Danmei

''Danmei'' ( zh, c=耽美, p=dānměi, l=indulging beauty) is a Chinese genre of literature and other fictional media that features romantic relationships between male characters. Derived from both Japanese boys' love and Western slash fiction, ''danmei'' is a diverse genre that first emerged online in the late 1990s. ''Danmei'' stories are primarily hosted online and are typically created by and targeted toward women. While ''danmei'' works and their adaptations have achieved widespread popularity and economic success in China and globally, their legal status remains precarious in China due to government censorship policies, and ''danmei'' authors and platforms have been targets of censorship.

Etymology and terminology

) is reborrowed from the Japanese word . Chinese fans often use ''danmei'' and BL interchangeably, while ''danmei'' is the preferred term.

; ) is the female same-gender counterpart to ''danmei''. The term is an orthographic reborrowing of the Japanese word '' yuri''. ''Baihe'' is not as well-known or popular as ''danmei''.

History

The male same-sex romance genre of "boys' love", or BL, originated in Japanese manga in the early 1970s, and was introduced to mainland China via pirated Taiwanese translations of Japanese comics in the early 1990s. Chinese fans referred to this genre as ''danmei'', a reborrowing from the Japanese , which in Japan typically refers to BL prose fiction. ''Danmei'' as a genre was also influenced by Western slash fiction, with Chinese fans incorporating elements of both BL and slash fiction into their original stories in ways that suited their local context.

The first ''danmei'' story was posted online around 1998. By 1999, several online ''danmei'' forums had been founded. These venues started as communities for Chinese fans of Japanese BL, but soon began hosting fanworks and original ''danmei'' stories by young Chinese women. 1999 also saw the founding of the first print magazine devoted to ''danmei'', ''Danmei Season'', which was published continuously until 2013 despite not having an official permit to do so.

While early online ''danmei'' communities were largely run by amateur fans of the genre, those websites were gradually supplanted by a slew of commercial online fiction websites founded in the early 2000s. The largest of these, (, ), was founded in 2003 and has since amassed 7 million registered users and over 500,000 titles. The works published on Jinjiang Literature City include both original works and fan fiction, and heterosexual, gay and lesbian romance as well as stories in other genres, but it is best known as a platform for original ''danmei'' novels.

''Danmei'' reached wider audiences in China and elsewhere in the late 2010s and early 2020s, with censored ''danmei'' adaptations like ''Guardian'', ''The Untamed'', and '' Word of Honor'' receiving billions of views and broad international distribution. In 2020, film and television producers purchased the rights to 59 ''danmei'' titles. In 2022, scholars Yanrui Xu and Ling Yang described ''danmei'' as "a significant economic and cultural force in China" and said that it "might well be one of the few created-in-China cultural products that have gained a foothold in overseas markets and potentially enhanced China's soft power despite continuous censorship at home".

Censorship in China

Background: Censorship of pornography and LGBTQ fiction

Despite its popularity, ''danmei'' media is a frequent target of legal action by the Chinese government as it "breaks two social taboos in one shot: pornography and homosexuality." Pornography is illegal in China, although the exact laws regarding its possession and distribution are blurry, and ''danmei'' literature with explicit sex scenes is unambiguously classified as pornography. Since 1998, when the Chinese Communist Party began the Great Firewall project, internet users in China have been at least partially blocked from online access to sexually explicit content, though many ''danmei'' writers and fans, like other internet users, have found ways to bypass the government filters, IP blocks, and other measures that make up the Great Firewall. Homosexuality itself was decriminalized in China in 1997, but since 2007, China's National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) has nonetheless deemed depictions of homosexuality subject to censorship. Vague legal definitions of "obscenity" and "abnormal sexual behavior" may also result in greater scutiny and censorship of even non-explicit queer literature.

2004–2015: Actions against ''danmei'' platforms and authors

Anti-porn crackdowns in 2004, 2010 and 2014 resulted in the closure of many ''danmei'' websites and forums. In 2011, Chinese authorities shut down a ''danmei'' website hosting 1,200 works, and its founder, Wang Ming, was fined and jailed for 18 months. In October 2018, a female ''danmei'' author who wrote under the pen name Tianyi was sentenced to 10 years in prison after her self-published homoerotic novel featuring rape and teacher-student romance sold over 7,000 copies, violating laws regarding excessive commercial profit for unregistered books.

