For many Chinese girls, stumbling for the first time into the shimmering world of “danmei” (耽美, literally “indulging in beauty”) feels like finding a secret door. What began as quietly circulating fan-fiction of male-male love stories – mostly written by young women – has blossomed into a full-blown cultural phenomenon, in China and across the region — only to now face a sudden chill from state authorities. Once offering a space for female readers to imagine relationships free from patriarchal scripts, danmei now finds itself — and its authors — under scrutiny.
Danmei traces its roots to the Japanese Boys’ Love (BL) tradition of the 1970s, which, through Taiwanese translations and Chinese online portals, morphed into something uniquely Chinese: web novels by women, for women, featuring stylised relationships between men. While its themes range from tender soulmate romances to full-blown erotic fantasy, what many scholars note is how danmei gives female readers a way to step out of heteronormative expectations — family pressure, early marriage, dominant-male/female roles — and explore love as equality or even reversal. As one reader put it: “We free ourselves by projecting the fantasy onto a character who is not female, and therefore not trapped by the clichés of male-female relationships.”
In China, danmei’s growth has been astonishing. The genre migrated from niche forums to mainstream publishers to digital platforms, with international readership in Southeast Asia and beyond. According to a piece by ThinkChina, it is now part of China’s soft-power export — via fandoms, web-novels, fan-art, adaptations. For a time, the market seemed boundless: female authors, many in their 20s and 30s, turned their stories into incomes, reaching readers hungry for alternative romance.
Yet the State’s reaction has been increasingly severe. Writers of danmei, especially those crossing into erotic territory, have been detained, fined, or even jailed. In 2025, at least thirty such authors were arrested and charged under obscenity laws for publishing on platforms such as the Taiwan-based Haitang Literature City. Most are women in their 20s and early 30s who earned only modest royalties — yet they’ve seen court-records, forced asset transfers and prison sentences. Their stories and platforms are being erased in the name of “socialist core values” and “normal sexual relationships,” leaving fans in a void. “For Chinese female readers, we can no longer find a safe, uncensored space to place our desires,” one educator lamented.
Why has something that seemed harmless become so contested? Partly it’s about gender. Danmei sidesteps the traditional male-female pairing and thus threatens the normative order (按传统性别秩序). As one French press article puts it, the regime seems less keen on female-led erotic projects while male-dominated works flourish without similar penalties. Also, the State is wary of cultural forms that export influence beyond its control — danmei fandoms are global, digital and hard to domesticate. From the soft-power vantage, danmei’s global footprint is a paradox: China may market culture overseas, but domestically it clamps down. Then there’s the demographic and ideological angle: as the regime emphasises marriage, reproduction and traditional family models, narratives of non-heteronormative love become, in its view, destabilising.
For readers, especially women in China, danmei once offered not only entertainment but emotional refuge — a world where love was written on one’s terms. If we see the fandom vocabulary, you’ll encounter terms like “腐女” (fŭ nǚ, “rotten girl” – a playful self-label among female danmei fans) and “CP” (“couple pairing”), borrowed from Japanese fandom culture and re-inflected in Chinese contexts. Yet now, as platforms vanish and authors go silent, the community reels: how do you express desire when your stage is taken?
Internationally, the crackdown is already rippling into fandom habits. Chinese readers turn to Thai BL dramas or overseas web-novels to fill the gap. For global readers and watchers, especially those from Southeast Asia — this means danmei remains relevant: its disappearance inside China may fuel its diaspora elsewhere. The pressure actually crystallises the genre’s meaning. In resisting, the community asserts: stories of fluid affection and equality mattered. That matters.
For those interested in gender, culture, rights in Asia, danmei is a fascinating lens. It’s not just about romance between men: it’s about women writing fantasy, women reading fantasy, and a patriarchal system reacting. It’s about state control, about desire, about what gets silenced in the name of “morality.” Perhaps most poignantly: the crackdown tells us that what seems like innocuous fan-fiction is never just fluff. In the eyes of power, it’s dangerous.
Ah, my darling rotten girls — fŭ nǚ with fierce hearts and wild imaginations — gather around Auntie for a moment. Because today, we salute you. Yes, you: the young women of China who dared to write LOVE in a country that fears love unless it’s boxed, sterilised, state-approved, and stamped with a marriage-registration seal. You wrote stories where two beautiful boys fall in love, where tenderness blooms without permission, where desire is poetry and care is reciprocal — and for that, the patriarchy trembled.
Let Auntie tell you a secret: whenever a regime panics about fiction, it’s because fiction is doing something revolutionary. These young danmei authors weren’t peddling weapons; they were crafting worlds — lush, erotic, gentle, subversive worlds where nobody plays by the rigid scripts of “proper woman,” “proper man,” “proper family.” And oh, how threatening that must feel to those clinging to power like mould on old rice.
These girls wrote LOVE, in capital letters. Not propaganda romance, not dutiful reproduction romance, but messy, gorgeous, equal love — the kind that makes readers blush at midnight and whisper, “Maybe life could be like this.” And the censors? They saw that spark of possibility and panicked. Because when women imagine alternatives, they start demanding them. And that, sisters, is how change begins.
I salute the courage of these writers — many barely out of university, some still hiding manuscripts in secret folders — who dared to take up the oldest weapon of all: art. Never underestimate it. Stories sneak past walls, past firewalls, past taboos. Stories spread. Stories liberate. Patriarchy has armies; women have imagination. Guess who always outlasts the other?
And let’s be honest: this isn’t just China’s problem. Across Asia — from military regimes to one-party states to ultra-conservative democracies — authorities get itchy whenever women express desire, agency, or joy outside prescribed lines. Autocrats hate freedom, especially the kind written in soft strokes and stolen kisses. But this is precisely why danmei matters: it is freedom disguised as fiction.
So to my beloved danmei authors, the brave weavers of forbidden tenderness: Auntie is a fan, an avid reader, and bows deeply. Keep writing, even if you must write in exile, online, anonymously, or in the margins of your notebooks. Love always finds a way. And every tender, defiant page you create is one more crack in the armour of patriarchy.
Remember: regimes crumble. Stories endure. And girls who dare to imagine? They change the world.