How Fanfiction Communities in China Cope With Censorship

In a new paper published in the journal Qualitative Sociology, Ran Wang, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Department of Sociology, explores how Chinese fanfiction writers responded to a wave of increased government censorship in February 2020.

Through interviews with 31 fanfiction writers in China, Wang documents how government censorship caused once-thriving fanfiction communities to break apart and forced fanfiction writers to find new ways to share their work.

Fanfiction — amateur-written stories based on existing media like television shows, video games, and books — first made its appearance in China in the late 1990s and has since gained a solid foothold in Chinese creative culture.

Inciting Incident 

In February 2020, fans of television actor and musician Xiao Zhan mass-reported the U.S-based fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) to the Chinese government after “sensitive” LGBTQ-themed fanfiction featuring the actor gained popularity in China.

Following the incident, fanfiction apps were removed from the country's Apple and Android app stores, and Chinese fanfiction sites adopted heightened censorship policies. Stories considered “sensitive” were hidden or deleted by these sites.

“As a fanfiction writer myself, I witnessed the suffering, despair, and anger of my fellow writers facing the sweeping censorship intensification,” Wang, a member of the Center on Digital Culture and Society at Annenberg, says. “While there was little I could do, I felt the responsibility to tell the story of my community and to let the world know both the destructive state power and the resilience of the fandom community.

The community had to reckon with ever-evolving censorship policies and quickly find ways to keep their writing communities alive, she says. “[Fanfiction platform] Lofter turned articles visible only to the author without notification on an unseen scale, and authors could not appeal to make articles public for more than three months.”

Losing Readers and Friends

Before the incident, Chinese fanfiction sites allowed writers to create mini-communities for specific fandom and character pairings. Wang describes the communal structure of fanfiction as a gift economy in which the writer's story is a gift that is reciprocated with likes, comments, subscriptions, private messages, and social status within fan communities.  These communities fostered friendship and creativity, fanfiction writers told Wang.

“When almost every [story] has so many acquaintances commenting, that feeling is very nice,” one of the writers told Wang.

After the incident, these communities faced a crisis. Stories were taken down by platforms and, with them, the comments and likes that bonded writers.

In response, writers searched for ways to circumvent intensified censorship, whether by self-censoring stories containing “sensitive content” or by moving to new platforms. However, each method came with challenges, like adapting to a new site’s features or giving up one’s creative freedom by writing self-censored content.

What’s Next

According to Wang, censorship isn’t stopping creativity; it’s changing how and where it happens. Of all the writers interviewed, only one decided to stop writing fanfiction after the incident.

Fanfiction writers are finding new ways to create and connect — in small group chats dedicated to sharing stories, through printed fanzines, by talking to writing friends directly. They are also discovering new creative outlets, including painting, digital art, interactive text games, and original writing, Wang says

“Censorship and Creative Communities: Fragility and Change of Fanfiction Writing in China”  was authored by Ran Wang and published in Qualitative Sociology.