This article provides a brief overview of the history of online literature in the PRC. The focus is on the development of online literature into a successful commercial industry, serving a large and highly interactive community. The discussion looks at how this community and its practices pose challenges to conventional practices of preservation and canonization of literary texts, as well as how PRC cultural authorities are attempting to steer this community toward adherence of ideological guidelines for literary production.
Looking back at the history of online literature (wangluo wenxue 网络文学) in the PRC, I continue to be surprised by the way in which the term itself took on a completely different meaning over time. When I first took an interest in the phenomenon, around the year 2000, the term was a catch-all for recognizably literary writing produced in an online context, often by groups and individuals that had previously been active in the non-official (fei guanfang 非官方) world of privately circulated printed journals in the 1990s. Around the same time, bloggers and online diarists, like Muzimei 木子美 and Lu Youqing 陆幼青 as well as, slightly later, Han Han 韩寒 achieved prominence. Websites such as “Rongshu xia” 榕树下 (Under the Banyan Tree) also facilitated the rise of authors such as Anni Baobei 安妮宝贝, whose dedicated fandom enabled her to make the transition from online popularity to print success. But a decade or so later, the usage of the term wangluo wenxue had changed completely. Virtually everybody I spoke to in the 2010s and beyond considered the term to refer to online genre fiction. By now, this usage has been well established also in institutional terms. Major research groups such as those at Peking University (Prof Shao Yanjun 邵燕君) and at Central South University (Prof Ouyang Youquan 欧阳友权) deal almost exclusively with genre fiction; Internet usage statistics treating “literature” as a separate category track only genre fiction sites; industry reports discuss only the performance of genre fiction websites; and state policies toward online literature target only genre fiction. Wangluo wenxue has become an industry.
Commercialization
Although it is certainly not wrong to note that online literature in China has become more commercial and professional over time, it is worth bearing in mind that concerns about the impact of “the market” were around almost from the beginning. In a passage I tend to quote frequently, the author and critic Chen Cun 陈村, who wholeheartedly embraced online literature from its inception, wrote already in the year 2000 that
Literature on the Web has merged with tradition before having accumulated its own classics and before having shaped its own aesthetics. Even on the Web the ability of writers is measured by whether or not they have published a book. In this way, it [i.e. web literature] has folded the wings of imagination and metamorphosed itself into an appendage of traditional writing and publishing. The laws of commerce are working their magic. I understand that this change is inevitable. But, hasn’t it come a bit too soon?
網絡上的文學在還沒有充分積累自己的經典，沒有形成自己的審美之前就和傳統合流了。甚至網上也以是不是出書作為網絡寫手實力的標識。這樣，它收斂起想象的翅膀，把自己蛻變成傳統寫作和出版的附庸。商業的規律在施展它的魔力。我理解這樣的變化是必然的，但，是不是來得太快一點了？
(Chen Cun, 2000)
Here lies the crux of the matter: whereas early adopters of online literature in other parts of the world, including in Sinophone communities in Taiwan, were producing highly experimental “electronic literature” that reveled in the functionalities of hypertext and interactive literary experiences, the vast majority of online literature in the PRC never broke away from the linear mode of presentation. In Internet Literature in China (Hockx, 2015), I argue that, despite this fact, much early online writing from the PRC was still innovative because it was produced on forums that enabled collective authorship, thus destabilizing traditional notions of what a literary “text” should look like. But the fact remains that, relatively speaking, PRC online literature from its inception harbored commercial potential by sticking to a format that did not challenge its readers’ concept of literature and that could be reproduced in print. What Chen Cun and others could not have foreseen was that the rise of sites like “Qidian” 起点 (Starting Point) would result in establishing a format for online literary production that did actually shape a very specific online aesthetics that was also very commercial, yet not (or at least not entirely) reliant on traditional modes of printed production. Community and industry go hand-in-hand on those sites, which thrive exactly because they engage readers as part of an online world in which they can participate and find solace and entertainment.
