The Chinese Web Novel Tag Glossary: 25 Tropes Explained

Genre tells you what kind of world a book is set in. Tags tell you what actually happens in it, and that is what Chinese readers actually search by. A reader does not want "xuanhuan", they want xuanhuan with a system, a rebirth, and no harem.

There are around 2,000 distinct tags across the six catalogues here. These are the ones worth knowing, grouped by what they do, with a link into the catalogue on the platform that uses the tag most. The book counts are listed books across all six platforms, read from the tag indexes on 9 October 2026. Faloo leans hardest on this layer of all: Power Fantasy alone is on more than half of its books. More on Faloo's tags.

Premise tags: how the story starts

These set up the whole book, and between them they account for an enormous share of Chinese web fiction.

穿越 · Transmigration: about 916,000 books. The largest single tag there is. A person is transported into another world, another era, or another person's body. Sometimes a modern reader wakes up in a novel they read, sometimes an ordinary office worker wakes up in the Tang dynasty. The appeal is asymmetry: the protagonist knows things this world does not. Browse transmigration

重生 · Rebirth: about 365,000. Transmigration's tighter cousin. You die and restart your own life, keeping everything you learned. Rebirth stories are usually about correcting a specific failure: a family that fell, a person you did not save, a stock you did not buy. Tonally they are the most bitter subgenre in Chinese web fiction and the most satisfying when they land. Browse rebirth

系统 · System: about 757,000. A game-like interface attaches itself to the protagonist and starts issuing quests, rewards, stat blocks and occasionally sarcasm. It solves the serialisation problem perfectly: an author with a system has an infinite supply of clear short-term goals. Qidian files it as 系统流, and the site labels both System. Browse system on Fanqie · on Qidian

魂穿 · Soul Transmigration: about 98,000, all on Fanqie. Specifically the soul moving into an existing body, usually one that just died, inheriting its memories and its problems. Browse

开局 · From the Start: about 83,000. A title convention as much as a tag: "开局..." means "starting out with X", and the tag marks books whose hook is entirely front-loaded into the premise. Extremely common on free platforms where the first three chapters decide everything. Browse

Structural tags: how the story feels

打脸 · Face-slapping: about 157,000. Not a genre, a scene type, and one of the load-bearing pleasures of the form. Somebody looks down on the protagonist in public. The protagonist demonstrates, in front of the same audience, that they were wrong. A book tagged 打脸 will do this on a schedule, and that is a promise rather than a criticism. Browse

爽文 · Power Fantasy: about 561,000, most of them on Faloo. The umbrella term for books built around 爽 (shuang), a word meaning refreshing, gratifying, the feeling of an itch being scratched. Shuangwen removes friction: the protagonist wins, obstacles fall on cue, and the reader is never made uncomfortable. It is the dominant mode of free-platform fiction and it is deliberate craft, not laziness. Browse

虐渣 · Scumbag Torment: about 65,000. Revenge against people who really deserve it. Overlaps heavily with rebirth, where the protagonist arrives back in time already knowing who the scum are. Browse

轻松 · Lighthearted: about 772,000, nearly all on JJWXC. Low-stakes, comedic, no grimness. A useful filter when the last four books you tried all opened with a massacre. On JJWXC it's on about a third of the catalogue, so pair it with something narrower there. Browse on JJWXC · on Qidian

无敌流 · Invincible flow. The protagonist is already at the top when the book opens. There is no power climb, and the tension comes from consequences and from people who have not yet realised. A direct inversion of the standard xuanhuan structure, and popular precisely because readers got tired of that structure.

Romance tags

甜宠 · Doting Romance: about 154,000. Romance with the manufactured misunderstandings removed. The couple gets together, they are good to each other, and the conflict is external. If you have bounced off romance because of the third-act break-up caused by nobody finishing a sentence, this tag exists for you. Browse

总裁 · CEO Romance: about 117,000. The overbearing-president romance: a cold, absurdly wealthy executive and the woman who does not defer to him. One of the single most commercially successful shapes in Chinese fiction. Also appears as 豪门总裁 (Billionaire CEO, ~118,000) and 豪门世家 (Wealthy Family, ~157,000). Browse CEO · billionaire CEO · wealthy families

宫斗宅斗 · Palace and household intrigue: about 86,000. Power struggles inside a court or a great house. Poisonings, adoptions, marriage politics, and a protagonist who wins by reading a room. The nearest Western comparison is a very cold Regency novel. Browse

纯爱 · Pure love: about 105,000 as a tag, nearly all on Fanqie. Male-male romance, the mainland term now used more widely than 耽美 (danmei). The site labels it Danmei (BL), the words English readers actually search for. On JJWXC it's a whole category rather than a tag, the second largest there. Browse on Fanqie · the JJWXC category

双男主 · