From Philosophical Research
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- In 2025, China detained BL writers for violating obscenity laws [1] [2] / China persecuted yaoi (abbreviation) -> so. this is bad, but it actually isn't as bad as it looks. it looks like this law is mainly about making money on things — China doesn't really like certain kinds of sexual literature if you make money on it. it looks like this is just another one of those heavy-handed measures to try to make sure labor and potential corporations are put into the right sectors, much like the law that inadvertently banned free open-source map datasets when it assigned the role of creating all maps to the map ministry. [3] I don't really like the heavy-handedness of these laws, arresting individuals for matters of not individually planning the divisions between government ministries with their feet correctly, but I can see the basic logic of where they come from. on the map thing, I've always thought that if you handed an OSM server to the map ministry and set up some kind of quality control to keep contributors insulated from the worst consequences (and exclude Xinjiang from the free map so it can have its own separate server or whatever other tweaks are necessary) there would probably be a way to get that fixed? and as for this. it sounds to me like there might be a loophole in it where if you aren't making money it's technically not illegal. (note: there isn't.) if that were the case, that might not be ideal for people who both want to sell books and express themselves, but it wouldn't be expression itself that's actually being prohibited, it would be "putting paid labor into prostitution" and the presence of tip jars.
this seems vaguely similar to the situation of gay prostitutes getting persecuted in Cuba. if I remember right I think they were targeted because they were taking money from First World people or something like that. two major reasons a country targets prostitutes are to try to combat the influence of foreign money (saying 'capital' is a stretch here but eh, the sex workers are a kind of 'tradesperson' in their own field, so you can call them small owners), and to move people to other industries. in the latter case they are literally just transitioned to other industries, not imprisoned. so if I had to go talk to the CPC about this I would probably say that they can make people earn money on different kinds of writing than BL but they have to let people write and distribute it for free, and they have to release people without charges if they actually give up the money.
wait. so. provinces are going and catching people in other provinces, and the central government said they're not supposed to. yeah. that happens. there are a bunch of times where people have to complain and get local officials removed. why is this suddenly the most interesting part of the article to me. I listened to a podcast about China having any number of successes coordinating between different regions. but then this stuff happens, where police departments just start bleeding people in the next province for income. what is going on?
I try so hard to steelman and promote solidarity with China and then shit like this always comes up and knocks me to the floor — the maps, the BL hunts. it makes me nervous about my own writing and my attempts to create "Communist edutainment". because, like, what I'm creating would be the opportunity of a century. assuming it ever gets finished. Ironblood is explicitly this historical-fiction narrative about history and the struggle of workers' states to survive and understanding the universe and it is just drenched in Marxism and its imagery and realizations of it and reflexive critiques of it, it's socialist realism on this grand multi-era scale, and then it just kind of has gay romance in it as a secondary theme. the first arc is this rather on-the-nose story of a gay man withdrawing from existence and beating himself up because he wants to be a good person and be part of his country but he doesn't feel like he can uphold justice or uphold Marxism if he ever thinks about having sex with men, so he just kind of isolates himself in fear people won't actually care about him and spirals and feels like he has to turn himself into an object and a tool without humanity just to achieve the ethical goal of serving society and the party that he thinks is more important than his own existence or well-being; he begins to feel better when his partner comes back and they start to see that some of the people around them do actually care and basically socialist society takes care of its people and actually functions. they try to get a gay and lesbian organization started in the USSR, only to find out various clusters of minority people are turning against their country and they have this painful task of convincing a group of women or Erzya people etc that a spontaneous tiny identity movement won't protect them better than having an ongoing country would. for reasons they end up digging into the connections between underground resistances and "official", "presentable" Trotskyism and possibly exposing the whole fucking Fourth International to all its followers in the new United Socialist States. (this doesn't end the era of Trotskyism miraculously being real, but it becomes hard for it to go knocking over countries with impunity.) I don't think the people who make these laws are expecting that anything like what I'm writing is even possible. but they should be. the reality is that when multiple countries with different histories manage to have the same shared demographics separately form inside them, the ability for somebody in one country to look across the divide of culture and language and spot the same shared identity and experience in another country is one thing that's truly international. gay and intermediate-gender communities forming in the United States and forming in China is a matter of historical materialism; getting people to accept the combination of LGBT pairings and Marxism helps people in different countries who already align with one of them to accept the other. accepting gay people is internationalism, in and of itself, because LGBT identity clusters are like a tiny nationality of their own that also happens to overlap countries and physically bridge nations. I don't know why this is so hard to understand.
case of: Q32,94 Deng Xiaoping ruined my life.
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