another sufferer of jiang cheng brain disease

A. Zombie bit you! 🧟

B. Safe

C. Zombie bit you! 🧟‍♀️

D. Safe

E. Safe

F. Safe

G. Zombie bit you! 🧟‍♂️

H. Zombie bit you! 🧟‍♀️

I. Safe

J. Safe

K. Zombie bit you! 🧟‍♂️

There was a ghost at the end of the pier.

He was sitting on the steps, shoulders bowed under an extra layer of robes, a deep purple, a little too small across the shoulders. Jars of local alcohol sat and rocked at his feet, mostly empty, save the one hanging precariously from one hand. Legs sprawled in front of him, his other hand was fisted on his knee, strangling a piece of paper, the ring on his finger purple, dull and lifeless.

“Wei Wuxian,” The ghost said, deep voice devoid of anything and everything. “If you desecrate my uncles remains, there will be no place you can go, no realm you can flee to, that I will not find you.”

“Ah, A-Ling,” The Yiling Patriarch swayed in place, rocking like one of Lotus Piers boats in a storm. He felt drunk, he hadn’t had a drop, he was lightheaded and heavy-hearted. “What makes you think that’s why I’m here?”

A breath that wanted to be a scoff. “Because I know you.” He held up the paper. “Because... Jiujiu knows – knew – you.”

“Oh?” The Yiling Patriarch laughed, and it echoed, empty and sharp. “He send you one of those silly letters too? Can you believe he sent one to both Lan Zhan and Lan Xichen?” He took a step closer. The ghost tensed, slowly setting the jar down so that he could rest a hand on his sword. Ah! What a silly child! “It was really awkward to slip away, don’t you know?” Silly, silly child. “Just like Jiang Cheng to kick up such a fuss!” That won’t stop him. But its cute that they tried! Attempt the impossible! He’d make sure to tell Jiang Cheng how valiantly this child fought on his behalf; he’d be happy to hear it, but would probably scold them all instead of showing it. He couldn’t wait!

He wouldn’t wait. This, it wouldn’t wait.

“So, why don’t you step aside and let me pay your uncle a visit, hmm?”

The rest of the story is on ao3! Link below.

"I've been warned not to talk about it," the woman wrote, before revealing snippets of the day she says she was arrested for publishing gay erotica.

"I'll never forget it - being escorted to the car in full view, enduring the humiliation of stripping naked for examination in front of strangers, putting on a vest for photos, sitting in the chair, shaking with fear, my heart pounding."

The handle, Pingping Anan Yongfu, is among at least eight in recent months which have shared accounts on Chinese social media platform Weibo of being arrested for publishing gay erotic fiction. As authors recounted their experiences, dozens of lawyers offered pro bono help.

At least 30 writers, nearly all of them women in their 20s, have been arrested across the country since February, a lawyer defending one told the BBC. Many are out on bail or awaiting trial, but some are still in custody. Another lawyer told the BBC that many more contributors were summoned for questioning.

They had published their work on Haitang Literature City, a Taiwan-hosted platform known for its "danmei", the genre of so-called boys' love and erotic fiction.

Think of it as a gay version of Fifty Shades of Grey: a BDSM relationship that leads to a happily-ever-after. That's a frequent trope, across historical, fantasy or sci-fi settings. Over the years it has cultivated a fiercely devoted following, especially among young Chinese women.

These authors are being accused of breaking China's pornography law for "producing and distributing obscene material". Writers who earn a profit could be jailed for more than 10 years.

The law targets "explicit descriptions of gay sex or other sexual perversions". Heterosexual depictions often have more leeway - works by acclaimed Chinese authors, including Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, have graphic sexual scenes, but are widely available.

Although authors of heterosexual erotica have been jailed in China, observers say the genre is subjected to far less censorship. Gay erotica, which is more subversive, seems to bother authorities more. Volunteers in a support group for the Haitang writers told the BBC police even questioned some readers.

Those who reported being arrested declined to be interviewed, fearing repercussions. Police in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, who are accused of driving this crackdown, have not responded to the BBC.

Online, the crackdown has unleashed a debate - and a rarer pushback against the law.

"Is sex really something to be ashamed of?" a Weibo user asked, arguing that China's anti-obscenity laws are out of touch. Another wrote that women never get to decide what is obscene because they don't control the narrative. Even legal scholars have expressed concern that just 5,000 views for anything deemed "obscene" qualifies as criminal "distribution", lowering the bar to arrest creators.

It made Beijing uneasy enough that discussions have been vanishing: #HaitangAuthorsArrested drew more than 30 million views on Weibo before it was censored. Posts offering legal advice are gone. A prominent Chinese news site's story has been taken down. Writers' accounts, and some of the handles, are also disappearing.

