Chinese cops cuffing erotica writers in perverse money-raising exercise
'In my 20 years of life, I never thought my first flight would be to a Lanzhou police station.' So wrote one young woman who, in the past few weeks, says she was ordered to leave her home and report to authorities in the faraway capital of Gansu province, in the parched northwest.
Her supposed crime was profiting from posting erotic stories on a website dedicated to danmei – online fiction that depicts romantic and sexual relationships between men, but which is largely written by (and for) straight women.
Most authors earn a pittance for posting danmei online, but a lucky few inspired hit TV shows (though with the naughty bits excised) before a crackdown on making them in recent years. One such programme, The Untamed, has racked up more than 10 billion views since it first aired in 2019. But danmei writers are also attracting unwanted attention from the authorities as part of a troubling trend.
Cops from the sticks are finding ways to slap charges on Chinese who have never once come within a thousand miles of their towns. In China, tackling entrepreneurs and private firms in other forces' jurisdictions to make money is known as 'fishing in distant seas'. In March, Li Qiang, China's prime minister, said 'profit-driven law enforcement' had to stop. But scooping up writers of erotica continues.
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Though Chinese authorities are deeply conservative on matters of sex and sexuality, several lawyers and danmei writers suspect that money-raising may be the real goal. Chinese police forces depend upon a mix of national and local funding. But the country's property crash has left local governments in the lurch as they can no longer rake in so much revenue from selling land-use rights to developers. Meanwhile, some local authorities have grown increasingly adept at finding other funding: last year China's tax haul declined by about three per cent, while money raised by fines and confiscations rose by 15 per cent.
In recent months, at least four other danmei writers say they were approached by cops from distant parts of China. In December, police from a poor, rural part of Anhui province announced the results of an investigation into 36 people for online obscenity and raised 11 million yuan ($2.3 million) in fines. They sentenced one well-known danmei author to more than four years in prison. She had to hand over all her earnings from writing – about 1.8 million yuan ($384,000) – and pay another 1.8 million yuan as a fine.
'Why are some people who commit sexual assaults in real life not punished so severely?' asks one erotic writer, pointedly. 'People should have full freedom of thought, including freedom of sexual fantasies,' writes Chen Bi of the Chinese University of Political Science and Law, who is offering legal aid to arrested authors.
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Sydney Morning Herald
20 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Chinese cops cuffing erotica writers in perverse money-raising exercise
'In my 20 years of life, I never thought my first flight would be to a Lanzhou police station.' So wrote one young woman who, in the past few weeks, says she was ordered to leave her home and report to authorities in the faraway capital of Gansu province, in the parched northwest. Her supposed crime was profiting from posting erotic stories on a website dedicated to danmei – online fiction that depicts romantic and sexual relationships between men, but which is largely written by (and for) straight women. Most authors earn a pittance for posting danmei online, but a lucky few inspired hit TV shows (though with the naughty bits excised) before a crackdown on making them in recent years. One such programme, The Untamed, has racked up more than 10 billion views since it first aired in 2019. But danmei writers are also attracting unwanted attention from the authorities as part of a troubling trend. Cops from the sticks are finding ways to slap charges on Chinese who have never once come within a thousand miles of their towns. In China, tackling entrepreneurs and private firms in other forces' jurisdictions to make money is known as 'fishing in distant seas'. In March, Li Qiang, China's prime minister, said 'profit-driven law enforcement' had to stop. But scooping up writers of erotica continues. Loading Though Chinese authorities are deeply conservative on matters of sex and sexuality, several lawyers and danmei writers suspect that money-raising may be the real goal. Chinese police forces depend upon a mix of national and local funding. But the country's property crash has left local governments in the lurch as they can no longer rake in so much revenue from selling land-use rights to developers. Meanwhile, some local authorities have grown increasingly adept at finding other funding: last year China's tax haul declined by about three per cent, while money raised by fines and confiscations rose by 15 per cent. In recent months, at least four other danmei writers say they were approached by cops from distant parts of China. In December, police from a poor, rural part of Anhui province announced the results of an investigation into 36 people for online obscenity and raised 11 million yuan ($2.3 million) in fines. They sentenced one well-known danmei author to more than four years in prison. She had to hand over all her earnings from writing – about 1.8 million yuan ($384,000) – and pay another 1.8 million yuan as a fine. 'Why are some people who commit sexual assaults in real life not punished so severely?' asks one erotic writer, pointedly. 'People should have full freedom of thought, including freedom of sexual fantasies,' writes Chen Bi of the Chinese University of Political Science and Law, who is offering legal aid to arrested authors.
