China’s Web Novels and the Return of Serial Literature

A joke forced through translation is one of the saddest cultural objects. The words may survive, the syntax might remain obedient, even the little trap by which the punchline is meant to spring from can seem mechanically intact, and yet the joke lies lifeless before its audience. Dead. This is usually described, politely, as a loss of nuance, as though what is missing from the recipe is some form of local spice. However, the opposite may be closer to the truth. If that je ne sais quoi is not what fails to cross the border, then we are dealing with the very form of life itself. Its rhythm, its timing, tacit social complicity, all of which allow that nuance to strike, rather than simply mean. Storytelling presents the same difficulty. Plots can be summarised, books translated, genres exported, meaning it is often assumed that stories travel well. Yet the history of the novel reveals a less convenient fact: stories do not only travel as narrative, but as habits of reading, including the older serial discipline of waiting and returning.

There is a tendency to imagine literature as bound and complete. A finished object, to be purchased, owned and placed neatly on a shelf. It feels natural, almost inevitable. Yet historically, this is somewhat of an illusion. For much of the nineteenth century, readers in Europe did not encounter novels in this format at all. More often than not, it arrived in pieces. A good example of this is Dickens’ Great Expectations, which began as a serial in 1860. His body of work is so bound to the form that all fifteen of his novels first appeared serially. It is important to highlight, however, that this format was not a prelude, but rather the real object itself, or at least one of its fullest historical expressions: rhythmic, incomplete and dependent on return. People often wandered to the newsstand for the next installment. 

The modern reader has been taught to confuse literary value with closure. A serious work is imagined as a whole, self-contained and almost architectural in design. Serial novels, though, remind us that literature has long lived by suspense and interruption. Current public opinion describes fragmented attention and episodic reading as a symptom of cognitive decline, with the digital as its catalyst. Yet, this participatory impatience may in fact indicate the return of an older tacit complicity between reader and writer. Oxford describes serial publication as more than a market mechanism: it is a form that fostered “active reading” and reflected historically specific experiences of time and circulation. The point goes beyond the fact that people consumed stories in “chunks”. Those “chunks” changed the relationship between story and everyday life, weaving narrative more directly into the rhythms of ordinary experience. If that relationship existed once before, then it might very well re-emerge. 

This is one reason China’s web novels deserve to be taken far more seriously in Europe than they usually are. Too often filed away as guilty pleasures or commercial excess —  genre machinery operating at an industrial scale. However, what appears excessive from the outside may be precisely what makes it work. The scale alone should not be mistaken for evidence of literary emptiness or lack of seriousness. If anything, it reveals that said form solves a fundamental issue of engagement. China’s reading ecosystem is vast. According to an official 2025 report published on the portal of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, the number of digital readers in China reached 670 million in 2024. In the same period, online literature revenue reached 49.55 billion CNY, with overseas revenue continuing to rise as Chinese stories reached wider global circulation. Alongside these market statistics is the more important realisation that millions of readers have once again accepted the discipline and pleasure of serial literature. 

An important distinction should be made regarding Chinese web fiction:  It is not simply content that happens to exist online, but rather the product of constant engagement with the digital ecosystem. Comment sections, fan communities, reward systems all form part of a pressurised environment that changes how these stories develop. A recent Humanities and Social Sciences Communications article on contemporary Chinese web novels describes them as part of a much longer development in popular narrative rather than a sudden rupture. The same journal hosts studies on transmedia science fiction in China, arguing that participatory culture has expanded both creative imagination and reader involvement, solidifying the format. In other words, the previously mentioned diagnosis about how digital environments negatively affect literature is not as accurate as it seems. On the contrary, the digital chapter in human history is restoring to literature the contingency and responsiveness that the prestigious paperback had hidden. 

Benedict Anderson’s broader argument about print culture and imagined communities comes to mind. For Anderson, print culture mattered because it helped produce the conditions under which dispersed readers could imagine themselves as contemporaries, belonging to the same collective life. The serial has always been one of the forms by which a reading public comes to feel itself as an actual public, with a “print capitalism” enabling the emergence of shared “mass reading publics.” Readers dispersed in space encounter the same instalment and have the means to discuss the same turn of plot and anticipate the same continuation. Although the technology shifts from a magazine stall to a smartphone screen, the choreography remains recognisable. What nineteenth-century Europe once organised through the newspaper and the monthly issue, contemporary China has reorganised through the platform and the update feed. 

