China’s Enforcement of Gender Conformity Leads To Crackdown on Boy’s In Love

GayNrd Editors February 2, 2022

The Chinese government’s efforts to enforce gender conformity is clashing with the hugely popular boy love themed entertainment among its populace.

Boy Love or BL is huge in southeast Asia. The genre which began in Japanese manga and spread to anime, and now live action is one of the fastest growing genres in the region and China.

According to the China Morning Post:

At a national conference on the television and film industry earlier this month, Yang Shuo, who heads the Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau, said his authority has banned the dangai genre in films and TV series completely to “create a clean and healthy cyberspace for the capital city.”

Although the authority only has control over content produced in the Beijing municipal area, the ban is set to have a much wider influence as two of China’s three leading broadcast platforms, iQiyi and Youku, are located in Beijing. It follows a directive from the country’s top media regulator a few months ago. In September, the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) called for an end to dangai, along with a series of entertainment phenomena including chasing online traffic, sky-high salaries for celebrities and tax evasion.

As a highly lucrative form of drama in recent years, dangai comes from a Chinese genre of literature borrowed from Japan — danmei, which revolves around gay men and their romantic relationships, or boys’ love.

Between 2014 and 2020, 57 series were produced and released in Thailand under the boys’ love genre, the South China Morning Post previously reported.

Above: Word of Honour, which depicts the friendship and brotherly love between two male protagonists has urned the two little-known leading actors, Gong Jun and Zhang Zhehan, into super idols, it has also received a rating of 8.6 out of 10 from more than 565,000 users on media review platform Douban.

Lu Peng, a researcher from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said the boycott is more a result of the alleged social problems dangai dramas have caused than the content itself.

“These dramas in the first place were about boys’ love, such as Addicted starring Johnny Huang and Timmy Xu, which was inconsistent with the country’s mainstream ideology and therefore could be described as ‘problematic’, but later such content was replaced with bromance, which has nothing to be blamed for,” he said.

“The problems of dangai dramas today mainly lie in the fans, the great online buzz they create and online fights among different rival groups. If the popularity of dangai has led to bad social behaviour, then it’s correct to seek a solution,” Lu added.

Even though the overtly gay aspects have been tamed for Chinese markets it’s still seen threatening by conservative Chinese critics.

Despite content changes, authorities still want to pull the plug on the genre because it mainly targets teenagers, according to screenwriter Wang Hailin who claimed gay love is sickening and promoting it is tantamount to committing a crime.

“Danmei is a subculture. Commercialising it and selling it to children and youths is irresponsible, whether it’s the publishers, producers, or broadcast platforms. There are even fan clubs for male couples and celebrities doing charity in the form of male couples [even though they’re not homosexual], which has become a sickening trend,” he said. “While China still lacks sex education, influencing the young ones, whose sexual awareness has yet to be fully developed, with such culture is to some extent a crime.”

Chinese audiences counter that “dangai is in the government’s crosshairs just because other TV series are of poor quality and can’t generate the same interest or relevance to younger viewers.”