news report on the state crackdown of Chinese queer writers - June 20th, 2025

Since March 2025, police in Lanzhou city of Gansu province has been summoning and detaining writers of queer (mostly Danmei) web novels from all over China over “suspicions of making and distributing obscene materials for profit.”

This isn’t the first time queer writers are targeted. From June 2024 to August 2024, the police in Jixi County of Anhui province did the same thing and detained more than 50 writers. Majority of them were sentenced to prison or put on probation by the end of 2024 and all adults were left with criminal records.

Sanlian wrote that among the writers they got in contact with this time, their profits ranged from 20000 yuan (or about $2785 USD) to a whopping 0. One of them has only withdrawn 400 yuan (or about $55 USD); one of them charged readers for reading their work but has never withdrawn from the website, only using the in-site currency to support other writers; one of them doesn’t even charge anything, but readers willingly supporting them financially was enough for this writer to be summoned. Southern Weekly also noted that much of the sentencing is based on how many clicks their work have.

One writer summoned by the Lanzhou police has only been writing heterosexual romance ft. consenting adults and readers can only access the explicit part by paying.

Sanlian noted that most of the writers are young college students. Many of them have been disqualified from admission to graduate schools even though they were only being investigated. Southern talked about how one writer was taken away by the Lanzhou police while they were working on their thesis and another has been out of school and working for only a year. This is consistent with what one of the main lawyers advocating for the writers shared, who said most writers who contacted her were college students, the youngest not even 20 years old.

Readers local to Lanzhou have also been summoned by the police to “provide evidence.”

According to Southern’s article (the newer of the two), Lanzhou police has yet to announce an official number of writers summoned. Southern estimated that more than 20 have already contacted a lawyer. Although in the earlier article from Sanlian, a writer revealed that way more than 50 have already been summoned or arrested.

The Case of Li Xin (2024)

This case is detailed in the Southern Weekly article. Li Xin was first sentenced to ten years in prison over BOOK ROYALTIES that were over 300,000 yuan (or about $41,000 USD). They were the co-author of a danmei series with explicit sex scenes that was published in Taiwan. In September 2022, They were taken away by Anhui police for the same crime of “distributing obscene materials for profit” and sentenced to prison in November 2023. During the second hearing, however, the sentence was reduced to four years in prison.

There is a heated debate in the legal scene about what counts as “obscene materials” and what counts as “art”. The law states that any books, videos, recordings or images that depict sexual acts or “explicitly promote pornography” are considered to be obscene materials, but not when they are science books OR tasteful “literature or art with sexual content.” During the case of Li Xin, four Chinese Language scholars of various universities were invited to read the entirety of Li Xin’s novel and all of them came to the conclusion that it can be considered as art. However, their opinions were not taken into account during the first hearing, causing their sentence to be ten years in prison at first.