How the blacklisting of one popular online forum left droves of Chinese fans of queer fan fiction without a ”home”
In February 2020, as China’s battle against the viral outbreak in Wuhan was dominating global headlines, another fierce battle was being fought on the Chinese internet, ultimately leading to the demise of what many Chinese netizens had been calling their “home”—a popular website for sexually explicit online literature.
The fight began when Chinese fans of The Untamed TV series actor Xiao Zhan got wind of a homoerotic online novel published in Chinese on the US-based fan fiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3), in which Xiao was depicted as a cross-dressing prostitute. The star’s fans took offense and began reporting AO3 to China’s Cyberspace Administration Office for pornographic content. The site became inaccessible in China on February 27.
Roman Kierst is a staff writer and editor at The World of Chinese based in Beijing but much more at home in Chengdu, where his own China story first began as a high school exchange student in 2006. Likes to pick up a film camera occasionally to take pictures of (mostly) old places.
