How Jinjiang, the Biggest Stronghold of Danmei Culture, Survived by Taking Its Time | 20 Years of Web Fiction ⑨

In no hurry to commercialize, no hurry to please its users, not even in a hurry to fix what everyone complains about.

A green book, its pages spread open in the shape of petals.

That is the logo of Jinjiang Literature City, and it hangs on the wall of a dust-gray apartment block in northern Beijing. People passing by rarely give it a second look, and Huang Yanming does not much want Jinjiang to draw more outside attention than that.

Huang Yanming runs Jinjiang Literature City. When she appears in that role, people usually call her "Bingxin." In the late 1990s, she got online for the first time in college and, on a whim, gave herself the screen name "iceheart" — no relation to Xie Wanying, the author who wrote as Bingxin and published To Young Readers.

Jinjiang has ten thousand reasons to keep quiet. Fujoshi treat it as the stronghold of danmei (boys' love) culture, which traditional opinion considers unfit for polite company. A few years ago the government's "clean web" campaign cost Jinjiang some ground, and to this day certain works and chapters remain locked. A Vietnamese publisher once approached the site about translation and publishing rights, but when relations between the two countries turned bad, the deal collapsed entirely.

For a literature website, Huang Yanming believes, policy is the biggest risk — after all, "ten thousand yuan is enough to build a literature website," and everything after that is a question of how many users you draw. Now that Jinjiang is large, it can afford one wrong step even less than before.

Otherwise, she is happy enough to talk about Jinjiang, gossip and twists included. She and her husband, Liu Xudong — they carry the titles of Jinjiang's president and vice president — both keep busy Weibo accounts, where they post the site's latest moves.

Only a few months ago, Huang Yanming was set upon on Weibo by a group of Jinjiang authors.

It began when Jinjiang updated its standard author contract. The authors found it unreasonable, above all one clause that appeared to say that anything an author wrote — academic papers, news stories, screenplays, even program code — belonged to Jinjiang.

After round upon round of fierce argument on Weibo and on Jinjiang's own forum, the dispute ended with the company's legal staff working overtime for half a month to rewrite the contract's language.

Argument turning into a shouting match, the shouting match ending in a settlement: this plot has run on Jinjiang again and again over the years. Written as a novel, it might have more turns in it than most of the fiction the site hosts.

Through the long tug-of-war, some readers came to love Jinjiang more, posting suggestions on the forum for new features and doing design work for free. Others came to hate it, writing palace-intrigue posts to vent their anger at Huang Yanming.

Few websites are treated this way. Douban is one; Bilibili is another. Both drew users together around a shared enthusiasm, and as the sites changed, that enthusiasm slowly turned into a tangle of love and hate.

Huang Yanming likes to describe Jinjiang's history as "going with the current." Looking back at its turning points, she tends to begin with "at the time, everyone else was doing such-and-such," then describe how the market threatened or inspired Jinjiang. Her own explanation is that she is a fairly lazy person and would rather leave the complicated thinking to other people.

But she also has a hard side. When the contract fight had her surrounded, she picked through the hostile comments under her Weibo posts one by one, explaining herself or answering with sarcasm — she fired back at nearly all of them.

She later said, more than once, that what she calls going with the current is a form of caution, and that she has always kept a careful hand on Jinjiang's overall direction. In that sense, treating Jinjiang and Huang Yanming as one and the same is probably not wrong. Everything readers see as the site's virtues, and everything they see as its sins, leads back to her.

The servers draw the most complaints. Users grumble about how unstable they are, and about the stinginess that instability seems to reveal.

Huang Yanming is not in a hurry about it. Asked about questions involving the ranking algorithm or the site's data, she sometimes blurts out, "because our servers can't handle it." A colleague nearby will wince and correct her. Only then does she turn serious and insist that Jinjiang's servers will have no trouble meeting demand over the next year or two.

She handled the technical work herself at the start. She studied economic law as an undergraduate at Hebei University of International Business and Economics, and, out of an interest in computers, taught herself a great deal about building websites.

In 2001, when Jinjiang's users started a campaign on the forum to save the site, she became one of its core members as a matter of course. "Romance-fiction sites were read almost entirely by girls, and back then not many girls did technical work. Plenty of people were discussing the problem, but nobody could actually do the work, so I said I'd help out with the programming."

