Chinese online literature

Chinese online literature, also known as Chinese internet literature or Chinese web literature, refers to works of literature written in the Chinese language that are published and read directly on the internet. Originating in the 1980s, it has seen increasing development in the 21st century with the increase of mobile reading throughout the world, especially as the internet has become more accessible. Most Chinese internet literature has made use of the popularity of scrolling platforms and literature tends to be published in a serialized format, with this literature being known as webnovels or light novels.

Origins

In the late 1980s, Chinese-language contributions to the internet were primarily made by overseas Chinese scholars publishing research papers, overseas students, or general Chinese diaspora sending emails or newsletters, or making posts onto small forums onto the internet. After 1991, when the World Wide Web was established and publicly accessible, some online Chinese language magazines were developed overseas, such as China News Digest and Chinese Magazine (Hua Xia Wen Zhai 华夏文摘) which provided news on China-related topics and was run by Chinese and Chinese-Americans in the United States. During the early 1990s, the Chinese government began to develop the Internet further and open it up to its people, but it wasn't until the late 1990s that the Chinese internet userbase became established, leading to key developments in Chinese online literature.

In 1997, the Chinese-based literary website Under The Banyan Tree (Rongshuxia 榕树下) was founded. The site was focused on online literature and was popularized by the online diary of Lu Youqing, a cancer patient who published entries until his death. One of the most influential online Chinese-language works in the late 1990s was The First Intimate Contact by Cai Zhiheng (pen name Pi Zi Cai 痞子蔡) which was published to the internet via the Bulletin Board System (BBS) in Taiwan in 1998. By the 2000s, Chinese online literature was well established, and book publishers began to look to the internet to find new works and authors to publish.

Platforms and commercialization

While initially established as a platform for pirated Taiwanese novels, in 2003 Jinjiang Literature City began to host original works and has grown into one of the largest online literature platforms in China. Qidian literature network (起点, Starting Point) was launched in 2006, it quickly overtook Under The Banyan Tree in terms of a popular online literature site, as it focused on marketing strategies and reader engagement for its webnovels. Qidian was among the first to launch a freemium model, and was met with a lot of support and quickly grew popular.

In 2004, Shengda acquired several online literature platforms, including Under The Banyan Tree, Jinjiang Literature City, and Qidian to form a new branch of its company called Shengda Literature. By the 2010s Shengda Literature (aka Shanda Literature) became highly profitable.

In the early 2010s a company quite similar to Shengda named Tencent began their own online literature branch named Chuangshi Literature, which would eventually develop into Tencent Literature. In 2015 Shengda acquired Tencent Literature and they merged to for Yuewen Literature, also known as China Literature Limited. A website that was developed with the intention of fostering more experimental and artistic writing was Black and Blue (Heilan), which mostly functions as a series of forum posts.

Some platforms have been devoted to poetry forums, such as Chinapoet and Poemlife, with users exchanging brief critiques and comments on each other's posts. Within popular poetry forums, there are also translation forums, where users dedicate themselves to the translation of poetry between Chinese and English.

Censorship restrictions make traditional publishing inconvenient as it can take a long time for works to be processed and approved for publication, and for this reason online publication has a great appeal. After Mao's rule, the communist party had less control over writers, so rather than the driving force for writing be propaganda, the driving force became the market's demands and the publishers looking to profit off of them. For this reason, the works produced on these literature platforms are disproportionately written to appeal to readers of popular genres, such as fantasy. There are two main ways writers can get paid by literature platforms:

(1) To sign a contract with the platform that requires them to reach a daily quota of words, usually equivalent to at least one chapter of their series, and so receive a salary for their daily work.

(2) To produce an entire work which is ready to be published, and sign a contract with the platform which says they will split the money that the work makes on the platform.

For this reason, online writing can be quite lucrative for some, and for many it serves as a true career. An example of a writer of online fiction who has received a lot compensation through his salary as well as royalties from adaptations of his works is Tang Jia San Shao, who has been known to earn millions of dollars each year. Even so, in the world of Chinese online literature, print authors or authors with more recognition are referred to as zuojia, whereas internet writers tend to refer to themselves as xieshou, however, as it relates to the more amateur or informal type of writing that they perceive themselves to write.

