The Ugly Beauty of Boys’ Love in the Ruins

In the digital topography of the Chinese internet, the platform Haitang Literature City (海棠文學城), established in 2015 in Taiwan, flourished for nearly a decade as a digital heterotopia for the production and consumption of erotic danmei novels (耽美小说)—that is, books that feature male homoeroticism (also known as ‘boys’ love’, often abbreviated as BL). For its denizens, who are predominantly women, it was the ‘flower market’ (花市)—a coded vernacular invoking the begonia (海棠, the haitang in the name) to signal a space of sensory abundance. If mainstream platforms for publishing danmei such as Jinjiang Literature City (晋江文学城) were the manicured public parks, sanitised by the 2014 nationwide ‘anti-porn’ campaigns into spaces of ‘pure love’ (纯爱) where intimacy stops at the neck (Hu et al. 2024), Haitang emerged as the unpruned thicket at the periphery of the regulated web. It was a subterranean space where the ‘ugly’—the explicit, the excessive, the non-normative, and the visceral—could be written and consumed with a fervour that bordered on the religious. Here, the danmei genre located its radical praxis, exploring themes of power, gender fluidity, and erotic autonomy that were fundamentally impermissible within the Great Firewall’s primary perimeter.

However, the sequence of events spanning from 2024 to 2025 collectively termed the Haitang Incidents (海棠事件) have violently ruptured this ecosystem. The mass arrests of authors—orchestrated first by police forces in Jixi County and Anhui Province, and subsequently by authorities in Lanzhou City, Gansu Province—have fundamentally altered the ontological status of danmei production (Ma and Yang 2025). These were not merely routine internet clean-up (清朗) campaigns designed to enforce the moral order in line with the socialist core values embraced by the Chinese Communist Party—the normative framework designed to cultivate ideological unity and guide citizens’ moral, civic, and political conduct in support of national stability and socialist governance (Schneider 2018). Rather, they represented a shift towards predatory state brokerage: mainland Chinese danmei writers on Haitang were targeted in cross-provincial extractions of human and financial capital that laid bare the precarious foundations of the danmei as well as the broader post-socialist Chinese cultural sector.

Taking stock of these incidents, this essay posits that we are witnessing an ‘ugly’ turn in the cultural logic of danmei—a shift that necessitates a departure from the optimistic scholarship that frames the genre solely as a site of feminist resistance or queer potentiality (Xu and Yang 2022; Zhang 2022). As an alternative, I develop the generative analytical tool of ‘ugliness’ to situate the status quo of danmei cultural ecology as an ambivalent ‘ugly beauty’ (Ge 2025b). Ugliness here is not merely the state’s aesthetic or moral judgement of the genre as ‘vulgar’ (低俗) or ‘obscene’ (淫秽). Rather, ugliness manifests as a structural condition of existence. It is the ugliness of the ‘oceangoing fishing’ (远洋捕捞) law enforcement model that commodifies authors as sources of revenue to plug local fiscal deficits. It is the ugliness of platform capitalism, under which sites such as Haitang monetise the legal risks taken by their users while offering no protection. And, profoundly, it is the ugliness of internal disintegration, where tightened censorship and political depression fracture the danmei community, transforming many readers into witnesses against their favourite authors and authors into informants against one another.

As Ling (2025) suggests, political depression signals a loss of control over one’s world and the collapse of the expectation that effort leads to reward and is attributed to coercion and manipulation by the pervasive governance of the Chinese Party-State. The danmei author on Haitang and the Shanghai resident who experienced the lockdown in the spring of 2022 share the same ontological insecurity. Just as the Shanghai resident lost the sense of time and future, the danmei author, retroactively criminalised by cumulative click counts, loses the ability to predict the consequences of their past actions. The past (old chapters) returns to haunt the future.

