Pornography and adult content have long been taboo in China but intrepid mainlanders keep coming up with imaginative ways and means to cash in on a lucrative online market that was globally worth more than US$76 billion (HK$592.8 billion) last year.
Some do it with words, others with videos – and carefully crafted personas and tales of their lives. Take the case of a 38-year-old cross-dresser from Nanjing who became an internet sensation after he was arrested last month for distributing obscene material online.
Dubbed "Red Sister" or "Nanjing Sister Hong," the man, whose last name is Jiao, allegedly seduced thousands of men by posing as a woman on social media, using wigs, heavy make-up and voice-altering apps to complete the illusion.
Hidden cameras reportedly recorded the encounters that were later sold through a video-sharing group, earning him more than 500,000 yuan (HK$546,508).
Red Sister's fall comes on the heels of reports that police had detained dozens of young women authors in a genre of gay erotica widely known in Asia as "boys' love" during a nationwide crackdown on online pornography since March this year.
One of them said she "never imagined 300,000 clicks and 4,000 yuan in royalties accumulated by those obscure words over time would become criminal evidence."
The writers, in their 20s and early 30s, published their work on Haitang Literature City, a pay-to-read platform specializing in erotic fiction about gay love that's popular with women and only accessible through virtual private networks or VPNs.
But Red Sister is no trailblazer when it comes to crafting an online persona to cash in on adult content in China.
More than four years ago, a woman called HongKongDoll made her debut on Pornhub with masked videos before moving to OnlyFans.
For the uninitiated, Pornhub is the world's biggest adult pornography site, attracting over four billion visits every month while OnlyFans – the second largest – is a subscription-based site where users pay creators directly.
The 27-year-old HongKongDoll is said to have made a killing by claiming she was a Hongkonger, a rarity on the site, though she was later revealed to be a mainlander from HangZhou.
While OnlyFans hosts 4.2 million female content creators, there are just a few thousand Chinese and a few dozen Hongkongers, according to reports.
"I actually believed she was from Hong Kong because she speaks fluent Cantonese," said Benjamin Yang, a civil servant in Jiangsu.
HongKongDoll has reportedly earned about US$10.79 million, charging US$9.49 for 31 days of access, US$28.47 for three months and US$101.90 for a full year.
Yang says her persona is not her sole selling point. "She carefully designs her scripts and it's like following a well-developed character than an adult star," he said.
HongKongDoll also uploads clips to Pornhub to drive traffic to her OnlyFans account, and shares snippets of her daily life on X, formerly Twitter.
Figures about China's adult content market are hard to find and porn and erotic content is usually accessible only through VPNs, but in 2017 it was estimated that over 400,000 mainlanders were involved in erotic video content generating billions of yuan annually.
Mainland Pornhub knock-off 91Porn was reported to have over 15 million monthly visits as of 2022.
Some adult content creators reportedly earn six-figure monthly incomes by selling explicit content to private groups on WeChat or Telegram.
And while sex sells, novelty helps, said Lydone Lin, a university student in Nanjing.
"This market is saturated and you need some kind of uniqueness," he added.
Ashes Kang, a postgraduate student in Shanghai, agrees, citing the case of Taiwanese math teacher Chang Hsu, who gained fame on Pornhub by uploading tutorials where women in revealing outfits helped clean the blackboard.
Though the content is not pornographic, his channel has over 20,000 subscribers. In 2021 he reportedly earned over NT$7.5 million (HK$1.97 million) from selling online math courses.
Some make a name through cosplay-inspired themes. Mainlander Miao Xiaoji, who gained fame in Japan for her revealing close-ups, uses nine hashtags on X and calls herself "Stormborn Bodhisattva," a playful mix of Daenerys Targaryen's character from the hit television series Game of Thrones and local erotic slang.
Miao, who was reportedly arrested last year, was said to have earned as much as 300,000 yuan a month.
The adult content market - which includes games, videos, audio, literature and live performances - was worth US$76.17 billion last year, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com. It is expected to be worth nearly US$120 billion by the end of the decade.
CICI CAO
