[Photo by Wang Xiaoying / China Daily]

Pornography is illegal in China, a rule that extends to erotic literature, and e-publishers have to work hard to stay ahead of the booming underground market in provocative writing. Mei Jia reports.

E-publishing has meant new content is available on a daily basis for ferocious readers, but for Web-lit editors like Li Xiaoliang, the rapid pace of publishing means he must check hundreds of e-books a day to ensure they are free of "pornography" and other illegal content.

Li and his colleagues are assisted by computer programs to scan the books, but they still need to add new words or new combinations of words into the system every day to stay ahead of the porn writers.

It can be a fine line between art and porn, and the Chinese language includes many clever puns to make that line even trickier to detect. Li, who worked under the name Hu Shuo for Chuangshi Literature under Tencent Inc, believes he has refined his skills in detecting inappropriate online content over 10 years of experience.

"To us, content that violates Chinese laws and regulations and harms public moral values should be banned on our website," Li says. "In some complicated cases, all editors need to have a discussion to decide (what is inappropriate).

"But we know that generally, historical novels and hardcore sci-fi is safer than urban white-collar love stories. Because as writers develop their stories into a series, they have less potential to be porn than, say, stories featuring a male protagonist with a skill that helps him to attract almost every woman he meets."

Online literature boasted 274 million readers by the end of 2013, according to the latest report by the China Internet Network Information Center. More than 2 million registered writers upload millions of stories every day, the report says.