Yet, crucial to this formulation of ‘ugly beauty’ is the recognition that this ecology also harbours the fierce, transgressive momentum of its participants while they persistently ‘indulge in beauty’: perniciously writing, reading, sharing, and communicating danmei, including that which is sexually explicit. These creators and fans—primarily Chinese women born in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—are not passive victims of this ugliness, but active navigators of it. Their persistence in creating and consuming content despite the encirclement of the state and capital embodies a specific resilience.

To understand this crisis is, therefore, to understand a specific modality of ‘political depression’ in youth in post-Covid China: a condition in which the withdrawal of hope is not passive, but a violent yet creative collision between the state’s fiscal desperation and the individual’s stubborn struggle for survival.

The Political Economy of Ugliness

The timing and geography of the Haitang crackdowns reveal that these actions were driven as much by economic imperatives as by ideological policing. Thus, it is critical to analyse the ‘oceangoing fishing’ mechanism at play. This colloquialism describes a pattern of law enforcement by which public security bureaus from economically distressed regions target individuals or entities in wealthier regions (or, in the digital age, online entities with traceable cash flows) to extract fines and make confiscations. These funds are then channelled into local non-tax revenue to alleviate fiscal distress.

The Haitang crackdown evolved in two distinct phases, each revealing a different facet of state predation. The first wave, centred on Jixi County, Anhui, in 2024, followed the logic of the harpoon: target the ‘whales’. Police focused on those authors who had gained substantial earnings via the platform. The case of the author Yunjian (云间, short for her pen-name, Yuanshang Baiyuanjian 远上白云间) is emblematic of this phase. Yunjian was a prolific writer on Haitang and had accumulated significant earnings over a decade of labour. Her sentencing to four years and six months in prison was accompanied by a fine of RMB1.84 million (roughly US$260,000)—a sum that exactly matched the amount identified as her ‘illegal earnings’. This one-to-one correspondence between punishment and profit, effectively requiring the full forfeiture of her income, underscores the extractive nature of the prosecution. For a county such as Jixi, where fiscal revenues are limited, a single case yielding more than RMB3 million in confiscations represents a significant financial injection. The prosecution of more than 50 authors in this wave likely generated tens of millions in revenue, turning the danmei archive into a treasury for the local state.

However, the ‘ugliness’ deepened in early 2025 with the Lanzhou crackdown. By this time, the ‘whales’ had gone underground. Consequently, the Lanzhou police cast a dragnet for the ‘minnows’—the ‘waist and tail’ authors. These were students, part-time writers, and amateurs whose annual earnings ranged from a few hundred to less than RMB20,000 .

The cruelty of the Lanzhou model lies in its diminishing returns and increased desperation, leading to an unsettling intimacy of control. This wave of operations frequently began not with a raid, but with a summons via telephone: a low-cost, coercive bureaucratic reach extending to Chongqing, Fujian, and Jiangsu, to extract funding from young women whose ‘crime’ was writing niche erotica for pocket money (Zhen and Dao 2025). The operation’s execution betrayed a distinct lack of state capacity. This juxtaposition of the reach of the digital summons versus the fiscal poverty of the physical extraction underscores a bleak form of political depression: a depressive mode of governance in which a state apparatus that is itself struggling is forced to feed on the most vulnerable, precarious labourers of the digital economy simply to sustain its own operational overheads.

To criminalise these digital labourers, the judicial system engaged in a profound ‘ugliness’ of interpretation: the weaponisation of obsolescence. The Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China (Article 363) and the Judicial Interpretations issued in 2004 and 2010 (Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate 2004, 2010) were deployed to define sentencing thresholds (Chen and Gu 2025). These outdated standards stipulate that ‘serious circumstances’ are met if the ‘illegal gains’ are more than RMB10,000 (US$1,070) or the number of ‘clicks’ exceeds 10,000. In the mobile internet era, in which a single viral post can garner millions of views, a threshold of 10,000 clicks is microscopically low. Yet, the Lanzhou police exploited this anachronism to construct felonies. In the absence of finding high earnings to justify prosecution, they utilised a cumulative click count method. If a novel has 100 chapters and is read by 3,000 people, a rational interpretation will count 3,000 readers. However, the police aggregated the clicks for each chapter (100 chapters with 3,000 readers equals 300,000 clicks). By this ‘ugly’ maths, an author who earned less than RMB5,000 could be charged with ‘especially serious circumstances’, facing a potential prison sentence of 10 years to life.

