Online platforms like Webnovel greatly accelerate the spread of Chinese online literature to the English world, enthralling English readers to encounter Chinese cultures, such as martial arts, fantasies and history. Judging from the ethnographic perspective, these online platforms are online communities where readers of literary translation acquire knowledge about the other, i.e., the Chinese culture. Thus, Webnovel could be viewed as the field to conduct digital ethnographic research. With the aim to clarify the initiatives and effects relating to soft power building, this essay mainly focuses on the soft power building of the online platform Webnovel’s literary translation. Being a piece of digital ethnography, this essay demonstrates the initiatives and effects of Webnovel’s literary translation by interviewing the online platform’s users and runners, analyzing the content, comments and browsing data of Webnovel and so on. Basically, there are disparities between the values spread by online platform Webnovel’s literary translation and China’s official initiative relating to soft power in the 21st Century. The official initiative of soft power building mainly focus on the cultural influences of China, including attracting more people to be interested in Chinese culture, enhancing the overall comprehensive strength of China globally and so on. However, in terms of the goals of the online platforms like Webnovel, it is the profits and subscriber numbers that are aimed at. As for the members belonging to the online community Webnovel, it is usually the pleasure and interesting or unique plot that drive them to be the fans of Chinese online literary translation, instead of the parts of the Chinese culture that the official institutions hope to spread and build its own soft power. Nonetheless, there remains a possibility that online platforms like Webnovel could adjust its choice of literary works and writing guidance for the online writers, so that a balance might be reached between the official initiative of soft power building and the platform’s economic or developmental motivations.

Accompanied by government intervention to curb panic buying during the COVID-19 pandemic, tunhuo 囤货 (hoarding behavior) has transitioned from real space to cyberspace, prevailing as a trope in Chinese women’s survival-themed web novels on Jinjiang Literature City 晋江文学城 (hereinafter referred to as Jinjiang), a major Chinese female-oriented online platform for producing and consuming web novels. In a typical tunhuo novel, the heroine predicts doomsday events and hoards all kinds of survival supplies to navigate through diverse crises such as extreme weather and zombie outbreaks, establishing an orderly life in the disordered (post-) apocalypse. While most tunhuo novels are categorized under the romance genre on Jinjiang, the focus on negative affects–particularly anxiety–overweights romantic love within this trope. These novels intricately detail the list of survival supplies, even including specific weights and quantities, drawing inspiration from survival guides in prepper culture and survivalism. This specificity mitigates the affective milieu with heightened uncertainty in and beyond the fictional world amidst the pandemic.

This study posits that Chinese women’s production and consumption of tunhuo novels showcase Chinese women’s affective labor in contemporary online writing platforms during the pandemic crisis. Drawing on text and discourse analysis of several most representative tunhuo novels on Jinjiang and reader-reader/author-reader communication in the comment section attached to those novels, this study explores the dynamic and multifaceted relationship between literature and technology. On the one hand, authors exert sensitivity and creativity to stitch their quotidian affects into the fabric of survival fantasy, while readers expand the discussion of plots to their everyday hoarding experiences that provoke emotional resonance in the attached comment section. In this sense, online writing platforms provide Chinese women with a virtual community to resist the physically isolated pandemic life. On the other hand, whether affects embedded in the novels or expressed as fan labor in the forms of rating, commenting, and reviewing, are all commodified as cultural products on Jinjiang. Also, Jinjiang can easily exploit the prevailing negative affects of the pandemic for better social traffic by increasing the visibility and discoverability of tunhuo novels via algorithms. Overall, along with Chinese women’s affective labor around tunhuo novels, this study reveals how affects are circulated and manipulated with the contemporary convergence of literature and technology. It examines to what extent affects in literature can gather the momentum that helps transcend the current and future crises in the post-digital age. Besides, given that the previous studies on Chinese internet literature have explored romantic affects and desires, this study expands existing research by illuminating the non-romantic affects in Chinese internet literature.

The trope of the "docile husband" (娇夫文学) has emerged as a new form of soft masculinity, wherein men adopt submissive and vulnerable roles in their relationships with dominant partners. While this trope contrasts with the hegemonic ideal of masculinity, it has not received as much criticism as other forms of gender nonconformity, partly because it is perceived as a form of masculinity that reflects a progressive societal stance on gender equality. It not only reflects a shift in gender roles but also represents a form of resistance to hegemonic expectations.

The docile husband trope is prevalent in Chinese digital culture, such as web novels, TV dramas, and social media. This trope also appears across Asian cultural contexts, with examples such as the Korean film My Sassy Girl (2001) and the 2024 television drama Queen of Tears. However, the recent discussion on the docile husband trope in Chinese media is shaped by the unique intersections between streaming platform, social media, reality television, and fan-driven online culture. Building on Song Geng’s influential framework of Chinese masculinity, this paper explores how such male representations are not only a response to traditional gender norms but also a way of reimagining masculinity in the context of China. In particular, this study asks the question of how media formats like reality television and social media converge and contribute to the portrayal of vulnerability and docility in men, and what this reveals about the extent of fluidity of masculinity in contemporary Chinese culture.

Using Liu Shuang, a popular figure from the reality TV show See You Again Season 4 (2024-2025), and his curated "docile husband" persona on Weibo as a case study, this research examines the ways in which the "docile husband" trope is constructed, performed, and received in today’s Chinese digital culture through critical discourse analysis. Henry Jenkins’ idea of media convergence is integral to understanding how soft masculinity is articulated in digital spaces. Online audiences actively engage with media texts, creating a participatory culture where fans actively negotiate and reshape representations of Chinese masculinity.

By examining Liu’s online persona and audience interpretations of the docile husband on platforms like Weibo and Douban, this paper situates this form of soft masculinity within a broader cultural framework that draws on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, in understanding how the "docile husband" trope functions as a deliberate performance of masculinity, one that both resists and perpetuates the traditional ideals of masculinity. Through this analysis, the study illustrates how reality TV and social media have become sites of active negotiation and transformation of gender politics within the digital media landscape in China.

This presentation explores the Japanese isekai genre through the lens of Rhetorical Genre Studies, emphasizing its role as a form of social commentary and means of self-actualization for both writers and readers. Isekai narratives clearly reflect societal critiques, as evidenced by the dichotomy between the protagonists’ inability to self-actualize in contemporary Japan and their success in doing so within isekai worlds. This function of the genre was initially supported by an online participatory culture through web novel submission sites and their communities, which were free from the constraints of the traditional publishing industry. This study explores how the creation and consumption of isekai, facilitated by online participatory culture, aid in the self-actualization of both writers and their audience, a function made possible by the "age of fiction/age of the self," as developped by Mita Munesuke and Miyadai Shinji, where fictional content and real-life events are given equal value in fostering psychological balance and self-actualization.