From about that point on, Huang Yanming maintained Jinjiang's website, a job later handed to Liu Xudong. The site's chronic instability probably dates from then.

In 2015, Liu Xudong wrote on Weibo: "Jinjiang's engineers found a configuration error that had been hiding for eight years, and it has now been fixed. Comments should load faster and faster from here on."

In the early years Jinjiang had little traffic, and connections were slow, so the architecture did not have to be strong. As more and more people came to the site, the architecture became a problem no server could solve.

Before Liu Xudong posted that, a user had opened a thread on Jinjiang's forum denouncing the site's terrible reading experience: "Guan San (Liu Xudong's screen name), I know you read this forum a lot. If you care at all, come take a look."

Moderators later pinned the thread as required reading. For two and a half years users kept adding comments to it, first about the site and then about the app Jinjiang launched in 2015, without a break.

Huang Yanming describes building Jinjiang's mobile app roughly the way you would describe an embarrassing childhood memory.

The first outsourcing team they hired got as far as the app's bookmarks list and found that their technology could not carry the demands of Jinjiang's huge user base. The second team gave up for much the same reason. The third cleared the technical bar, then went out of business halfway through.

Huang Yanming and Liu Xudong thought it over and simply bought that development team with Jinjiang's own money, bringing it in-house, which is how the app finally launched in 2015 — more than two years after Jinjiang decided to build one.

She is not a decisive manager. Around 2010, after smartphones arrived, she noticed that traffic to Jinjiang's PC site had all but stopped growing and that most new users were coming through the mobile WAP site. But "we weren't professionals and couldn't find anyone to do it," so the app kept being put off.

Her explanation is vague, and familiar: "In the reading business, as things stand, the business models are all much the same. Beyond the fight for traffic, what everyone competes on is how well they meet users' needs. But with this particular thing, whether you meet 50 percent of the need or 60 percent doesn't improve the experience all that much."

She uses the same reasoning on the copyright question. "[Jinjiang] has thirty or forty thousand contracted authors, and every author's terms are a little different — sooner or later we were bound to get something wrong." She remembered one author who had signed for three years when the system offered only a five-year option. When the term ran out, Jinjiang had trouble on its hands. Signing every author to one standard contract is what produced the clause that appeared to claim everything the author wrote, code included.

Huang Yanming has never run a company. After moving to Beijing, she worked as a graphic designer at a real estate firm and looked after the company's web pages on the side. Her spare time went to Jinjiang. After she joined the site in 2001, she and three other users — Qingmei, NINA and Cuixiu — made up its core.

Jinjiang was not commercial then either. She recalls that its operating money came from user donations plus a little advertising, which roughly covered renting and hosting the servers. Jinjiang also once ran a bookstore called Little Witch, selling print editions by its own authors, but it was shut down before long for breaking government rules. This near-personal-website state of affairs lasted until 2007; along the way, a 2005 falling-out between Huang Yanming and Qingmei and NINA drove the latter two off the site.

As Huang Yanming tells it, commercializing Jinjiang was forced on her too. At the time, many web-fiction sites aimed at women were rolling out paid VIP reading, and since authors could earn money elsewhere, quite a few left Jinjiang. She felt the danger. Having once promised to hold off on commercializing for as long as she could, she nevertheless opened talks with Shanda. At the end of 2007, in her own home, the two sides came to terms: Shanda took half of Jinjiang's equity.

The sharpest difference between her and her peers is that she did not hand Shanda control. She claims she does not really know why she insisted. "At the time I honestly hadn't thought about what harm it could do. I just thought, just in case — and then I never gave an inch on it."

Huang Yanming came away with a bit over 9 million yuan. More than half went back into Jinjiang's day-to-day operating money; with the smaller remainder, plus a bank loan, she bought the building Jinjiang works in today. The space, just over 500 square meters, was exactly enough to meet the licensing requirements for reopening the Little Witch bookstore. "Only once we had that did we start hiring and working out of an office. That's when operations really began."

Huang Yanming was Jinjiang's only full-time employee then. The team was built up only as needs arose. In early 2008 Jinjiang launched paid VIP reading, which meant paying authors and producing financial statements, which is how it got finance staff. "[The team] all grew up here, slowly — changing careers, learning on the job. It's always been like that, us included: we went from business development into product."

In the future, Huang Yanming thinks she may bring in a professional manager to lead Jinjiang, but not before she finishes what she wants to do herself. One question on her mind lately is how to use algorithms and data to pull the obscure but well-written novels out of Jinjiang's enormous catalog.

China Literature, which grew out of Shanda Literature, still holds half of Jinjiang's equity, but because the two sides own equal stakes, decisions end up with management — that is, with Huang Yanming and Liu Xudong. She recalls one China Literature meeting that brought Jinjiang in only because it touched on content regulation for web fiction; when the discussion moved on to how traffic would be allocated on the QQ Reading platform, Jinjiang was shut out again. And on China Literature's official website, Jinjiang Literature City does not appear among the group's listed brands.

Huang Yanming takes pride in that position; it produces a relatively unhurried attitude. However obscure a genre is, Jinjiang treats it like any other and does not chase whatever is popular at the moment. Its editors do not ask authors to rewrite their work to fit a trend.

In an age when web-fiction sites repositioned themselves to survive — as Hongxiu Tianxiang turned itself wholesale into a home for CEO romance — that was uncommon.

Years later it turned out to be the source of Jinjiang's success. As the idea of IP adaptation caught fire in film and television, a number of Jinjiang novels were among the first works adapted. My Sunshine runs to fewer than 80,000 characters; in web fiction, where length is king, it could hardly have survived, but on Jinjiang, which still keeps room for short fiction, it found recognition. Ode to Joy, set in the workplace, ranked only in the middle of the pack on Jinjiang, yet Daylight Entertainment picked it up, and the television adaptation was a huge hit.

The clearest case is Nirvana in Fire. It was first serialized in Jinjiang's danmei section — the category for stories about love between men. Among mainstream web-fiction sites, only Jinjiang ran a section that mainstream society regards as unfit for polite company.

In the history of danmei culture in China, Jinjiang was not the first base. A site called Lucifer Club was already running in 1999. Because joining Lucifer Club meant passing a quiz, Jinjiang's forum became the place where people traded the answers. In time the forum also became a place where many people published danmei fiction — what is now the site's leisure section.

Huang Yanming's own introduction to danmei fiction was probably much like many other people's. In college she rented romance novels from a rental bookshop, and in several of them the main character was referred to as "he" rather than "she." She was baffled, until one day someone online explained what danmei was and it all made sense.

"It didn't strike me as wrong. I just understood that this was what those several books had meant," she recalls. She has no particular liking for the genre, and no dislike either. So in 2003, when Jinjiang set up its original-fiction site (later renamed Jinjiang Literature City), danmei was added as a category as a matter of course. "I think we sorted the categories quite rigorously. You have to give people something to choose from, so you list everything that ought to be there."

Because the site itself stayed neutral and acted only as a gatekeeper, Jinjiang's danmei category flourished. When Lucifer Club mishandled a plagiarism case in 2007, large numbers of its authors and users moved to Jinjiang, and Jinjiang became the most important home for original danmei fiction on the mainland.

Jinjiang's character formed along with it. For women readers, it offered a far richer choice of work, and its forum made it easier for users to talk to one another, which built stronger emotional bonds. That is how Jinjiang came to have a literary community of its own.

As Huang Yanming sees it, she is keeping Jinjiang's original atmosphere intact and "making a bit of money on the side."

She seems content with that. "There's actually plenty to do, but sometimes when I don't feel like working, I go read the forum." At Jinjiang today she handles product and content; Liu Xudong handles the rest.

Most of the time it is Liu Xudong who speaks for Jinjiang in public. A photograph of him being interviewed by CCTV News is printed on a sheet of A4 paper and stuck to an "Outstanding Employee" whiteboard in the entryway of Jinjiang's office.

The office is still the apartment Huang Yanming bought a decade ago. The front door is narrow, opening onto an entryway about four square meters across, with a cramped corridor running off each side toward different work areas. Two people meeting in the corridor have to turn sideways to squeeze past. As the light fades, desks and chairs crowd the rooms, and the longer Jinjiang keeps growing, the tighter the place feels.

Over that decade, property prices have gone up. Half-joking, Huang Yanming agrees that this is now Jinjiang's largest fixed asset. But when the talk turns to the bank loan she took out to buy it, her voice rises: "I've been paying that debt for ten years and I still haven't finished."