The Age
20 hours ago
- The Age
Chinese cops cuffing erotica writers in perverse money-raising exercise
'In my 20 years of life, I never thought my first flight would be to a Lanzhou police station.' So wrote one young woman who, in the past few weeks, says she was ordered to leave her home and report to authorities in the faraway capital of Gansu province, in the parched northwest. Her supposed crime was profiting from posting erotic stories on a website dedicated to danmei – online fiction that depicts romantic and sexual relationships between men, but which is largely written by (and for) straight women. Most authors earn a pittance for posting danmei online, but a lucky few inspired hit TV shows (though with the naughty bits excised) before a crackdown on making them in recent years. One such programme, The Untamed, has racked up more than 10 billion views since it first aired in 2019. But danmei writers are also attracting unwanted attention from the authorities as part of a troubling trend. Cops from the sticks are finding ways to slap charges on Chinese who have never once come within a thousand miles of their towns. In China, tackling entrepreneurs and private firms in other forces' jurisdictions to make money is known as 'fishing in distant seas'. In March, Li Qiang, China's prime minister, said 'profit-driven law enforcement' had to stop. But scooping up writers of erotica continues. Loading Though Chinese authorities are deeply conservative on matters of sex and sexuality, several lawyers and danmei writers suspect that money-raising may be the real goal. Chinese police forces depend upon a mix of national and local funding. But the country's property crash has left local governments in the lurch as they can no longer rake in so much revenue from selling land-use rights to developers. Meanwhile, some local authorities have grown increasingly adept at finding other funding: last year China's tax haul declined by about three per cent, while money raised by fines and confiscations rose by 15 per cent. In recent months, at least four other danmei writers say they were approached by cops from distant parts of China. In December, police from a poor, rural part of Anhui province announced the results of an investigation into 36 people for online obscenity and raised 11 million yuan ($2.3 million) in fines. They sentenced one well-known danmei author to more than four years in prison. She had to hand over all her earnings from writing – about 1.8 million yuan ($384,000) – and pay another 1.8 million yuan as a fine. 'Why are some people who commit sexual assaults in real life not punished so severely?' asks one erotic writer, pointedly. 'People should have full freedom of thought, including freedom of sexual fantasies,' writes Chen Bi of the Chinese University of Political Science and Law, who is offering legal aid to arrested authors.
The Age
a day ago
- The Age
New evidence unearthed of shocking Japanese assault of Australian nurses
In February 1942, when the evacuation vessel, Vyner Brooke, was sunk off the coast of Sumatra, survivors who had fled Singapore just before the island surrendered to Japanese forces, struggled ashore on Bangka Island. Among them were 53 Australian army nursing sisters. Two days later, 21 who made it to Radji Beach lay dead, machine-gunned by Japanese soldiers. The sole survivor of this infamous massacre was Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, who sustained a minor flesh wound just above her left hip. Feigning death, she floated in the water until it was safe to go into the nearby jungle, where she hid for some days, caring for a badly injured British soldier. Finally, the pair realised they had no option but to make their way to the closest town, where they gave themselves up. The soldier died of his injuries, but Vivian survived, the only person, apart from the Japanese, who knew precisely what happened on that isolated beach. The story she told for the rest of her life was one of noble courage, of nurses holding hands, calmly and silently marching into the sea, until cut down by machine gun fire. Fifty years after the event, many people interested in this wartime incident began questioning the veracity of Bullwinkel's account, as the Japanese responsible for the massacre were from the same unit that had raped and murdered British and Chinese nurses in Hong Kong. Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka was even brave enough to suggest that Vivian 'did not tell the truth' at the International Military Tribunal in 1946, to save her dead colleagues from 'the disgrace of being known as victims of rape'. It was not until 2019, building on forensic detective work by writer Barbara Angell and journalist Tess Lawrence, in whom Vivian had confided, that I amassed sufficient evidence, some of it from Vivian herself, revealed in my book Angels of Mercy, to show that the nurses had been raped before being killed, and that the scene on the beach had been horrific. Far from calm acceptance of their fate, the nurses had run for their lives, screaming, some only partially clad and at least one killed by a sword blow to the head. When The Sydney Morning Herald reported my 2019 findings when the book was released, there were naysayers who refused to believe it. They also refused to believe that Vivian had been gagged, although she had also told Lawrence that being forced to remain silent had caused her great emotional anguish. However, the article aroused international interest, and several people contacted me. A former employee of the (now) Department of Veterans' Affairs, revealed that Bullwinkel's files had been 'more closely guarded than the nuclear codes' because 'she had been raped by the Japanese on Bangka Island'. A female army officer reported that in the early 1990s, when chatting to Vivian about her forthcoming biography, published in 1999, she confided that her biographer was refusing to allow her to tell all the facts, to let the truth be known. When asked, 'Well, what is the truth?' Vivian replied, 'we were not just marched into the sea. We were raped and tortured, and then we were marched into the sea'. She told a similar story to a friend, a fellow ex-POW and a police officer, who had suffered terribly on the Burma-Thai railway. Despite her wish to have 'all the facts' revealed, Vivian, by now in failing health, was denied this right by her biographer, who had simply repeated the oft told, censored story. Seven months after publication, death silenced her forever. She died of a heart attack on July 3, 2000, aged 84. Determined to give her the voice she had been so long denied, I began an investigation to determine who had shut her down, and when. Loading The gagging had begun in 1945 with an order issued by Lord Mountbatten's South-east Asia command, forbidding any recovered prisoner of war from making any statement without military clearance. As soon as it was known that Australian nurses had been recovered from a prison camp in Sumatra, an Australian officer was dispatched to Singapore, where he prepared a statement that Vivian signed. It mirrored the sanitised version of the massacre which, by this time, had been published worldwide. The Australian military and government believed that the public should be shielded from the harsh realities of war, but determining who had silenced Vivian was going to be a challenge. However, blessed with a knowledge of how war crimes units operated, I took a punt and was rewarded when I came across a lengthy statement by Francis Hughes, a war crimes investigator. It was a gift from heaven – the missing piece, which vindicated everything Vivian had said. Hughes, who had served in a highly secret wartime unit, applied for service with 1 Australian War Crimes Section. Based in Singapore, his task was to sift through affidavits documenting atrocities to extract data for use by the prosecution. In due course, he came across one from Vivian, not the sanitised version of events but one given to war crimes investigators in which she stated all the facts. Horrified, he sought advice from his superiors who, on learning that the nurses had been subjected to rape that was 'continuous and shocking', decreed that the details should never be disclosed, out of consideration for their families and that no one, including Vivian, who knew the truth, must ever reveal it. Hughes remained tight-lipped for almost 60 years. It is amazing that, in the more than 20 years that his statement has been on the public record, no one noticed it. He also made a second statement, alluding to a cover-up, but that too passed unnoticed. Vivian's affidavit also confirmed that some nurses had been forced to act as comfort women. After reading her affidavit, Hughes reported, 'one knows exactly how they had been subject to indescribable conditions by Japanese officers who were using Dutch Club for this activity'. There is no doubt that Vivian Bullwinkel was not only brutally violated, she was forced to suffer in silence all her life by a succession of men who thought they knew best. She wanted a voice and I am privileged to give it to her. There are sure to be some who would prefer that such a story be left untold, but to continue to deliberately air brush events that are uncomfortable truths, serves no purpose but to subvert our wartime history. I like to get to the heart of the matter. All my books have uncovered a story that was not known before. Truth suppressed, facts buried, for many and varied reasons. The families of the nurses have a right to know. Vivian wanted them to know. To continue to deny the existence of an atrocity, hidden for so long, protects no one but the perpetrators.
