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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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If this is actually happening and isn't just Western media making shit up, I have to wonder if these online publishers aren't registering their businesses correctly or aren't paying taxes or something. If they're just self publishing and collecting """donations""" for their work, they're sidestepping legal business practices to make extra cash.
Wild speculation, of course, but that's my first instinct.
While the making of lewd content is legal in China, profiting off of it is very heavily criminalized. And erotic books, as absurd as it may seem, are categorized the same as pornography. So by selling or profiting off of these works, these authors were breaking the law.
So they aren't registering their businesses correctly, because they literally can't as the business is itself prohibited.
Then, because the sale of these works is prohibited, the authors sell under-the-table and collect untaxed income. Declaring income from their smut would be illegal, so they have to do fraud to hide it as income from other sources or just hide the income entirely.
And now they're guilty of multiple crimes, selling obscene works and tax fraud, and so we see the prison sentences.
Damn, those laws are fucking awful.
Those erotica authors were no angels, did you know they were doing tax fraud?
Why would that be absurd? If it's 1) some form of media, and 2) meant mainly for sexual gratification, it's porn. Like that's the literal definition.
well an erotic book is qualitatively different from exploitative pornography.
Yes, but the exploitative aspect is only one of the arguments against pornography. There is also the argument that it atomizes and alienates people from each other by allowing effortless consumption of sexual gratification instead of having sex with another person, and that will apply no matter the medium.
Okay? Now it doesn't matter what I think obv but IMO it's weird to have a government enforce laws & prohibitions that in effect say "hey queers, you're not allowed to fantasize about this, find someone to fuck idk". Legislating to fight the exploitative nature of esp. live pornography? Cool, good. Legislating against this nebulous sense of atomization from personally consumed fiction...?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of it, and in fact I have a fairly recent post history arguing against it, but I'm paraphrasing arguments I've seen others make and upvote here on Hexbear.
That is how it should be. Sexuality for enjoyment not profit. I don't have a problem with this. Now if any of these people were not making money off this and just publishing it for free and got in trouble yes that would be something I'd be against and think it an area of improvement China needs to work on but also an understandable one given how rapidly Chinese society has progressed in just the last half century. I am confident that with time and effort by good comrades inside China that any such problems will in time be rectified. (Also I suppose I do have mixed feelings given the amount of capitalist exploitation China allows to disallow women to make money in this way which is relatively harmless and given they probably don't have great financial means... an imperfect situation all around)
You don't have a problem with sentencing people to 10 years in prison for writing and selling gay smut?
"Porn is inherently fascist" is a sentiment that has been both expressed and significantly upvoted here on Hexbear before the mods got it for SWERFism.
Porn is not inherently fascist, though. The way that pornography exists as an industry in our current time is exploitative and fascist, because we live in a fascist/capitalist society.
Im of the belief that pornography for the purpose of sexual gratification has basically always existed in some form or another. Fascist country creates fascist porn.
I do think 10 years is quite excessive but I also think western media would lie about that so I'm going to assume that with good behavior and reform they'd probably actually be out in much less than half that.
Secondly I don't presume that this was per se special punishment because of the orientation, non-hetero nature of the works and that the law provides for the same for straight works. I admit there are likely problems with selective enforcement as with any law like this that runs into existing societal biases and prejudices so I think that would be another argument in favor of leniency but again I don't really believe that sentencing is necessarily accurate or the whole story.
Thirdly we don't know all the details about the ages of the characters or any aggravating factors about the content or the nature of payments or whatever.
Even half a year in prison for something that small is absolutely barbaric
"Making art shouldn't provide a living if it doesn't fit my sensibilities"
We shouldn't be trying to restore profitability to art. Not taking a side either way concerning the porn stuff, but it's extremely bourgeois to think the problem with art under capitalism is importantly that the artists aren't getting enough money to do it.
I’m sorry but I think this take is ridiculous. Producing art is labor, and every laborer should be entitled to a living. That idea gets scoffed at a lot, but art has the potential to be an incredible expression of human experience. I’d argue that authors and songwriters are in the same boat, using a form of expression to appeal to other people. Obviously if your art sucks people wont want it, you are mostly at the whims of your audience if you are lucky enough to have one.
That doesn't really mean anything. Marxism is about social labour, not just work. It's more important that people are able to survive and do art outside capitalist production than it is to try to make art profitable for workers in capitalism. All you're doing is creating/sustaining labour aristocrats and petite-bourgeois sentiments in society. Especially when we're talking about fucking explicitly-pulp smut literature here, which is definitely not something we need or want the state to be funding.
Notice Cuba, DPRK, etc. aren't funding that.
DPRK film director:
It’s a Taiwanese niche website for this kind of content (which can range from mild to shocking). The main audience are female and queer college students.
Also, plenty of Chinese content creators have their separate accounts on YouTube, earning American dollars through ads and subscriptions. All you need to do is to fill out the W-8BEN form and pay tax to the US Treasury as a foreigner (10% for mainland Chinese citizens, 30% for Hong Kong residents) and a bank card that accepts foreign currencies to receive the income.
Wouldn't they also need to register as a business generating foreign income and pay taxes to their own government as well as paying taxes to the US?
Gray zone. Most content creators aren’t registering themselves as businesses, let alone some poor college students writing on a niche website earning some donations and subscription fees.
You can enter into a contractual relationship with the internet platform and you may be liable to pay personal income tax, but personal income tax is only a very small fraction of the Chinese government tax base that they are negligible for internet content creators except for the largest channels with millions of subscribers as well as high profile celebrities involved in contracts comprising tens of millions of yuan.
Most of the tax revenues in China come from value-added tax, followed by corporate income tax. These are where the tax evaders are at. I highly doubt they’re wasting resources going after some poor college students or even internet content creators for evading personal income tax.
The other possibility (again, assuming this is actually happening and the NYTimes isn't just making shit up) is that they are wasting resources enforcing an obscenity law on amateur authors for writing slashfic. The tax angle makes more sense to me?