“I want to influence the world with China’s intellectual property.” This is the great ambition of Tang Jia San Shao, 41, who wants to build the “Disney World of China” — a gigantic theme park inspired by his stories. But Tang Jia San Shao is not in the movie business. He’s one of China’s wealthiest online authors, who was last reported to earn $18 million a year.
China’s vast lucrative web novel industry, the largest in the world, brilliantly illustrates the peculiar nature of “Chinese socialism” in recent years. The combination of unfettered economic growth with often severe restrictions on free speech has transformed online authors from writers into aspiring tycoons. The result is a consumerist vacuum, where authors hoping to follow in Tang Jia San Shao’s footsteps churn out vast quantities of work with little literary value or originality.
Tang Jia San Shao is known for both for his epic xianxia (immortal hero) fantasies in which lowly “cultivators” rise up the ranks to unmatchable omnipotence, as well as his dogged work ethic: he holds the Guinness World Record for 86 months of daily serialised chapter updates on Qidian, a webnovel platform backed by Tencent, one of China’s most influential tech giants.
He may be one of the rare success stories, but he has inspired millions of xieshou (writing hands) to churn out thousands of words a day in the hope of selling their own IP. As a rule, titles with the highest number of readers within a pay-per-view system, including Ashes of Love and The Untamed and Duolou Continent, are turned into lucrative TV dramas, computer games or manga series.
Tech companies such as China Literature and Qidian have morphed into shameless “IP cultivation” empires, overseeing a somewhat psychotic, dog-eat-dog world in which popularity is the only metric that matters. “Help readers fantasise about what they lack,” instructs the testosterone-heavy platform Qidian in its writing guide. With an estimated 450 million active readers, and as many as 25 million titles to choose from, competition is merciless and exhausting. If a title doesn’t get enough eyeballs, the platform cancels the book.
Writers, desperate to keep readers, often resort to brazen and desperate tactics — offering “red packets” (bribes) or plagiarising so they have more content to post. One trick to getting more views is to make novels insufferably long, with some online books exceeding six million words. Another is to turn each chapter into a cliff-hanger. Owing to its trashy, short-term thrills, Chinese readers dub webfiction yiyin or “YY” for short, a phrase that has evolved to mean “mental porn” or an addictive, guilty pleasure.
Writers’ grasping tactics are mirrored in the personalities of their status-obsessed and borderline sociopathic protagonists. Heroes are known for their “shamelessness” and for intentionally humiliating (“face-slapping”) their opponents. Many will stop at nothing to acquire wealth and status, smiting anyone who obstructs their path to becoming the richest tycoon in the world or the most supreme being in the universe. In short, online fiction is often a fantasy in which brute individualism pays off, written and read by self-described diaosi — “penis hairs” or “losers” — for whom reality is a communal struggle.
Last year, all this suddenly ground to a halt when beleaguered and exhausted writers downed tools following a regime change at Tencent. By temporarily making content free to read and taking over the copyright of all works until 50 years after the death of the authors, Tencent planned to both strip writers of their revenue and deny them any hope of precious IP.
The dispute was eventually resolved, but it lit an old ideological fire amongst writers who are both victims, and advocates, of this mercenary genre of fiction. “This is class struggle,” said one writer. “The bourgeoisie and capitalists only pursue profits, their pores ooze dirty blood, they squeeze the proletariat for every drop of oil they can.” And they are not wrong.
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