The strict censorship policies caused some ''danmei'' communities to self-police, with sites such as Jinjiang Literature City asking its readers to report explicit works for deletion. In the face of the 2014 anti-pornography campaign directly targeting ''danmei'', online literature platforms implemented stringent self-censorship measures that particularly affected the ''danmei'' genre.

Baidu blocked several ''danmei''-related forums on its Tieba platform, including "Danmei Bar" and "Funü Bar". Jinjiang Literature City adopted a different strategy by rebranding its ''danmei'' channel to "''chun’ai''" () to distance itself from the genre's explicit associations. The platform also introduced stricter content regulations, surpassing government mandates by prohibiting depictions of body parts below the neck and limiting intimate scenes to non-sexual acts like mouth-kissing and handholding.

2016–2020: ''Danmei'' adaptations

In early 2016, the gay web drama '' Addicted'', which was based on a ''danmei'' novel, was abruptly removed from all mainland Chinese streaming platforms before it finished airing on orders from the NRTA. The following week, the China Television Drama Production Industry Association publicized guidelines dated December 31, 2015, that banned television portrayals of "abnormal sexual relationships and behaviors", including same-sex relationships. These new guidelines impacted web dramas, which have historically been subject to fewer restrictions than broadcast television. The NRTA went on to issue even stricter regulations regarding online shows in June 2017.

To comply with censorship policies, live-action ''danmei'' adaptations began to replace the explicitly homosexual romances of the source texts with deep homosocial friendships instead, sometimes leaving the possibility of more intentionally vague. Adaptations featuring such non-romantic relationships are sometimes called ''dangai'' instead of ''danmei'', though ''dangai'''s literal meaning is simply "''danmei'' adaptation". Several ''danmei'' novels have been adapted as live-action web dramas since 2017, skirting the regulations in this way while retaining queer subtext.

In 2018, shortly after releasing its final episode, the live-action ''danmei'' adaptation ''Guardian'' was pulled from streaming platforms for "content adjustments" following a directive from the NRTA to "clean up TV programmes of harmful and vulgar content". It was later re-released with scenes edited or deleted, apparently due to public complaints about homoerotic subtext. The following year, however, in a departure from the norm for ''danmei'' adaptations, ''The Untamed'' enjoyed massive national and global success and was even praised by the Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper, ''People's Daily''.

2021–present: Renewed regulation

In early 2021, ''Word of Honour'', a drama adaptation of a ''danmei'' novel by Priest, was released. The drama was commercially successful, but in August of that year, one of its lead actors was blacklisted by the Chinese Communist Party as an "immoral celebrity" owing to a visit he had once paid to a controversial shrine in Japan. As a result, all of his works, including ''Word of Honour'', were banned. While the banning of ''Word of Honour'' was apparently unrelated to its depiction of queer subtext, it was part of the state's "Internet Clean-up Campaign", which began in August 2021 and "marked a policy change towards more direct, severe criticism of and crackdown on the ''danmei'' genre".

Jinjiang Literature City officially banned external links to sexual material that same year, in an escalation of the platform's previous self-censorship strategies. As a result, many readers and experienced writers migrated to Changpei, a platform perceived as offering greater creative freedom. This relative liberty was short-lived, as Changpei's growth into a commercial ''danmei'' platform attracted the attention of state censors. To align with regulatory demands and sustain operations, Changpei eventually adopted self-censorship practices as well, removing explicit content and urging authors to avoid publishing sexually explicit scenes.

Also in 2021, a new regulatory approach targeting ''danmei'' adaptations emerged, combining state media criticism with authoritative measures to enforce self-censorship on digital platforms. This marked a significant clampdown on ''danmei''-inspired dramas, following a series of critical state media articles that framed them as "vulgar culture" in line with the Internet Clean-up Campaign. Editorials, such as those by Xinhua News Agency in March 2021, argued that ''danmei'' stories encouraged irrational fanaticism and consumerism among adolescents, necessitating regulation. In August, the ''Guangming Daily'', a newspaper run by the Chinese Communist Party, criticized the perceived vulgarity of male-male flirting and the distortion of male aesthetics through femininity, and advocated for hyper-masculinity as the state-preferred standard. This stance dismissed opposing viewpoints as harmful to youth values.