Preservation
The academic field of the study of Chinese online literature, which is a rich and flourishing field in the PRC, has produced histories and textbooks that do preserve the memory of the pre-industrial era of wangluo wenxue, but the irony is that most of the works considered “classics” of early online literature can in fact no longer be found on the web (Hockx, forthcoming). The same histories and textbooks that describe those sites often do not even bother to list their URLs, and even if they do, those URLs have long disappeared and nobody seems to have set up an archive. Of course, the Wayback Machine is there to help us out, but the Wayback Machine is blocked in China so it does not help the authors of those textbooks and histories and their students. From the perspective of literary studies, this is an unusual situation. Typically, canonical works of literature are those works that are considered worth preserving in the format in which they were first made public. But this has not happened for the early classics of Chinese Internet literature. If they are still available, it is usually because they have appeared in print, and of course, they would have always been extensively edited for print publication. At the very least, all the readers’ comments would have been removed. Ironically, the online works that are being preserved quite systematically are in fact the genre novels on Qidian and other sites. Those sites have built up huge online archives representing years of creative activity by their users. But these are archives that the Wayback Machine cannot crawl, so they are only available to registered users of the site. This issue of preservation and the general ephemerality of born-digital material is not unique to the field of online literature. Many scholars of the Internet in China whose work is represented in this special issue presumably have their private archives of websites they have studied. Perhaps it is time to find ways to link those archives and make them accessible.
Regulation
Much has been written about Internet censorship in China. To a large extent, the censorship uses similar mechanisms and is based on similar principles across the different types of, and applications for, online expression. Yet literature often occupies a special position in censorship practice and the study of censorship is long-established in the field of literary studies. Literary texts are often considered “fragile” in the sense that every single word counts and any kind of change or deletion can come across as a “violation” of a work of art. Moreover, literary works are considered in most legal systems (including the PRC legal system) as being capable of possessing “redeeming artistic value” that allows for content and language that would be censored in other types of writing. As censorship scholar Nicole Moore once put it (Moore, 2015, p. 1), the very definition of literariness is that which is legally exempt from censorship. Finally, literary texts tend to contain a measure of ambiguity that makes it possible to say things that are difficult to say in different modes or contexts.
There are certainly plenty of examples of cases in which literary writers in the PRC were able to “get away” with writing things that would otherwise be censored, but what interests me here is the fact that Chinese cultural policy of the past decade or so has upheld the notion that literature, and writers of literature, should be morally superior. All of Xi Jinping’s 习近平 speeches about literature make this argument very strongly and the statements that Xi has made in his speeches about how literature is exceptional among cultural forms can be found in all manner of policy directives aimed at making Internet literature “healthier.” As early as 2014 (and probably even earlier), Chinese online writers were encouraged by policy makers to promote “Truth, Goodness, and Beauty” (zhen shan mei 真善美)—a conservative triad with roots in pre-modernist European thinking about literature and its value, which has long gone out of fashion in the West but which is held up regularly by Chinese policy makers as the gold standard for literature. This old-fashioned thinking about literature goes hand-in-hand with policy recommendations that suggest literary writers should promote the “socialist core values” (shehuizhuyi hexin jiazhiguan 社会主义核心价值观). Literature, in such a framework, becomes a morally elevated and aesthetically beautiful tool for political propaganda (Hockx, 2023).
Assimilation
As far as I know, Chinese cultural policy makers have made few efforts to impose this understanding of literature on “serious” writers, even though they were the implied audience of Xi Jinping’s speeches. Yet they hold it up again and again as ideal standards to emulate for online writers—who are least likely to give up their genre fiction formulae to promote socialist core values. The implementation of these policies is left largely to the Writers Association (zuojia xiehui 作家协会), which over the years has made many attempts to co-opt and assimilate the online writers community. Successful online writers are encouraged to join the Association and, in many provinces, there are separate sub-branches for the Association referred to as “Online Writers Associations” (wangluo zuojia xiehui 网络作家协会). The Writers Association also organizes regular prize competitions for online writers and has also regularly published rankings of what its juries considered to be the best online works of a certain year. I have studied one such ranking (of 2017) a bit more closely and found that although the criteria for eligibility clearly stated that works should uphold the socialist core values and Xi Jinping Thought, the actual jury reports about individual works that made it to the ranking did not refer to those criteria at all, but instead used only aesthetic criteria (Hockx, 2023, p. 526). The message seems to be that it is more important for online writers to engage with the Writers Association and participate in their activities than to follow its precise instructions for literary form and content.
It is difficult to predict where Chinese online literature is headed in the future. It is certainly a well-established industry that produces economic value and creates jobs, and as such it has the support of the government as well as a certain measure of independence. At the same time, there are many communities, especially fan communities, that are very active online and whose moral and aesthetic norms do not align with, or are at odds with, those of the policy makers. In some cases, such as in the case of the danmei 耽美 (Boys’ Love) fandom, such communities extend across geographical and linguistic boundaries, with English translations of BL fiction increasingly popular among English-language readers. Some of these communities certainly have the potential to create hyper-popular global trends similar to what we have seen with Japanese anime and manga or Korean pop music. The question is whether or not Chinese policy makers, regulators, and ideologues are going to let this happen or if they will insist on promoting “healthy” literature to a global readership that does not care.
