Seems like Western media is using this as the latest, China cracking down on free expression narrative.
For the record, I did bother to do my research on Chinese social media to see what people were actually saying about this. In essence, contrary to the media narrative BL is only banned in China when it comes to portrayal in dramas and movies, when it comes to online literature there's tons of shit floating around and the government has bigger things to worry about than deleting them all. In this case, the writers who have been arrested are in fact writing stuff that's just straight up pornography. This activity is covered by Article 367 of the Chinese Criminal Code, which even contains a loophole in that besides for the purposes of science and education, stories with "artistic value" are allowed to some extent to potray erotica. So there are in fact ways to get around it, which is why vast majority of BL writers are not affected.
I haven't read what those arrested writers actually wrote since my Chinese isn't at the level of being able to read novels and plus they've been taken down by now. But netizens have said what they wrote does basically violate the law, since its just straight up smut and nothing else. In fact, go on to Weibo and XHS, vast majority of them actually do think their arrests are just routine enforcement of the law. However, what they do have issue with is the double standards in the enforcement of the law. You see, some of these writers have been sentence to 4-5 years in prison, but just some. Vast majority have gotten fines, though the fines range in the low thousands of US dollars which as we know for a lot of Chinese isn't a small sum of money. Meanwhile, recently there have been cases of domestic violence and animal abuse in China, where perps have gotten only 1-2 years in prison and a fine in the low hundreds of US dollars. So this is in fact what most netizens are mad about.
