• Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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      13 days ago

      putting queer fiction authors in prison

      I don’t believe this happened. I first read about it from an extremely shitty Radio Free Asia article and every subsequent article I read about it was similarly low on detail, high on inference.

      I do believe some people who were monetizing queer fanfic on a particular website got arrested and fined. From reading between the lines of all these shitty articles about the situation, it really looked, to me, like the monetization was the problem, not the queerness.

      Now, should you trust my reading of this situation? No. I don’t speak Mandarin, I never did a deep dive, I don’t know shit about fuck, I’m a dumbass on the internet.

      But I also wouldn’t trust Radio Free Asia’s read on the situation, and when you say “China put queer fiction authors in prison”, that’s what you’re doing.

        • Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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          13 days ago

          I guess I’m not sure that China is only taking issue with monetizing gay content. Do we know for a fact that no one was arrested for straight content? I don’t think any of the articles bothered to try to show that.

          I also think “officials in China sometimes unevenly enforce their laws, and that uneven enforcement sometimes punishes queer people more heavily” is a bit different from “China is systematically imprisoning people for writing queer stories”. It seems to me the truth in this instance is closer to the first than to the second, while the statement I first responded to, “[China is] putting queer fiction authors in prison”, is closer to the second than the first.

    • Oppopity@lemmy.ml
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      12 days ago

      Porn is illegal in China. That sucks but it’s not like they’re specifically going after gay people.