webnovels

(page under construction)

My current research focuses on using LLMs to explore how characters are gendered in different subgenres of Chinese webnovels.

What are webnovels?

Webnovels are novels published on the web. They belong to the larger category of electronic literature, which Katherine Hayles defines as being “‘digital born’ … and (usually) meant to be read on a computer” (Hayles, 2008), or more recently mobile devices. In Chinese, the term is 网络文学 (lit. Internet literature), shortened into 网文 (lit. web-lit). Technically, any kind of literature, such as poems or creative nonfiction, would count as 网文/web-lit. In everyday speech, however, 网文/web-lit refers almost exclusively to novel serializations. As such, “webnovels” have caught on as the most common translation.

Why webnovels?

There’s A LOT of them (over 42 million works as of the end of 2024, apparently) (Shi & Chen, 2025). And they sometimes feature marginalized narratives that can’t easily be published in print in the PRC.

Print publication in China relies on the Standard Book Number system, which “grants book number rights exclusively to state-owned entities linked to the Communist Party, who then sell these numbers to private publishers” (Wang, 2024) Each year, a limited number of book numbers are allocated to state-owned publishing organizations. Private publishers must pay these state-owned organizations to purchase not only book numbers, but also censorship services.

Content-wise, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television (SAPPRFT) releases general policies on prohibited subjects and content (Song, 2022) (Zhu, 2025). In practice, censorship rules are much vaguer and change year-to-year (Wang, 2024). Most pertinent to my personal interest is the censorship of queer intimacies.

Webnovels are subject to censorship as well, but to a lesser extent. Further, because anyone can publish a webnovel series online, webnovels capture a less filtered version of Chinese contemporary fiction, and I think that would be really interesting to explore.

However, in recent years, as webnovels rose in popularity, they have been facing much stricter censorship than before. I hope I’ll be able to explore and quantify this in my future research!