Hey Tumblr friends! @alliumms and I are excited to bring you translations of a series of five short stories written by MXTX during her student days. These early stories are equal parts entertaining and thought-provoking, and contain many incipient themes that can later be found in her novels.
So far we have translated two stories: "A Three-Day Chronicle" (translated by @alliumms) and "The Seer" (translated by me). We have posted the stories on AO3 and will be updating our translation of the other three stories in the near future.
Below is the link to the stories, hope you guys enjoy!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
But online misogyny is only one corner of a much bigger problem
full article below cut
To get a flavour of how some university-educated male influencers in China think, log on to Zhihu, a social-media platform, and find the account of someone who calls himself Peng Huitang. Mr Peng has 50,000 followers and regularly spews vitriol at modern women. “Young women brainwashed by feminist thinking became increasingly man-hating, which then evolved into the idea that men are born owing women something,” he rants.
Another man, who goes by the name Ying Yueyong, in a post viewed 4m times on Bilibili, a video platform, issued “a rallying cry to men to no longer remain silent in the face of years of bullying and to rise up in resistance”. He slips in some of the nationalism popular with such influencers: “Extreme feminism is a common choice favoured by academic cliques and foreign forces.” Welcome to the Chinese manosphere. (Neither Mr Peng nor Mr Ying accepted a request for an interview.)
Like most countries, China has lots of online communities of unmarried men. Some are angry nationalists. Some are hardcore misogynists who post messages claiming that society favours women, whom they believe should stay in the kitchen and the bedroom. There is plenty of overlap. Many of them remain anonymous. Tellingly, however, there is no direct translation of the word “manosphere” in Chinese. That is because the online anger of Chinese men is only the most hostile expression of a more widespread frustration felt by tens of millions of men, online and offline. Traditional patriarchal values remain much more deeply rooted than in the West, and feminism is a more recent phenomenon. Involuntarily celibate men are struggling to adapt to the changing dynamics of gender relations.
In Western democracies, right-wing populists aside, there is plenty of opprobrium towards the manosphere. In China, traditional masculinity and anti-feminist rhetoric have long had substantial support from the Communist Party. The Communist Youth League has said “extreme feminism” (which it does not define, but generally includes anything that encourages activism or conflict and discourages women from getting married and having children) is a “cancer” afflicting the internet. Despite the fact that Mao Zedong famously said that “women hold up half the sky”, the party has regularly cast feminism as a destabilising, insidious foreign force.
China does have unique problems. The most obvious is the effect of its one-child policy that ran from 1980 to 2015. This led to the abortion of many female fetuses and thus a surplus of adult males today, many of whom struggle to couple up. The number of surplus men, known as guanggun, or bare branches, is huge. By 2027 there will be 22.5m more marriage-age men than women. That translates into 119 men of marriage age for every 100 women of that age; in 2012 the ratio was 105 to 100.
Young women are also increasingly well educated: they often have more qualifications than men. By 2024, they made up 51% of higher-education students, up by 14 percentage points from 20 years earlier. This younger generation of women benefited from the one-child policy, as resources were funnelled towards only daughters. And, while urban Chinese women have been able to shed more of their burdensome traditional roles, men are expected to continue upholding many of their own. To marry, it is considered essential that a man first owns a flat; many will be asked to pay a “bride price” to the bride’s family.
Lan Zhaoxia, a matchmaker in Langfang, just outside Beijing, says the demographic shift has thrown the marriage market off kilter. She builds databases of young men and women that include details such as their parents’ pension status. Now, however, the odds are so stacked against rural male migrants that she does not accept them as clients. “Since all the village girls have gone to school, there are now more ordinary boys in rural areas and more outstanding girls in the city,” she says. Women want to marry up, while men want to marry down or just find an obedient girl. “The gap is huge.”
One of those frustrated rural men is Mr Zhao, who is tucking into a lunch of noodles near the car-parts factory in Hebei province where he works. The unmarried 27-year-old often scrolls through social-media posts arguing about the status of men and women. He points to a big debate about a widely publicised ruling on marital rape last year. “When something happens, it’s always the woman who’s portrayed as the wronged party.” Another discussion prompts him to ask why, if the sexes are equal, he should have to give up his bus seat to a woman. He appears resigned to the fact that he may not find a wife.
Debates about China’s manosphere focus a lot on economic issues. Poorer men like Mr Zhao face immense economic pressure. Online, they use the term baojinbi, or “exploding gold coins”, to describe women wringing them dry by demanding expensive dates, gifts and bride prices. Research by Minhee Chae of Nankai University and Zhang Dandan of Peking University found that more than 30% of young male migrants who intend to marry think they only have a 50% or lower chance of doing so by the age of 30. They estimate that a young migrant worker would have to save every penny for six years to afford the average bride price of 127,300 yuan ($18,780).
