chose to remain silent. The backlash escalated as angry donors formed groups to collect evidence and report those Haitang authors who called for donation as fraud. Subsequent fundraising efforts by implicated authors were met with increasing scepticism.
Even Yunjian’s sister (who sought public donation on behalf of Yunjian) faced backlash, and her Weibo account was suspended after reports of misconduct. The pervasive sense of fear, untrust and uncertainty has led authors to retreat into silence.
On Weibo, many danmei readers cautioned others to avoid discussing the issue publicly to prevent further harm to authors. Discussion appears to be a luxury. Danmei participants are consciously shrinking their own space for survival, becoming quieter, more obedient, which evidenced the great effects of the han-xu (reticent) politics implemented by the Chinese party-state (Hu et al., 2023). As both Liu and Ding (2005) and Hu et al. (2023) suggest, han-xu politics function as a meticulous governance deployed by the Chinese hetero-patriarchal socio-familial system, including the soft xu (storing up) – marginalisation and rendering those excessive and non-normative invisible; and the hard han (holding back) – crackdown and sanitisation. This atmosphere of fear and fragmentation reveals the deepening mistrust and vulnerability within the danmei community, exposing how state repression not only criminalises cultural production of male homoeroticism but also erodes solidarity and amplifies precarity among marginalised creators and their audiences.
As revealed in the Haitang Incident, the dominant versus subversion binary framework adopted by the resistant model in danmei studies (e.g. Hu and Wang, 2021; Yang and Xu, 2017) may overlook the complexity of both the community as counterpublics and the participants whose lived experiences are not unilateral, but marked by dissonance, uneasiness and ambivalence throughout their engagement with male homoeroticism. Concerning the very dynamic Chinese danmei culture, it is crucial to examine the material-discursive practices that constitute these participants’ diverse yet incoherent lived experiences, which include both struggling for respite opportunities and venues for engendering and circulating counter-discourses, and internalised heterosexist, misogynist and self-censored sensibilities in their intensive affective engagement with danmei culture. Such ambivalences by no means foreclose the transformative momentum of Chinese danmei culture, but rather manifest its complexities and incoherences where queer and feminist potentials are intertwined with multiple indelible societal norms in this very complexifying danmei cultural ecology.
The dynamics of (dis)trust within the danmei community reflect the precariousness and volatility of online danmei cultural participation under authoritarian governance. The constant negotiation between resistance and compliance, solidarity and self-preservation, highlights the fragility of trust among authors and readers. This internal fragmentation is further exacerbated by external pressures, as state censorship tactics sow division and fear while platform capitalism exploits these tensions for commercial gain. The Haitang incident exemplifies how danmei participants must navigate competing forces of state surveillance, community solidarity and individual survival, ultimately revealing the inherent contradictions and ambivalences within this digital subcultural space.
These tensions are not merely disruptions but constitutive elements of danmei’s digital ecology. The precarious trust within the community – always under threat, yet never extinguished – mirrors the paradox of ugliness itself: it is at once marginalising and generative, silenced yet persistent, stigmatised yet foundational to the survival of the danmei cultural community as self-organised counterpublics (Ge, 2022). As danmei participants oscillate between retreat and resistance, their fractured engagements embody ugliness itself as a critical lens allows investigation into this complex affective condition – a state of being both too visible and forcibly obscured, too excessive to be assimilated yet too powerful to be erased. The unfolding crisis of (dis)trust does not merely signify dissolution; rather, it reveals how danmei’s contested status fosters cycles of withdrawal, re-emergence and adaptation. In this sense, ugliness becomes not just a condition of exclusion but a strategic position from which danmei participants continuously reconfigure their existence within a shifting terrain of power, discipline and desire.
Ugliness as a lens for understanding the precarious struggles of danmei culture
The Haitang Incident 2024 underscores the structural vulnerabilities of danmei authors and communities operating under the convergence of state surveillance and platform capitalism. The crackdown not only revealed the legal precarity of danmei creators but also exacerbated fragmentation within the danmei cultural community, exposing fragile networks of trust, economic instability and the unpredictability of platform governance. While previous scholarship has often framed danmei within a resistance-compliance binary, these events suggest that such a dichotomy oversimplifies the intricate negotiations, contradictions and affective struggles that define the danmei cultural ecology. Instead, I propose ugliness as a more generative and nuanced conceptual tool to account for these complexities.
Understanding danmei culture through ugliness reveals its dual nature – at once stigmatised and generative, precarious and resilient, marginalised yet indispensable. Unlike frameworks that cast danmei either as a counterpublic resisting heteropatriarchal repression or as a commercialised escape from gendered realities, ugliness allows us to recognise danmei culture as an ever-evolving terrain of struggle where survival, desire and creative expression are persistently negotiated within unstable conditions.
First, ugliness helps us grasp the contradictory nature of platform capitalism in danmei culture. Platforms like Haitang simultaneously foster creative subcultures and exploit their labour, extracting economic value while offering limited protections against censorship. The 2024 crackdown revealed the paradox of digital refuge – where online platforms provide an illusion of autonomy yet remain subject to the pervasive reach of state intervention. Haitang’s ambiguous role – both as a host for transgressive creative works and an entity complicit in users’ legal jeopardy – exemplifies the ambivalent entanglements between community, platform and governance that ugliness makes visible.
Second, ugliness offers a lens to understand the precarious bonds of (dis)trust that shape danmei community dynamics. The Haitang Incident not only intensified external repression but also triggered internal fractures within danmei networks, as some members turned to reporting and surveillance while others engaged in mutual aid. The breakdown of trust between authors, readers and platforms reflects the inherent instability of online cultural participation under authoritarian governance, where solidarity is often fleeting, and survival strategies can shift from collective resistance to self-preservation. In this sense, ugliness is not merely a social stigma but a structural condition – a state of being constantly scrutinised, unassimilable, yet inescapably generative.
Third, ugliness helps explain how danmei persists despite persistent erasure. The han-xu (reticent) politics of self-censorship, withdrawal and silence – where creators and readers shrink their spaces for survival – does not signal total defeat. Rather, it exemplifies ugliness as a crucial lens through which to interrogate the complex affective condition that unsettles, re-emerges and refuses complete assimilation into dominant norms. Danmei continues to survive, not because it wholly resists power, but because it transmogrifies – constantly reshaping itself in response to regulatory pressures, technological shifts and the fluid desires of its participants. As Hayward (2010) astutely suggests, the process of transmogrification is always processing in unexpected and paradoxical ways, which is not merely about loss or distortion but the emergence of new, hybrid forms that challenge fixed notions of identity and culture. In and via this ongoing transmogrifying process, danmei remains a vital and contested cultural terrain that continues to redefine the possibilities of subjectivities and desires among the converged structural pressures of party-state censorship and capitalism.
By centring ugliness, we can move beyond the limitations of binary resistance narratives to better account for danmei culture’s messiness, contradictions and ambivalences. Instead of viewing danmei as a static site of defiance or oppression, this framework reveals it as a dynamic, incoherent and continuously mutating space, where censorship, commercialisation, trust, betrayal, desire and fear are always in flux. In this sense, the struggles of danmei culture – its precarity, its fragmentation and its ability to endure despite repression – are not merely symptoms of crisis, but reflections of the ugly logic that sustains and destabilises cultural production in Chinese cultural and mediascapes.
Acknowledgments
This article is dedicated to my fellow Chinese danmei writers and readers – a remarkably resilient community unwavering in their creative pursuits.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.