Reader participation

For the majority of its development, Chinese online literature has been crucially tied to its user-generated economy which has allowed even amateur writers to share their works for free and have readers consume their content for free. With so much content being created under this model, many companies have sought to profit off of it and began the commercialization of online literature. Many platforms have turned to freemium models, allowing readers to access base content for free and upgrade to a subscription for more access or utilize pay-per-view models.

This has led readers of such content to feel quite entitled to the kind of content being produced, as they have financially invested in certain platforms and authors. Fandoms of webnovels try to influence writers and the direction of their stories with their feedback. Writers receive many kinds of feedback on the content they publish, including: view count, comments, rating of chapters, monetary gifts from readers, and recommendation tickets. Recommendation tickets are tokens that readers are allocated to reward to chapters they enjoyed and recommend the chapter to other readers on the platform. This can benefit writers as it can increase their visibility on the platform, and is often done in support of a particular author so that their work can be high ranking on the website. Not all platforms share this recommendation ticket feature, it is mostly available on Qidian and its international version, Webnovel, but most platforms have some sort of system to increase the visibility of certain works on the platform.

Since it is common for writers to abandon works after the first few chapters, readers attempt to keep a writer from quitting by showing a lot of support. This can be beneficial to writers but can also be a burden as readers that show a lot of support tend to feel entitled to controlling how often the writer publishes new chapters or even feel like they ought to control the ending of the story. This leads to many writers apologizing to their fanbase for missing an update or even producing multiple endings to satisfy both themselves as well as their audience. Since fanbases are very vocal about their opinions, many fanfic writers, they often hire beta writers in order to ensure the fanbase would like their content.

Translation and global impact

Wuxiaworld and Webnovel are popular online literature platforms among the global readership of genres such as Xianxia(玄幻 Fantasy) and Xuanhuan(仙侠 Chinese mythology fantasy).

Wuxiaworld primarily uses translators to translate content, but after Kakao entertainment purchased Wuxiworld in 2021, readers found that the platform became more expensive. Webnovel primarily utilizes machine translation, and many readers complain that it isn't very good, but there is a rise is original works written in English and other languages being published to the platform, which may contribute to its global appeal. Since the internet has evolved into its own ecosystem, housing many online communities, participation in user generated translation has contributed to a lot of the translation done across many platforms. Some online translation is done in a collaborative manner, with a like minded group of translators forming teams and collecting data and revising together to produce a translation.

Many times, online translation is done in an unofficial collaboration between volunteer translators and reader critics exchanging insights within forums. An example of this is the reader-translator interactions on the forum Shuhua by the translator Xiao Mao, who was conducting an online translation of Charlotte's Web into Chinese, which he went on to publish online in 2000. Readers interacted with sections he had translated and compared versions of translations as part of the process for the final translation to come about. An example of a webnovel platform dedicated to translation is Gravity Tales.

Besides human translation, by fans or experts, some will turn to neural machine translation (NMT) systems and language model AI tools like ChatGPT. Studies done on the translation of Chinese poetry have observed that NMT translations, by Google Translate for example, perform very poorly compared to expert translators or ChatGPT translations. ChatGPT performs far better than Google Translate at translating within the textual and historical context of the poetry due to the difference in which data they were trained in. ChatGPT shows significant creativity and accuracy in the way it translates as compared to Google translate, but human translation by experts still exhibit more artistry. There has been significant debate about the ethics of AI assisted translation, with people considering whether or not the translator should receive the credit for a translation produced with AI assistance, or whether or not AI assisted translation is a tool that should be promoted.