The backlash is not just about women, says Sara Liao of Pennsylvania State University. Men want “to vent their anger, frustrations, precarities regarding their life status, regarding the general economic and cultural environment”. The safest outlet is attacking the opposite sex, especially since doing so aligns with what the government itself is saying.
Under President Xi Jinping, “sissy men” have been banned from appearing on television, while traditional marriage and childrearing have been promoted. Belatedly, however, leaders are also becoming aware that intensifying xingbie duili, or “gender antagonism” may be setting the scene for broader social instability. They are trying to tackle some of the root causes of male anger, for instance by intensifying campaigns against the practice of bride prices. Most of all they worry about plunging marriage and birth rates. In the first quarter of this year China registered just 1.7m marriages, half the number compared with the same period in 2017.
And it is not just the government that blames feminism and gender antagonism on foreign forces. Griffin Liu, a sports teacher, who is 35, is still looking for a wife. “Chinese people receive Chinese education and ideas,” he says. But now the internet is bringing new Western thinking. “The two are in conflict.”
Gender antagonism is frequently in the news. Last year, a legal ruling in favour of a male Wuhan University student accused by a female student of masturbating in front of her became a lightning rod for men’s concerns about feminist overreach and women’s concerns about a lack of clarity in defining sexual harassment. In 2024, after a gaming influencer nicknamed “fat cat” committed suicide, netizens doxxed his former girlfriend and cast her as a gold-digger who sent him to his grave.
In a country where much is censored online, misogyny is less likely to be silenced. Instead online censors are more likely to target feminist posts that are judged to be advocating buhun buyu (unmarried and childless) lifestyles. Last year the cyberspace regulator’s campaign to crack down on harmful content specifically listed “extreme feminism”, including posts that promoted singledom or gender antagonism. Weibo, China’s answer to X, last year added “inciting gender antagonism” (which is usually blamed on feminists) as grounds for reporting content; the company said it punished 15,000 accounts for this offence and deleted 640,000 relevant posts.
Xiong Xiaoneng, a 40-year-old consultant in Beijing, is one more man yet to find a wife. He partly blames the rise of microdramas, which he says create unrealistic expectations. He thinks women want to be like Wu Zetian, a seventh-century empress portrayed as the archetypal girl boss on screen. His hometown of Guilin has seen a boom in businesses catering to single women, such as shows with shirtless male performers. Men like him are trapped unhappily in their singlehood, he says, while women seem to be enjoying theirs.
hey :) i've been trying to find a fan trans of this danmei but i can't seem to find the completed version anywhere. do u have any tips on how i can search for it? the completed version isn't on novelupdates. sorry to ask this but i've been looking for a while but can't seem to find it. i'm not on twt and i wonder if that's why? the novel is 300 years of longing btw.
Hi! I think the fan trans was most likely taken down after the official publication of the novel, so I won't be surprised if it doesn't exist anymore. You can buy the official English edition of the novel from Amazon which is much easier than searching for the fan translation everywhere. I'm not good at finding stuff online so if anyone knows where to look, feel free to chip in
The funniest thing about messaging with old people in China (of any gender) is that they keep sending you the flower emoji🌹- sometimes they send you a couple of them like they're giving you a bouquet of roses for no reason - probably because they think 🌹has the equivalent function of a smiley face
was just reading this paper by Xi Tian that describes the current scene of Chinese danmei fandom as a "dystopian carnival" and it's honestly pretty accurate
watching Person Of Interest in 2025 is so strange… like damn, their idea of what the AI apocalypse would look like seems so much cooler than what we’ve got going on right now. they thought we’d have a supercomputer battle to the death, but actually it’s just annoying billionaire tech bros making google images utterly useless by slurping up a bajillion gallons of water every microsecond.
Looking back at this post I feel like I didn't articulate my thoughts well - what I really wanted to do is not to comment on the quality of MDZS translation (because I haven't read it except for fragments), but to explain that localisation in translation isn't always what readers think it is.
Let's take as an example one line spoken by a dragon prince from a story set in fantasy ancient China:
translation version 1: Those ignorant humans sure know how to tell tall tales.
translation version 2: Those ignorant humans sure know how to bullshit.
