Chinese Website Novel is Rising but Dying
At the end of 2014, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People’s Republic of China issued a policy to the nation on promoting the development of online literature and novels. They proposed the project in three general aspects. Firstly, the government established an official auditing mechanism to manage the novel quality and stop imitation and plagiarism. Secondly, they setted a clear promotion and economic development based on online novels. Finally, the government started to build the national censorship. Although the system encourages authors to create novels on a variety of topics, such as history, fantasy and etc. These works must conform to the “socialist core values,” otherwise they will get different penalties. This is the point of contention among readers all the time.
In addition to official and capital support for online novel platforms, the policy has also given influential online authors more the power and higher salary. One of these authors, whose real name is Wei Zhang, is known as Tang Jia San Shao, who began writing his new novel ‘Soul Land’ on the Qidian in 2008. This novel helped him becoming one of the legend authors on the platform. After the policy released, Zhang as an online author, joined the China Writers Association (CWA) in 2011, and even later became a member of the CWA National Committee. Zhang went from the online author to a man who controlled his former career. Ignoring his controversial personal reputation, Zhang is one of the representatives who have benefited the most from this policy and who have undergone the greatest class transformation. Professor Jiading Chen and Lecturer Qing Wang, as authorities in the Department of Literature, also claimed the success of the policy in their article for the 2022 Social Science Series, “Chinese Internet literature, as a distinctive and emerging genre of literature and art, has made remarkable achievements.”
However, the enactment of this policy implied that authors were being controlled. The trickiest point is, I cannot find an official list showing to the public what constitutes illegal content for novels. Therefore, there are many cases where unfinished long novels are subject to modify its content or bans by websites platform. In the case of Qidian (male readers’ favourite platform) and Jinjiang Literature City (female readers’ favourite platform), the novels in the psychic horror category disappeared from the two platforms after the regular clean-up operations in 2019. Novels in this category were constantly forced to modify their story outlines or simply be banned. These novels attracted so many loyal readers by fighting ghosts or creating a sense of extremely scary and gory atmosphere. When the authors had to revise their work that lose the core of the category, older readers were disappointed and angry about the policy. When I was in junior high school, I accidentally discovered a novel called Cinema of Hell, with its excellent setting and detailed writing, I deeply fell in love with the book. I still remember its detailed depiction of the bloody abuse the protagonist suffered at the beginning, which scared and thrilled me as a child. When I reread it again in 2024, I found this plot had changed. Those words that could cause the reader to fear physical pain were gone, only left one sentence summary of the protagonist found he only had a head without body. The book exists, but the ultimate reading experience that it could give the reader has disappeared. And there are countless similar examples like this.
While this policy to promote the development of online novels has had a positive effect in terms of affecting the economy and China’s cultural influence, the world of fiction is losing its vibrant and various contents. The core, content and categorisation of novels that people can read online are gradually disappearing.