Cultural GlobalA total of 40 million new overseas registered users were added in 2025, and the global influence of Chinese online literature continues to expand.
By Wang Peng, Xinhua News Agency
Recently, the 2026 China Online Literature Forum, hosted by the China Writers Association and the Publicity Department of Anhui Provincial Party Committee, and co-organized by the Online Literature Center of the China Writers Association, Anhui Writers Association, the Publicity Department of Hefei Municipal Party Committee, and the People's Government of Baohe District, Hefei, was held in Hefei, Anhui. How online literature can draw new stories from real life, bridge linguistic and cultural gaps, and preserve the unique value of literature amid the impact of short drama and artificial intelligence has become the focus of this event.
The 2025 Blue Book of China Online Literature (hereinafter referred to as the "Blue Book") released at the forum depicts the development landscape of the industry from dimensions including creation scale, reader composition, overseas communication, and IP transformation. According to statistics from 50 key online literature platforms nationwide, by the end of 2025, the total number of online literary works exceeded 33 million, with more than 35 million registered authors and a readership of 525 million, generating industry revenue of about 49 billion yuan. The huge number of authors, works and readers has made online literature a typical paradigm of new mass art and literature in the internet era. The Blue Book points out that the post-2000 generation has become the main force driving theme innovation and content reform, "silver-haired writing" has formed a new trend, and the life experiences of ordinary people are constantly entering the world of online literature.
The rise of the short-form creation trend and the all-round influence of IP transformation are reshaping the "way of telling stories" in online literature from two directions. The Blue Book notes that the development momentum of short-form online literature is stronger: the works feature faster pace, higher density, and higher requirements for narrative skills and language compactness, and their "one-time completion" publishing mode also strengthens the closure and completeness of the works. Meanwhile, in 2025, online literature authorized about 100 new long TV drama adaptations, 90 animation adaptations, 450 comic adaptations, and about 9000 short drama adaptations, a year-on-year increase of 463%. Behind the surge in numbers, IP transformation is no longer just adapting a work into another form, but continuously developing the same story world across different media.
The 2025 Online Literature IP Transformation Report "Online Literature IP Reshapes Cultural Industry Ecosystem", written by the Yangtze River Online Literature Review Center and released concurrently with the forum, further outlines this change: represented by works such as *The Ten-Day Eternity* and *Ma Surnamed Langya*, the full-industry-chain development of online literature IP has become the norm. Zhai Yujia, Vice Dean of the School of Literature of Shandong University of Technology, observed that IP development is no longer a secondary development after the completion of works, but has gradually become a factor to be considered in the early stage of creation. Short-drama-oriented narrative is also reshaping the text structure. From the early conception to subsequent transformation, the connection between literature and cultural forms such as film, television, animation and micro-short drama is moving forward and becoming closer.
As the industrial chain extends, the requirements for content quality are also raised accordingly. The above report points out that in the face of new challenges brought by media convergence and the rise of artificial intelligence, online literature platforms such as Fanqie Novel have carried out governance against homogenized and low-quality content, and promoted refined cross-media development through special incubation programs, continuously accumulating differentiated high-quality original content and expanding the reserve of domestic IP resources.
Overseas communication is one of the most concerned parts of the Blue Book. By the end of 2025, China's online literature has exported more than 130,000 works overseas in total, including more than 5,000 physical books and over 120,000 e-books; there are about 250 million registered overseas users, with 40 million new users added in 2025. Active overseas users cover more than 200 countries and regions around the world. The total daily active users of overseas online literature and related short drama platforms reach 60 million, and overseas revenue exceeds 8 billion yuan, including the short drama business of online literature platforms.
Behind the digital growth, the overseas expansion path of online literature is changing. Mao Guangcheng, Member of the Leading Party Members' Group and Secretary of the Secretariat of the China Writers Association, proposed at the forum that it is necessary to strengthen overall coordination, form joint forces with overseas platforms as the main body, and cultivate talents with international vision in creation, editing, research, translation and promotion, and industrial operation. He said that international communication should not stop at translating Chinese stories into another language, but also study the cultural habits of different markets, and enter the local daily cultural life with more localized expressions.
Selecting high-quality works from more than 33 million works, forming new literary publicity from the interaction of 525 million readers, and bringing stories with Chinese experience and shared human emotions to the world through multiple media, China's online literature is stepping out of the stage of single text output. The participating experts and practitioners believe that the next stage of overseas expansion will test not only the translation speed and platform scale, but also the original creation ability, cross-cultural understanding ability, cross-media development ability, and the patience to build a good story into a long-term IP. (Written by Kang Jiamu)
Source: Overseas Edition of People's Daily