This juridical manoeuvring strips the danmei text of its literary context, reducing complex narratives of gender, sexuality, affect, and desire, both individually and collectively (see Ge 2025a), to mere datapoints of ‘obscenity’ ripe for harvest. It creates a reality in which, as netizens bitterly noted, ‘writing porn is punished more heavily than rape’ (Zi 2024). Xiang (2016) notes a shift in China from ‘wealth creation’ to ‘wealth concentration’. The ‘ugliness’ of the state here is not just moral prudishness; it is fiscal desperation. The state is eating its young because the traditional engines of growth (real estate, manufacturing) are stalling.

Platform Capitalism and the Betrayal of the Commons

If the state is the predator, the platform Haitang Literature City is the trap. The 2024–25 incidents shattered the illusion of digital platforms as a benevolent community commons, exposing the ‘ugly’ reality of surveillance capitalism operating in a grey zone. Haitang operates on a model of risk outsourcing. It typically takes a 50 per cent cut of author earnings while hosting servers in Taiwan to evade direct censorship. This created a false geography of safety: authors believed that because the servers were offshore, they were offshore. However, because most mainland users could not directly top-up accounts on the platform and instead relied on third-party top-up services, often brokered through the sellers on the e-commerce platform, the entire payment infrastructure ultimately funnelled back into Alipay, WeChat Pay, and mainland China banking systems. These financial circuits are tightly embedded within the governance apparatus of the Chinese State. As a result, despite the platform’s offshore servers, the monetisation process produced a highly traceable transaction chain, enabling authorities to reassert jurisdictional reach and identify authors with ease.

The definitive moment of platform betrayal occurred in June 2024, during the initial Anhui crackdown. As rumours of arrests began to circulate, panic spread through the author community. Many sought to delete their work and close their accounts to destroy evidence as a rational act of self-preservation. Haitang’s response took the form of what users later described as a June denial: editors reportedly issued statements claiming the site was merely undergoing maintenance or technical upgrades. They encouraged authors to continue updating chapters to maintain traffic. This decision was catastrophic. Authors who might have gone dormant instead generated new transaction records during the height of police surveillance. By the time the maintenance facade crumbled, the evidence had already been secured on police hard drives.

This dynamic reveals the authors as digital sharecroppers. They work the land (the platform), producing affective value through their labour, but they own neither the land nor the means of distribution. When the landlord (Haitang) is squeezed, the sharecroppers are sacrificed. Some authors described the agonising process of negotiating with the platform to delete their accounts, eventually having to forfeit substantial earnings as a ransom to the platform to avoid the greater ransom of the state (Gan 2025). This mirrors wider dynamics in China’s gig economy: platforms instrumentalise workers’ vulnerability while maintaining the structural ability to abandon them in moments of regulatory risk.

What the Haitang case ultimately reveals is the ‘ugliness’ of platform governance in China: not simply exploitation, but betrayal. The platform relied on a feminised labour force doing emotionally intensive work to generate profits while withholding meaningful protections. When faced with state pressure, it not only failed to defend its community but actively deepened their exposure. The collapse of Haitang’s imagined commons underscores a foundational truth of digitised cultural production: infrastructure that appears liberatory and borderless is, in fact, built on architectures that are profoundly terrestrial—financially, legally, and politically.