Genres

• Xianxia (仙侠 immortal warriors) is a Chinese fantasy genre that always includes Chinese cultural and Chinese mythology elements, such as Daoism and gods, magic, demons, magical items. The setting of these stories is primarily in ancient China or Chinese inspired fantastical realms. Many of the webnovels in this genre are written within the subgenre of Cultivation fiction.
• Xuanhuan (玄幻 fantasy) is a Chinese fantasy genre that is rooted in but not limited to Chinese culture and mythology, often including foreign influence in current webnovels and are often set in a fantasy world, with the story including many Western fantasy elements.
• Qihuan (奇幻 magical) is a Chinese fantasy genre that truly blends eastern and Western fantasy elements. These are stories with fantasy elements that help drive the plot, but not fantasy elements that are the focus of the story.
• Wuxia (武侠 martial heroes) is a traditional genre focusing on characters with martial arts abilities, it is quite popular among webnovels. The Ming dynasty novel, Outlaws of the marsh (水滸傳), for example, which includes martial arts and a historical setting created a basis for the stories written today on popular webnovel platforms. Often a male protagonist is taught by a martial arts master and they become powerful and overcome their struggles. In contrast to Xianxia, a level of realism must be maintained, with fantasy elements being allotted to martial arts skills only.
• Cultivation is a Chinese fantasy subgenre that focuses on the main character overcoming struggles and becoming powerful, oftentimes immortal (仙 xian), in the end. The main character cultivates (progresses) themselves through training or magic. Cultivation contrasts western hero fantasy in that the main character is not gifted their powers, but works hard to train and earn them themselves. Cultivation can include, and often does, the cultivation of Qi(气).
• Danmei (耽美 boys' love) is a Chinese romance genre that focuses on the romantic relationships between male characters. These stories often have complex storylines, and there are many Chinese webnovels that contain a danmei story within the overarching story. This genre is especially popular among female readers.
• Tongren (同人 same person) is the Chinese genre of fanfiction, which involves creating derivative works based on the exact original characters written by another author.An example of a webnovel that has inspired many tongren novels is the danmei novel Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xia.
• YY/Yiyin (意淫 mental masturbation) is the Chinese genre of pornographic literature.
• Kehuan (科幻 science fiction) is the Chinese genre of science fiction.

Notable works

Xianxia

Cultivation Chat Group by Legend of The Paladin: A modern day, real world student is added to a group chat of what he thinks to be fantasy role players. They share cultivation techniques, and as he attempts some he finds it to all be real. This webnovel is popular for its refreshing take on the Xianxia genre. It has been adapted into animated series, though the series is not popular because it didn't have a high budget.

Reverend Insanity by Gu Zhen Ren: The story follow the ruthless character Fang Yuan in their pursuit of power in a world full of insect-like monsters named Gu after having been reborn 500 years in the past. This webnovel has been popular for its dark themes and evil main character that veers from the ways of more virtuous Xianxia main characters.

Coiling Dragon by I Eat Tomatoes: This is a very long webnovel that focuses on the journey of Linley of the Baruch clan once famous for its Dragonblood warriors. The story is set in a magical world, and the webnovel is full of adventure and cultivation.

I Shall Seal the Heavens by Er Gen

Xuanhuan

Way of Choices by Mao Ni

Wuxia

Douluo Dalu (aka Soul Land) by Tang Jia San Shao

Kehuan

Swallowed star by I Eat Tomatoes

Danmei

While not all of the following works are strictly of the danmei genre, here are a few works that include danmei content:

The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xia

Thousand Autumns by Meng Xi Shi

Guardian by Priest

MouMou (aka A Certain Someone) by Mu Su Li

Heaven Official's Blessing by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Adaptations

Some famous webseries adaptations include:

• Guardian: based on the webnovel by Priest of the same name.
• The Untamed: based on the webnovel The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xia.

Copyright

In the early 2010s Shengda Literature (aka Shanda Literature) struggled to fight the pirating of material from their platforms and has attempted to enforce copyrights on its content, but ultimately it remains difficult to regulate a user-generated economy within the internet. A popular site used for this sort of piracy is Baidu.

Censorship

Online writers avoid censorship screening programs by writing characters with symbols mixed in, or otherwise rewriting a word in its pinyin form, to avoid automatic censorship. Whenever a detection avoidance technique is discovered by a moderator the program is updated to identify this, and so the writer must revise their work and attempt to republish again.

Continued global outreach

As platforms like Webnovel continue to cater to foreign audiences, Chinese online literature has the opportunity to reach many. If good investment was put into the translation and marketing to foreign audiences, it could become quite popular. Popular web series adaptations often find foreign audiences and allows them to redirect to the original content for more, introducing them to the world of Chinese web literature.