In September 2021, the Central Propaganda Department released the "Article of Comprehensive Management of the Cultural and Entertainment Sector," highlighting concerns about "traffic and commercial dominance," "distorted aesthetics," "fandom chaos," and the detrimental social influence of ''danmei'' adaptations, particularly on teenagers. High-profile meetings with major companies like Tencent and NetEase underscored the need for increased political compliance. The NRTA reinforced these efforts with a September conference explicitly boycotting ''danmei'' adaptations and addressing fandom issues. This regulatory push resulted in a dramatic decline in ''danmei''-inspired dramas, reversing the genre's earlier success following ''Addiction'' in 2016. The once-common strategy of portraying male friendship as a façade for ''danmei'' themes was no longer tolerated. Many completed dramas, such as ''Immortality'', ''You by My Side'', and '' Eternal Faith'', remain unreleased due to state restrictions, signaling the end of a brief period of prosperity for the genre.

Some mainland Chinese ''danmei'' authors circumvent the restrictions on pornography by hosting the explicit portions of their work on Taiwanese literature websites. This strategy has not kept authors entirely safe from prosecution, however; in the summer of 2024, several mainland Chinese ''danmei'' authors who published their sexually explicitly work on the Taiwanese BL website Haitang Literature City were arrested and charged by Chinese police.

Genre characteristics

''Danmei'' works always feature a central romance between men, but otherwise vary widely. Many draw on ''wuxia'' and '' xianxia'' tropes and settings or incorporate elements of other genres like sports or science fiction.

It is common, but not universal, for the two male protagonists of a ''danmei'' work to be divided into ''gong'' (; ) and ''shou'' (; ) roles, meaning "top" and "bottom". These roles are analogous to the Japanese ''seme'' and ''uke.'' Some works do not incorporate these roles and instead refer to the protagonists as ''hugong'' ( zh, c=互攻, p=hùgōng, labels=no; ). Scholars such as Yao Zhao and Anna Madill have noted that ''danmei'' adheres to heteronormative gender roles within same-sex relationships. Since the mid-2010s, ''danmei'' literature has expanded to encompass a wider variety of relationship dynamics, though the ''gong''-''shou'' model remains dominant in the genre.

Audience

Most ''danmei'' fans are Chinese, and straight women predominate among Chinese ''danmei'' fans. A 2015–2018 survey of Chinese ''danmei'' audiences found that around 88% identify as female, 66.5% as heterosexual, 15.7% as bisexual, and 2.7% as homosexual. Perhaps because it is created for an audience of predominantly heterosexual women, researchers have found ''danmei'' to have a "heteronormative frame". Fans of ''danmei'' cite equality between partners as part of the appeal of the genre, especially in comparison to heterosexual romance.

Researcher Anna Madill has written that among ''danmei'' fans in the Anglosphere, "there is a sizable proportion of women with very heterogeneous sexual identifications (and uncertainties) and a relatively small, but not negligible, group of gay male fans."

Media

Most popular ''danmei'' properties originate as web novels that are published serially on websites like Jinjiang Literature City, Liancheng Read, and Danmei Chinese Web. Readers pay for new chapters as they are released, as is common in Chinese online literature. Complete novels may also be published as physical editions in China (either self-published or via Taiwanese publishers) and abroad. Fan translation of Chinese web novels, especially ''danmei,'' is widespread.

''Danmei'' novels are often adapted as ''manhua'' (comics), '' donghua'' (animation), audio dramas, and live action television series, which may or may not retain textual queer elements. Live action web series adaptations of ''danmei'' have achieved major commercial success via both producers and audiences' negotiation with the demands of the Chinese government censorship and broader consumer culture.

Original comics remain uncommon in ''danmei'' relative to Japanese BL, where manga is the dominant medium.

See also

* Gay literature
* Homosexuality in China
* LGBTQ themes in Chinese mythology

References

{{LGBTQ fiction

Shōnen-ai
Anime and manga terminology
Gay male mass media
Gay male erotica
Gay art
LGBTQ terminology
Chinese art
LGBTQ-related mass media in China