“The hand around his waist held him tighter, their bodies pressed closer together, and Xie Lian’s struggling hands were firmly folded and crushed against his own chest; unable to move. His lips were still securely sealed, the kiss deepening, and a stream of gentle, chilled air slowly passed through.”
A god kisses a ghost king, and a love story, movie deal and KFC sponsorship are born. The kiss appears in the book Heaven Official’s Blessing, a danmei or “boys love” story. Danmei is romantic fiction about men or male beings – ghosts, foxes, even a mushroom – falling in love, written almost exclusively by and for straight women and is the most popular genre of fiction in China.
Heaven Official’s Blessing is the most popular book on Jinjiang Literature City, China’s main danmei site, but its author’s identity is a secret. Like many danmei writers, she publishes under a pseudonym, in this case Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (“fragrance of ink, odour of money”): the Chinese Communist party has jailed the authors of danmei stories.
Each chapter of Heaven Official’s Blessing has been read an average of 2.4m times, according to a study by Aiqing Wang, a lecturer on Chinese at the University of Liverpool’s Department of Languages, Cultures and Film. Of Jinjiang’s seven million registered users, 93% are women. 84% are between 18 and 35 years old. KFC’s sponsorship deal saw the chain decorate its stores with giant illustrations of the story’s main characters and produce special menu items and merchandise. The anime series is available on Netflix.
The book is not just a success in China; the English translations of its three volumes had an initial print run of half a million and all three were New York Times bestsellers.
Experts believe they’re popular because they offer escape from daily life, and an outlet to explore taboo desires.
Danmei fiction draws women into romantic stories that don’t have to confront the realities of being a young woman in China, says Megan Walsh, the author of The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters. There is no risk of pregnancy, no pressure to marry, and sexual desires can be felt and acted upon without judgment.
“Getting pregnant is a real pain for romance,” says Walsh, who found that danmei was by far the most popular genre among girls in China.
“They like the fact that it’s not a girl who is suffering in love … They like that the jeopardy and the heartache and the risks associated with illicit relations aren’t played out upon a girl’s body.”
Danmei stories resonate with young women for many reasons, Wang says. They’re glamorous, with handsome protagonists and magical natural beauty. When the two main characters in Heaven Official’s Blessing kiss for the second time, for example, “thousands upon millions of silver butterflies break through the water next to them”..
Wang started reading danmei fiction at school. She says the stories will often spread in high schools because someone cool starts reading them and they may be seen as a little risque.
Talking about them with friends is also a more demure way to raise the topic of sex and they can join lively online chat forums, anonymously.
They also allow readers to indulge in their desire for a male body in a “liberal way”, Wang says – something not encouraged in wider society.
The rise of ‘rotten women’
In the 1990s, Japan’s “boys love” subculture crossed over to Hong Kong and Taiwan, before spreading in China. Today, danmei fans call themselves “rotten women”, a term that comes from Japan’s “fujoshi” or “rotten girls”. At first, danmei “occupied only a very niche market,” in China, says Wang, but today it is more popular than ever.
Many of the stories subvert traditional Chinese literary forms. Heaven Official’s Blessing is “full of religious connotations,” says Wang. It has all the tropes of “a traditional Chinese literary genre highlighting magical arts, martial arts, kung fu and imaginary worlds.”
But the Chinese Communist party (CCP) sees homosexuality as a challenge to traditional family structures, says Wang. The Jinjiang website, in response to government pressure, has strict policies on erotic scenes: nothing below the neck. So danmei writers use a website called Ao3 to publish missing sex scenes.
The publications are strictly controlled by the government, says Wang. Often the TV or movie versions will remove the romantic element between the protagonists, turning the stories into ones about “socialist brotherly love”, says Walsh.
Despite attempts to censor the stories, the genre has struck a chord with many young women and the government, says Walsh, is nervous about “millions of fangirls reading between the lines”.
The CCP has launched an initiative aimed at gaining control over online fandoms including danmei and K-pop called “Qinglang” or “clean and clear”, Vox reported in 2022. These feminine artforms with largely female fanbases challenge what Vox described as, “Xi’s narrative of an idealized China that’s strong physically as well as economically and politically”. Among the consequences was that 60 danmei adaptations were cancelled.
Several danmei writers have been jailed by the CCP, which uses pornography rules to crack down on writers whose books get too popular or are too homoerotic. In 2014 a writer called Big Grey Wolf was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. In 2018, a danmei author, a woman identified only as Liu, was sentenced to more than a decade in prison. In 2019, police arrested eight danmei writers, sentencing one of them for four years.
Writers are now using “increasingly silly metaphors” to describe sex in order to avoid censorship, Walsh says. But censors have also started encouraging readers to report danmei works that break the rules: rewarding them with points or tokens that allow them to buy more danmei content.
Feminist-utopian pornographic fantasy?
Fans argue over whether danmei stories are feminist: do they allow women to explore the ideal of love between equals, or reinforce heteronormative ideas of romantic relationships as involving one dominant and one submissive partner?
Japanese feminist Chizuko Ueno, influential in China, has described danmei characters as neither male nor female, embodying instead an idealised “third gender”. The manga versions of Heaven Official’s Blessing’s main characters bear this out: the characters have long hair and delicate, angular features: they look like androgynous runway models.
Then again, by finding ways around the censors, danmei writers and readers are rebelling against the patriarchy and, as Wang puts it, “norms of women’s chasteness and subservience”.
Wang believes danmei stories are feminist: they’re stories about men and what ideal love looks like from a female perspective. She has referred to them in her academic writing as, “feminist-utopian pornographic fantasy”. And whether danmei writers are good feminists or not, the stories are fun: she still reads them to relax.
“People want feel good stories, because they can’t have that kind of perfect love in real life.”
This is the second story in a three-part series on feminism and literature in China.
