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.
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)
"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.