The Ugly Survival of Danmei Authors on Haitang

Who are the women behind these ‘obscene’ texts? The police narrative constructs them as profiteers corrupting social morality. The arrested authors, however, form a demographic defined by precarity (Ge 2025b). This is where the concept of ugly beauty becomes most poignant: the production of aesthetic beauty is a desperate response to the ‘ugly’ material conditions of life.

The confessions of authors arrested during these crackdowns dismantle the myth of the bourgeois danmei writer (Ge 2025a; Yang 2019; Feng 2013). Drawing on interviews with Haitang writers conducted by the journalist Zi Yulin in 2024, this analysis foregrounds an often-neglected theme: poverty among danmei authors on Haitang. The case of the author Xihongshi Dui Fanqie (西红柿怼番茄) is heartbreakingly illustrative. In a viral confession on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, she described growing up in a single-parent home where the bathroom was a makeshift shed with a corrugated-iron roof that rattled in the wind. The floor was a mess of loose bricks, requiring one to ‘dance’ while bathing to avoid the mud. Her earnings on Haitang were not for luxury; they were the down payment on a secure house with a solid roof—a dignity she had never known.

Similarly, the author Momo was arrested while suffering from a benign tumour and internal bleeding. Her narrative is one of familial neglect and medical precarity. When she faced the prospect of heavy fines, her father’s response was reportedly: ‘You might as well die inside [prison].’ Another author, Zhangzui Chirou (张嘴吃肉), suffered from bipolar disorder and had undergone a total gastrectomy, rendering her unable to perform heavy physical labour. With Zhangzui’s parents working as a cleaner and a security guard, digital labour on Haitang was one of the few economic avenues available to her.

For these authors, writing was a form of ‘ugly’ survival. It was an economic lifeline for bodies rejected by the mainstream labour market—the sick, the poor, the mentally ill. Yet, it was also therapeutic. In the ‘beautiful’ world of their novels, these authors constructed omnipotent characters, fluid gender dynamics, and intense emotional bonds—everything their ‘ugly’ reality lacked. This dialectic is central to my analysis: the danmei production du jour is a mechanism for surviving political and economic depression. The act of writing allows the author to reclaim agency over the body and desire. The author Fanqie writing about powerful lovers while shivering in a draughty shed is the quintessence of ugly beauty. Ugly beauty is the insistence on living in a messy body when the state demands sterilised existence in which desires are kept on the rails of the socialist core values.

By stripping these authors of this income and branding them as criminals, the crackdown returns them to the raw, unmediated ugliness of their circumstances. The tragedy is compounded by the ‘criminal record’, which bars these young women from future employment in the civil service or education, effectively trapping them in the poverty out of which they sought to write their way. This is the ultimate manifestation of a very ugly political depression: the foreclosure of the imagination as a means of social mobility.

The Fracture of the Affective Commons

Finally, it is critical to address the ‘ugliness’ that has permeated the danmei community itself. The political depression experienced in everyday life in China now is not merely a vertical relationship between the Party-State and its subjects; it also manifests horizontally as the disintegration of solidarity and, in this case, the erosion of the affective commons of danmei participants.

The danmei fandom was once celebrated as a ‘utopian’ community of shared interests (Chao 2016; Xiao 2016). In the immediate aftermath of the Anhui arrests, the community displayed a ‘beautiful’ resilience. Fans organised to support the authors, knowing that the heavy fines were impossible to pay without collective help. To evade platform censorship that flags terms such as ‘bail’ and ‘prison’, fans created Douban groups with coded names such as ‘Health Supplement Enthusiasts’ (保健品爱好者). Here, they coordinated donations, masquerading legal aid as the purchase of health products. This was a moment of profound solidarity, recognising that the authors were being punished for providing the intense affective labour that sustained the readers’ needs for qing (情, that is, affect and desire, which can be both individual and collective) (Ge 2025a).