After Pingping Anan Yongfu's post went viral, she deleted it and wrote another, thanking supporters and admitting her writing had violated the law. She then deleted her handle.

Before that last post, she had written: "I was always the good girl in my parents' eyes. But that day, I brought them nothing but shame. They'll never hold their heads up again."

Danmei: The uncrowned royal of pop culture

These women have long worked in the shadows in China, where homosexuality and eroticism are stigmatised. Now outed by police investigations, they face social consequences that are as brutal as the legal ones.

"In that moment, all I felt was shame," posted a writer whose Weibo handle translates to "the world is a huge psychiatric hospital". She said the police pulled her out of class in college - and her classmates watched as they followed her to search her dorm.

"I earned my money word by word at a keyboard. But once it went south, it was as if none of that mattered. People treated me like I'd made money without ever working for it."

Another wrote the police had been kind, advising her to speak to a lawyer and return her "illegal earnings" to reduce her sentence. "I'm only 20. So young, and I've already ruined my life so early."

A third said: "I never imagined a day would come when every word I once wrote would come back to haunt me."

One author who has been writing danmei novels for 20 years was not questioned but she says the crackdown won't stop her. "This is how I find happiness. And I can't let go of the connections I have made with the community."

Inspired by Japanese boys' love manga, danmei emerged as a sub-genre online in the 1990s. It has become hugely successful, with some of the novels appearing on international bestseller lists.

In 2021, 60 of them were optioned for film and TV adaptations. The most expensive IP reportedly sold for 40 million yuan ($5.6 million; £4.1 million). Some of China's biggest stars, such as Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, began their careers on streaming shows based on danmei novels.

In short, it's the rebellious royal of pop culture - too popular to ignore, too controversial to honour.

And it is a signature offering on Haitang, which, in Mandarin, is a flower that blooms in every shade of pink.

Fittingly, Haitang and danmei have flourished as uniquely female spaces, although they centre male protagonists. In a culture where female sexual desire is routinely policed, danmei became a coded, creative outlet - a space where women can write about female desire for other women.

That is exactly what makes danmei so "subversive", says Dr Liang Ge, who teaches digital sociology at University College London. It allows women to "detach from gendered realities", which they often associate with marriage and motherhood.

For instance, in danmei stories, men can get pregnant and are at ease with being vulnerable – a stark contrast from the often unequal relationships many Chinese women struggle with in real life.

"Danmei frees me from thinking about all those potential dangers in relationships in traditional heterosexual romance," explains one writer who has been active in the danmei world for a decade.

Danmei novels are not without their critics, because some do contain extreme and violent scenes. "As a parent, how many of us can accept our children reading novels like this, let alone writing them?" asked one Weibo user.

The age of authors has also been a concern: a handful of those the BBC spoke to said they all started reading and writing gay erotica before they turned 18, some as young as 11.

It's a problem the community should acknowledge and address, said Ma, a danmei writer who only shared her surname, adding that this is a problem for all adult content because China does not restrict content by age.

But danmei in particular has increasingly come under attack in the last decade as Beijing launched a series of campaigns to "clean up" the internet. In 2018 a danmei author was jailed for 10 years for selling 7,000 copies of her book titled Occupy.

'My earnings were evidence of my crime'

As marriage and birth rates plummet, and China's leader Xi Jinping encourages a national rejuvenation, so state scrutiny of danmei has ratcheted up, Dr Ge says.

"The Chinese government wants to promote traditional family values and liking danmei novels is seen as a factor in making women less willing to have children," Dr Ge explains.

This is the second wave of mass arrests in less than a year - late last year, some 50 Haitang writers were prosecuted. A famous author who earned about 1.85 million yuan was jailed for nearly five years.

The two crackdowns are similar, according to a lawyer who had represented some of the defendants last year, "but this time, even those with minor involvement weren't spared".

A lawyer offering free legal advice said more than 150 people requested consultations in just two days. Many of those contacting her had not been charged yet - they were terrified about the possibility though.

"This is classic offshore fishing," says a lawyer who authored a "practical guide" to assist Haitang writers. The term refers to overreach by local police - those in Lanzhou summoned writers in various places, arguably beyond their jurisdiction.

Several reported paying out of pocket to fly to Lanzhou. One posted that the 2,000 yuan earned from two books on Haitang paid for the flight.

Last year too all the arrests were by police in Jixi County in eastern China.

Indebted local governments have done this before to earn revenue through fines, sometimes forcing a warning from the central government. Cyber crimes are particularly prone to this "as long as they claim a local reader was corrupted", the lawyer says.

Danmei writers know tolerance can be fickle. It's why they skirt censorship with metaphors. "Making dinner" means sex; "kitchen tool" is code for male genitals.