Now which line do you think is more localised? Version 2 might sound tonally jarring given the setting, and it might seem more localised because it uses modern slang, but it's actually a more literal translation of the original sentence 這些無知的人類真會放狗屁, and this is because, as I explained in that other post, Chinese internet fiction frequently mixes contemporary slang with archaic language, which isn't something readers of English fiction are used to. So internet slang in historical/fantasy danmei doesn't always equal more localisation; on the contrary, an English translation of historical/fantasy danmei that reads tonally very consistent and which always uses language appropriate to the historical setting might actually be the result of localisation.
I think Xie Lian didn't turn into Jun Wu not only because he's truly kind, but more importantly because he doesn't really care about other people's opinions of him, unlike Jun Wu. While Jun Wu does everything perfectly to please everyone in exchange for everyone's love, appreciation, and worship, he invariably starts throwing his toys out of the pram whenever he doesn't receive the 100% approval and appreciation he expects. "I've done everything perfectly and try to be as perfect as possible for everyone to please you all, so why don't you love and worship me wholeheartedly? Without your approval, how would I know I'm good? I will punish anyone who doesn't love me as they should, by god I will punish you all!" is probably what goes on in Jun Wu's mind, and eventually he became a monster filled with resentment. While Xie Lian has reached this very zen state of mind where he's like "people don't like me? Welp, ig that's just how it is. Anyway -" And not hinging his self-worth on other people's approval is how he managed to maintain sanity and follow his inner moral laws.
Question for you, what do you think is considered good prose in chinese? I've been reading a ton of xianxia recently, and while I can recognize differences between two writing styles I have no reference for which is "better" from a technical perspective. Just curious what your thoughts on it are.
Hi! If we're talking about xianxia then good prose usually comes from someone with good knowledge of classical Chinese. This is why nobody writes like Jin Yong anymore because in order to do that, you'll have to be a scholar of classical texts yourself from a family renowned for generations of scholars who were schooled in the premodern Chinese education system where reading Chinese classics was their whole trade. Kids still learn classical Chinese in school these days but it's not even considered to be as important as learning English.
But outside xianxia there're different rules, if you read some modern canonical writers like Mo Yan and Jia Pingwa, you'll find that their language can be quite crude, vulgar, and violent. Since they're writing about social events around the time of the Cultural Revolution, there's this idea that rough and violent language is needed to write about rough and violent times.
And if you read important writers from the early 20th century like Lao She, Ba Jin or Lu Xun, they'd deliberately use language that's more modern and colloquial and less literary, because they want to use modernised language to write about a China in the throes of modernisation, and they want to turn the spotlight on the common people instead of the elites.
So I would say there's no standard for good prose in Chinese, it's all about whether you have something to say about society and human nature.
Went to a big bookstore selling lots of manga and danmei novels and lurked there for 15 minutes to see what everyone's buying. Most people were only there for the manga and didn't pay attention to the danmei novles at all, there was only one girl I saw who stood in front of the danmei section for a long time. ig not a lot of people know about danmei yet, guys we still have a long way to go💪
In 2000, the British literary critic James Wood coined an infectious new term, "Hysterical Realism", to describe bulky, zany contemporary Anglophone novels written by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Zadie Smith or David Foster Wallace: "books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being." By vandalising plausibility through their perpetual chaotic motion, Wood felt, these novels destroy the possibility of meaningful ethical utterance. He pleaded instead "for novels that tell us not 'how the world works' but 'how somebody felt about something' - indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings)."
- "Finding a Place: Mainland Chinese Fiction in the 2000s," Julia Lovell
I miss the period when c-ent was making those drama's with just sheer determined scrappiness on a shoestring budget, uncertain whether they would reach a bigger audience, but making them with a lot of conviction and heart, anyway.
Suffering from insomnia so here I go ranting again - I've been seeing this take floating around the fandom that "MXTX's works are a gateway to danmei because they're easy to follow and less complex, but once you've familiarised yourself with the gateway works, you'll go on to find harder and more sophisticated danmei." Actually most danmei works are equally easy for Chinese readers. We're talking about popular online fiction here, not some esoteric linguistic puzzle from Dream of the Red Chamber. By saying "equally easy" I'm also including books like QJJ - if you're a Chinese kid and a big reader, you've most likely read the four great classics before you've turned 15, so don't expect Chinese readers to find books like QJJ complicated. So this idea that "MXTX is the gateway because her books are easy" doesn't really hold up imo, as I do not find MXTX less sophisticated or less grown-up than other danmei works; different danmei authors have different strengths, that's all. MXTX is the gateway not because she's easy, but because she's popular enough in China for international readers to learn about her first among all the danmei authors.