However, the relentless pressure of the Lanzhou crackdown fractured this solidarity. The introduction of reader-witnesses injected a lethal dose of paranoia into the fandom. The Lanzhou police began summoning readers from all walks of life to police stations, seizing their phones and scrutinising their browser histories. They were then coerced into signing affidavits defining the content as pornographic or obscene, which effectively turned the consumer into the prosecutor.

This structural pressure led to ugly spectacles of betrayal. The community devolved under infighting, with accusations of ‘eating blood buns’ (吃人血馒头)—profiting from the misfortune of others. The Haitang author Yixie (一蟹), facing backlash over fundraising transparency, allegedly reported another author to the police to deflect attention. Sceptical danmei fans even organised ‘rights defence groups’ to harass fundraising authors such as Fanqie, accusing them of fraud and demanding proof of their poverty and arrest.

This internal fragmentation is a symptom of advanced political depression. When agency against the structural oppressor (the state/platform) is impossible, affect turns inward. The rage and betrayal felt by the community are directed laterally, destroying the very networks of care that used to function as a core feature of danmei culture. The utopia has been terraformed into a panopticon of mutual surveillance, where every reader is a potential witness and every author a potential snitch. The ugliness permeates the community when fans themselves internalise the gaze of the oppressor. In this state of political depression, horizontal violence—that is, attacking peers—becomes the only available outlet for agency when vertical resistance (against the Party-State) appears to be highly risky and unfulfillable.

Weeds in the Cracks

The Haitang Incidents of 2024 and 2025 demonstrate a catastrophic convergence of forces: a desperate state apparatus seeking revenue through ‘oceangoing fishing’ law enforcement, a predatory platform capitalising on legal risk, and a legal system that weaponises obsolete metrics against the marginalised.

The beauty of danmei—its diverse explorations of desire, its forging of a community comprising heterogeneous subject positions, its capacity to provide an economic lifeline for the investment of affective labour by creators—has been met with the ugly realities of the carceral state. The result is a landscape defined by political depression, where hard work, imagination, and community-building no longer guarantee safety or success.

Yet, the concept of ugly beauty suggests that this is not the end. The Haitang flower market may have been trampled, its buds crushed into the mud, but what grows in it is fundamentally a type of weed, not a hothouse orchid. Since its emergence on online subforums and circulation via pirated copies of Japanese BL works transmitted from Taiwan and Hong Kong, danmei culture in China has been thriving in the ugly spaces, the neglected corners, the encrypted drives, the unspoken understandings between friends.

For the authors who deleted their works, the readers who populate the ‘Health Supplement’ online groups, and the countless anonymous users who continue to seek out these stories despite the risk, they demonstrate a resilience that is ‘beautiful’ precisely because it is stained by the ‘ugly’ struggle for survival. The golden age of semi-open proliferation on Haitang of erotic danmei works is over, replaced with a darker, more subterranean existence. But as long as the material conditions that produce the need for danmei’s qing—the gendered constraints, the emotional isolation, and the everyday political depression in China—persist, so, too, will the ugly and resilient beauty of danmei. By persisting in writing and reading ‘ugly’ content, these subjects refuse to forget or dispose of their desire and their precariousness, even if the state demands compliance with socialist core values to interpenetrate the harmonious heteronormative society. They are preserving and redeveloping the ruins, rather than letting the state pave over them.

Featured Image: Begonia. Source: Peter Stentzel, Flickr.com (CC).

References

Chao, Shih-Chen. 2016. ‘Grotesque Eroticism in the Danmei Genre: The Case of Lucifer’s Club in Chinese Cyberspace.’ Porn Studies 3(1): 65–76.

Chen, Yifan 陈怡帆, and Liangnan Gu 顾靓楠. 2025. ‘耽美的罪与罚: 情色文学作者获刑背后的平衡难题 [The Crimes and Punishments of Danmei: The Delicate Balancing Act Behind the Sentencing of Erotic Fiction Authors].’ 南方周末 [Southern Weekly], 20 June. news.qq.com/rain/a/20250620A09FEF00.