Still, the recent crackdown stunned them. "A phone call shattered my dreams," is how one writer described the call from police.

They accused police of searching their phone without a warrant. They said their crime was assessed by adding up the views for each chapter - a method they argued was misleading, as it likely exaggerated the readership.

Another danmei author posted: "I wrote on Haitang for years, with only a handful of readers. Then, those overlooked stories accumulated over 300,000 clicks, and the 4,000 yuan in royalties sitting in my account became evidence of my crime."

It's hard to know if this spells the end of their careers on Haitang.

"If I could go back, I'd still choose to write. And I will keep writing," wrote the handle Sijin de Sijin.

Below is a more academic discussion of what I mean. I care about this because the consequences are not theoretical. They affect real Jewish safety right now.

In the field of minoritized voice theory, marginalized groups are often compelled to perform identity in ways that reassure dominant publics and secure conditional belonging (Alcoff 1991, Ahmed 2017). Within this framework, the increasing public prominence of explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish discourse becomes analytically troubling. Such discourse is frequently amplified not as evidence of intra-Jewish heterogeneity, but as a legitimating mechanism through which non-Jewish audiences minimize, externalize, or disavow ongoing Jewish vulnerability (Spivak 1988). In this context, Jewish dissent is reconstituted less as internal disagreement and more as a discursive technology that enables dominant actors to displace responsibility for contemporary antisemitism.

Although dissent around Zionism exists within Jewish communities, available demographic data consistently show that explicit anti-Zionism is held by a comparatively small minority of Jews. The disproportionate elevation of these positions in public arenas therefore amounts to a representational asymmetry rather than a reflection of communal distribution (Alcoff 2009). When minority positions are narratively reframed as normative, such reframing operates not as inclusion but as epistemic erasure (Ahmed 2017). This erasure intersects directly with collective Jewish trauma shaped by persecution, expulsion, and mass violence, and with ongoing vulnerability experienced by the majority of contemporary Jewish communities (Caruth 1996, van der Kolk 2014).

A trauma-informed perspective shows that this dynamic is structurally consequential. Tokenization of dissenting Jews as evidence that antisemitism is negligible amounts to a modality of epistemic violence (Hartman 1997) in which collective memory and embodied fear are discursively invalidated. Trauma manifests not only in historical injury but also in the social processes through which harm is minimized, rationalized, or forgotten (Caruth 1996). Tokenization therefore functions as a normative practice of sanctioned forgetting (Ahmed 2017).

A decolonial analytic makes clearer what is at stake here. When Jewish identity is rendered intelligible solely through its political relation to the state, whether as endorsement or rejection, Jewish subjectivity is stripped of diasporic, cultural, and historical specificity (Tuck and Yang 2012). The extraction and elevation of an intra-communal minority position as a representative voice reproduces a colonial logic of selecting acceptable minority subjects whose sanctioned visibility authorizes broader harms directed at the community as a whole (Spivak 1988). Rather than producing liberatory representation, this dynamic reinscribes dominant power by converting Jewish identity into evidentiary material that serves external political projects (Hartman 1997).

Consequently, the public instrumentalization of anti-Zionist Jewish discourse can be understood as a technology of appropriation rather than as democratic representation. Here, dissenting Jewish voices are deployed to legitimate the dismissal of contemporary antisemitism, enabling dominant publics to frame Jewish vulnerability as negligible or fabricated (Alcoff 2009). As minoritized voice theorists argue, the strategic mobilization of internal exceptions to justify apathy toward collective violence intensifies structural harm. Denial becomes a form of policy enactment, and silencing becomes a material condition rather than merely a discursive one (Hartman 1997, Ahmed 2017).

This analysis does not require the constraint of Jewish dissent. Instead, it requires attention to the differential economies of visibility through which certain Jewish voices circulate disproportionately, particularly when that circulation serves to negate collective vulnerability. A trauma-informed and decolonial approach would insist on sustaining Jewish multiplicity without converting that multiplicity into a mechanism for normalizing Jewish endangerment (Tuck and Yang 2012, Caruth 1996).

And just to restate, plainly and without theory:

The issue is not that some Jews oppose Zionism. The issue is when non-Jews use those Jews as evidence that antisemitism does not exist. That does not protect dissent. It weaponizes it, and it renders Jewish vulnerability invisible at the precise moment that vulnerability remains acute.

Linda Martín Alcoff The Problem of Speaking for Others (1991) Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006)

Sara Ahmed The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012) Living a Feminist Life (2017)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Can the Subaltern Speak (1988) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999)

Cathy Caruth Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996)

Bessel van der Kolk The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang Decolonization is Not a Metaphor (2012)

In the afterlife, let's still be brothers, okay?