Cuffing Season with Chinese Characteristics
Crackdowns on erotic fan fiction reveal China’s evolving model of ideological enforcement and fiscal extraction
“In my twenty years of life, I never thought my first flight would be to a Lanzhou police station.” That’s not a punchline from a viral comedy bit. It’s the real-life chronicle of a Chinese danmei (male-male romance) fiction writer who found herself extradited - not internationally, but intra-provincially - by authorities from the dry heart of Gansu. Her crime? Erotic fantasy. Her punishment? Legal shaming, a hefty fine, and a one-way ticket to northwest China’s judicial imagination.
Welcome to the latest innovation in Chinese local governance: fine farming.
The New Urban Economy: Fines, Fiction, and Fantasy
Danmei fiction isn’t niche anymore. With hit shows like The Untamed racking up over 10 billion views, it has become a major cultural force. Most of it is harmless, even demure. But for local law enforcement desperate to balance books in a post-land-boom world, it’s fertile ground for a different kind of harvest.
With China's real estate model imploding and land sales drying up, rural police forces are no longer merely upholding the law; they're running revenue operations. As of early 2025, a coordinated crackdown by Anhui police has resulted in the arrest of over 50 danmei writers and the collection of more than 11 million yuan in fines. For comparison, that’s roughly 7,300 months of average rural income or one productive week of fan fiction raids.
This practice even has a name: “fishing in distant seas.” Why shake down your own county’s citizens when you can trawl WeChat and Weibo for some far-off scribe with a PayPal history and a taste for fantasy?
This Isn’t Just Another Crackdown
To be clear, this is not the first time danmei writers have faced repression in China. Over the past decade, authors have been jailed, fined, and silenced, some for years. However, what is happening now marks a qualitative shift in the state’s approach.
We're witnessing a shift from occasional, ideologically-driven censorship to a broad, revenue-driven, cross-jurisdictional enforcement campaign. Hundreds of writers across China are being prosecuted not for radical activism but for their imaginary gay romances. Police from rural provinces are now enforcing laws against citizens thousands of kilometers away, claiming jurisdiction over pixels and PayPal tips - even when the “profits” in question amount to just a few Haitang coins, the digital tokens readers use to tip authors online.
It’s not about decency. It’s about leverage.
One young author, writing under the pen name Sijindejin, described the moment she was summoned to Gansu:
“I thought I could write my way out of the orbit of my destiny... I thought I was writing my future, but I didn't realize that that future pointed to prison.”
Legal Dragnet as Statecraft
The danmei crackdown is more than local thuggery. It’s signal intelligence, both literally and strategically.
In the short term, it’s a desperate maneuver to extract value from a disintegrating fiscal base. But zoom out, and it begins to look like something more profound: the use of soft law and moral pretext to establish extraterritorial cyber-policing.
It mirrors principles from China’s concept of unrestricted warfare, where economic, legal, and psychological tactics are all fair game in achieving strategic advantage. Here, the battlefield isn’t the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait. It’s your AO3 login.
Danmei prosecution has become a model of “lawfare with Chinese characteristics.” The authorities are developing tools to assert legal dominance in cyberspace that mirrors China’s territorial ambitions offline. From the “Great Firewall” to now the “Great Fiction Raid,” Beijing is testing new frontiers in what digital sovereignty means.
What Xi Thinks About Erotica (Probably)
Xi Jinping doesn’t tweet, but if he did, it would probably be something like: “Sexual deviancy undermines core socialist values. Rectify.” His vision of cyberspace is one of moral clarity, cultural unity, and controlled virality. As emphasized in the 20th Party Congress report, China must “strengthen the development of internet civilization” and “build a clean and righteous cyberspace.”
In that light, danmei becomes doubly dangerous. Beyond fiction, it’s also feminine, queer-coded, subversive, and decentralized. In a word, it’s uncontrollable.
But this fusion of moral enforcement and revenue generation isn't emerging in a vacuum.
Is This Uniquely Chinese? Not Exactly.
China’s system is distinctive in its state-driven moral enforcement for profit, but the impulse isn’t unique.
Victorian Britain wielded the Obscene Publications Act (1857) to police erotic literature, targeting authors for destabilizing "moral order."
Modern tech platforms like Meta or YouTube demonetize adult content creators, often without appeal, but that enforcement is decentralized and primarily civil, not criminal.
What sets China apart is the fusion of criminal prosecution, ideological doctrine, and fiscal extraction, all guided by the Party, not platform policy.
The Road Ahead: Morality Policing Meets Monetization
Here’s what is likely next:
Formalization: Look for dedicated “cyber-morality task forces” embedded in provincial revenue systems.
Algorithmic censorship partnerships: Platforms may be pressured to auto-detect and flag “problematic content” for police follow-up.
Cross-border application: The model could be extended to Chinese writers abroad, particularly in diaspora communities.
And if the tactic proves effective domestically, don’t be surprised when China adopts it abroad. A Chinese citizen posting erotica from Canada? An invitation to experiment with the extraterritorial application of cyber-lawfare, one that sets a precedent for a broader digital order with PRC norms at its center.
When Kink is a Crime of the State
Although not exactly ancient Laozi wisdom, the principle is timeless: a state that cannot tolerate fiction fears its narrative. But in today’s China, even the fictional affections of imaginary men can challenge the supremacy of the Party line. In silencing danmei writers, Beijing isn’t just moralizing; it’s modeling. The State is demonstrating how governance can migrate to the cloud, how law can follow the yuan, and how fantasy can be a front line in the fight for control.
So the next time you stumble upon a charming love story between two fictional swordsmen, ask yourself: How long until someone in Gansu demands a piece of it?
Because in this new phase of ideological combat, nobody’s safe, not even your OTP.