Feng, Jin. 2013. Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Gan, Ye 甘叶. 2025. ‘耽美的代价: 一场围捕海棠作者的执法风暴 [The Cost of Danmei: A Law Enforcement Storm Targeting Haitang Authors].’ Initium Media, 13 June. theinitium.com/20250613-mainland-chinese-police-target-haitang-gay-erotica-zh-hans.

Ge, Liang. 2025a. ‘Ambivalent Affective Labor: The Datafication of Qing and Danmei Writers in the Cultural Industry.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 28(3): 773–92.

Ge, Liang. 2025b. ‘The Haitang Incident 2024 and the Ugliness of Danmei Culture/Industry.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, early view.

Hu, Tingting, Liang Ge, and Cathy Yue Wang. 2024. ‘A State against Boys’ Love? Reviewing the Trajectory of Censorship over Danmei.’ Continuum 38(2): 229–38.

Ling, Minhua. 2025. ‘Shanghai Lockdown and Alienation under China’s State Capitalism.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 26(5): 827–43.

Ma, Yi, and Eunice Yang. 2025. ‘“Every Word Has Come Back to Haunt Me”: China Cracks Down on Women Who Write Gay Erotica.’ BBC News, 25 June. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c056nle2drno.

Schneider, Florian. 2018. China’s Digital Nationalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate. 2004. ‘关于办理利用互联网、移动通讯终端、声讯台制作、复制、出版、贩卖、传播淫秽电子信息刑事案件具体应用法律若干问题的解释 [Judicial Interpretation of the Application of Criminal Law to Cases Involving Online Obscene Electronic Information].’ News release, 30 September. Beijing: Cyberspace Administration of China. www.cac.gov.cn/2004-09/30/c_126472347.htm.

Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate. 2010. ‘关于传播淫秽电子信息犯罪行为司法解释 [Judicial Interpretation of Criminal Acts Involving the Dissemination of Obscene Electronic Information].’ News release, 4 February. Beijing: Supreme People’s Procuratorate of the People’s Republic of China. www.spp.gov.cn/zdgz/201002/t20100204_25001.shtml.

Xiang, Biao. 2016. ‘“You’ve Got to Rely on Yourself … and the State!”: A Structural Chasm in the Chinese Political Moral Order.’ In Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China, edited by Carlos Rojas and Ralph A. Litzinger, 131–49. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Xiao, Yingxuan 肖映萱. 2016. ‘女性向网络文学的性别实验 [Gender Experimentations in Female Internet Literature: Case Studies on Danmei Fiction].’ 中国现代文学研究丛刊 [Modern Chinese Literature Studies], no. 8: 39–46.

Xu, Yanrui, and Ling Yang. 2022. ‘Between BL and Slash: Danmei Fiction, Transcultural Mediation, and Changing Gender Norms in Contemporary China.’ In Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia, edited by James Welker, 19–30. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press.

Yang, Ling 杨玲. 2019. 新世纪文学研究的重构: 以郭敬明和耽美为起点的探索 [Reconfiguring Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century: An Exploration Starting with Guo Jingming and Danmei]. Xiamen, China: Xiamen Daxue Chubanshe.

Zhang, Charlie Yi. 2022. Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Zhen, Wuyu 甄无羽, and Meidan Dao 岛眉淡. 2025. ‘跨省抓捕海棠作者: 一次没有真正受害者的犯罪 [Trans-Provincial Arrests of Haitang Authors: A Crime Without a Real Victim].’ 水瓶纪元 [Aquarius Era], 1 July. chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/719247.html.

Zi, Yulin 紫雨林. 2024. ‘海棠作者被捕, 耽美创作频繁涉刑出路何在 [The Arrest of a Haitang Author: What Future Awaits BL Creators Amid Increasing Criminalisation]?’ 水瓶纪元 [Aquarius Era], 19 December. aquariuseras.substack.com/p/haitang-danmei-1.