(boy’s love writers, so i guess more yaoi then slash) admit i didn’t read the whole article because it seems ridiculous and western reporting on China is like 90% fabrications. someone educate me on whatever this is. is it conservative local governments doing local government shit?
my partner loves this shit especially from China and i don’t want to inform her about some made up BS designed to radicalize the slash and yaoi community against the CPC
Radio Free Asia reported that
lmao
If this is even actually happening, I suspect it has more to do with China’s pornography laws (which amount to a blanket ban on creating any such work) than homophobia.
Article does indeed say
China last updated its laws on “digitally obscene” content in 2010.
Those regulations said the “production, reproduction, publication, trafficking, dissemination” of any obscene works that generate more than 5,000 clicks online, or that make profits of more than 5,000 yuan ($1,072), should be treated as a crime.It’s not immediately clear from the article if the works in question are 18+ or are just treated as obscene for being gay.
Not to affirm what the article says – I’m not in the right mental space to investigate and I don’t want to speak without investigation – but the article does not try to pretend that the blanket ban doesn’t exist. Would it be the first time in history when extra scrutiny is applied to anything that has to do with queer people?
It is possible. Given that RFA is reporting on it, it is not probable.
Now that’s just cope. Understanding that Radio Free InsertYourRegion doesn’t care about queer people and abuses queer stories to destabilise/dehumanise whoever they are ordered to is one thing, saying that queerphobia doesn’t exist because they reported on it is another. Radio Free Europe reported on gay purges in Chechnya, did they not happpen?
Having only the information that the US government said it is happening we can safely assume it didn’t. They probably accidentally report true things sometimes but that would be an outlier if so.
Oh, well, I guess if you’ve never talked to a single queer person from Russia or Chechnya you can safely assume anything you would like to be true. And this attitude is exactly why I made my initial comment too.
I’ll doubble down. I have no doubt a thing like that has happened. However I would bet money that the RFA reporting on that incident is meaningfully different enough as to make any attempt at analyzing meaning from it misleading and useless.
I’m struggling to understand your second sentence, sorry. Is it that it might have happened but we shouldn’t use RFA as a source for trying to analyse/understand it?
I’m not in the right mental space to investigate and I don’t want to speak without investigation
I am addressing the general idea that “if Radio Free Something reported on this, it is not true”. I can speak on this because I have experience with this and the example I give towards the end of my comment comes from this experience.
P.S. To be absolutely clear, I also have experience with queerphobia in China because my transition began while I lived there but this I specifically avoided talking about because I didn’t want to give more credence to the article in the OP.
it was only a few months ago that people downloaded redbook, a chinese social media app filled with gay people kissing each other in the frontpage
i don’t disbelieve that there’s a blanket ban on lgbtq issues in China, in the same sense that anti porn laws are applied selectively in Japan and that a similar social conservative streak dominates in India. but given that the main source for this issue is RFA then i’m gonna err on the side of caution. which is to not assume that there’s a repeat of the chechnya concentration camps situation
I lived in China and went to gay clubs lol so concentration camps is definitely not what I had in mind. But then again, there was a time when you could see gay people kissing each other on the front page in Russian social media apps and that time was not so long ago.
That would be beyond the scope of my knowledge, I’m afraid.
china’s strict anti-porn laws have come up before, usually in the context of “distribution” being defined before the internet was widespread. idk anything about the alleged incident but if RFA is the only source then it’s so distorted from what actually happened that we can have no idea.
This section caught my attention:
spoiler
On Chinese social media, people have accused police of “offshore fishing” — a phrase that refers to local police who have allegedly summoned suspects from other parts of the country for questioning for financial gain.
The phrase “offshore fishing” was censored last week on social media platforms in China, including Weibo and WeChat. [how do they confirm if specific words or phrases are actually banned? They don’t specify in this article]
Haitang, the website popular with fans of boys love fiction, has also been suspended until July 8.
A spokesperson for Haitang said they were working on improving their services.
I will also note that they mention China’s obscenity laws, but don’t mention much about the content of the summoned authors’ works, other than the homosexual nature of the content. I’m not a fan of obscenity laws as a concept, but the whole article frames the gay content as the focal point (calling it a “widespread crackdown on the ‘boys love’ genre in China,” for example) when that may not even be what’s causing the issue.
Sections like “the scale of action has been widespread, with estimates that at least 100 writers have been affected,” also make me wonder, is this an exceptionally small genre? Because if it’s really a genre-based crackdown, I’d think China would have considerably more than a few hundred people, even for the tiniest genre.
Again, I’m no supporter of obscenity laws, and I prize creative freedom in a society, but this seems like a re-framing of obscenity charges as an anti-gay crackdown.
ahhh ok more nuanced but still shit. personally I can’t wait for China to shake off the rusty chains of social conservatism and adopt Cuba’s family code or their own version of it.
plus it will fuck with the ACP nazbol types and technofeudalists that think China is some kind of model anti-woke hyper productive state
western outlet writing about china
don’t make me tap the sign