The cultural exchange stemming from Chinese web novels must, however, surmount the translation wall. Translation itself is necessary, but often insufficient. A web novel does not travel intact merely because its words are translated effectively; it requires those aspects of temporality, anticipation and its surrounding communal life. At first glance, what travels most easily are genres. Fantasy, wuxia, romance, dystopia, these labels arrive already half translated, but form travels more slowly. Or rather, it travels badly unless the receiving culture has some structure ready to receive it. Before turning to Europe, though, it is worth asking why the form could take root so powerfully in China in the first place. Episodic or chaptered storytelling is not an alien import suddenly delivered via smartphones to Chinese audiences. Classical Chinese fiction had already developed narrative worlds such as Journey to the West. One of the great novels from the Ming period is itself organised across one hundred chapters, and according to the Association for Asian Studies, has proven remarkably adaptable across audiences and media. The article notes how widely the work has been reproduced in forms ranging from opera and comics to film and interpretative dancing. 

It is therefore easy to see how an extremely malleable and responsive literary format thrives in an equally responsive digital medium. These web novels are accessible on the train, during lunch breaks, in bed before sleep. So is the community, with its predictions and explicit desires about the direction of the story. Platforms such as Qidian (and its international counterpart WebNovel) do not merely host stories; they are a social network with literature at their centre. One 2024 study notes Qidian is amongst the largest online reading platforms worldwide, with more than 30 million registered readers and more than a million stories available. Through it, a work such as Lord of the Mysteries (written by alias author Cuttlefish) with thousands of chapters is not merely in demand, it becomes part of the reader's routine for years. 

The European literary field, however, remains structurally different. China’s digital reading space benefits from an immense shared written language, highly integrated platforms, and a concentrated domestic market. Europe, by contrast, is split across languages, publishing cultures/traditions, national canons, pricing systems, and uneven digital infrastructures. Even when attempts are made, there is rarely a single literary space in which serial fiction can circulate at a comparable speed or scale. A novel that thrives in Chinese because thousands or millions of readers can meet its release in real time must pass, in the old continent, through multiple acts of delay. Translation, market testing, genre reframing, cultural mediation… By the time it arrives, it may already have been converted back into something safer and more familiar, namely the isolated text detached from the social rhythm that led it to such expanse. 

The main risk is that Europe receives the corpse of the original form. Yet, rather than “becoming China” or replicating the Chinese model, Europe needs to recognise this cultural shift with a strange degree of familiarity, given installments and publics of anticipation are nothing new. The main benefit Europe can reap from an increased cultural exchange with China is a revitalised sense of awareness for possibilities it once knew and mistook for obsolete. There are already signs of this exchange becoming more self-aware. The EU’s own literary initiatives in China have increasingly framed literature as a field of dialogue (as opposed to a passive cultural display). 

The numbers suggest this cultural exchange will only become more pressing. Reuters reported in 2025 that overseas users of Chinese online literature had reached 352 million across more than 200 countries, with especially strong growth in Britain, Greece, Spain, France and Germany. However one interprets these figures, they certainly indicate that Chinese serial fiction is no longer a niche curiosity on the edge of global culture. The EU Delegation to China, announcing the  8th EU-China Literary Festival, described it as an invitation for European and Chinese authors to exchange views on contemporary literary trends and open a door onto diversity. Chinese web literature now operates in the international literary environment to which Europe must respond. 

From all of this, a story comes to mind: During the late 19th century and the early 20th century, artists excluded from the Paris Salon in turn rejected the academicist and state-sponsored traditional styles common at the time. Realising they had the means to do so, characters such as Monet and Manet organised their own exhibitions. A boom in style and breadth followed, giving us post-impressionism, fauvism, cubism, modernism, and allowing a wider range of works to be institutionalised. However, traditional art still had a space and a following. Assuming the form of online serial novels represents the exact future of literature is both too dramatic and too naïve. Being an art form, literature rarely has a single format. It mutates, overlaps and revives. The more valuable question is what Chinese web novels tell us about storytelling under contemporary conditions, and what Europe is prepared to do with that revelation. If literature once again becomes something episodic, social, portable and uninterrupted, then much like with the modernisation of art, an explosion in style and creativity might be upon us.

The lesson these web novels provide is that literature may always have been closest to itself when it was not entirely complete, when it arrived in portions and asked its readers to keep company with it. The chapter, after all, is a promise before it is a unit, and promises travel differently from books. What is found between the Europe-China exchange is a renewed sense of what literary life and culture can look like in a high-speed digital age. More porous, less monumental and less a possession than a shared event unfolding in time.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author(s) alone and do not necessarily reflect those of European Guanxi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leonard Rus is a researcher working at the intersection of society cognition and politics. He holds a BA in Architecture and Urbanism, where his research on the effects of inherited policy and material context on political polarization earned him the Deans Award for Achievement. He is currently coursing an MSc in Science, Technology and Policy at the University of Zurich, and works as a Policy Analyst with Amnesty International, while dedicating a large part of his free time to teaching Mathematics and Art. Speaking 5 languages and two dialects, Leonard has spent his entire life mediating different cultural contexts through dialogue and immersion. 

This article was edited by Alice Baravelli and Kai Moreno Momiejo.

Featured Image:  Inside D30 Train / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License / Free for use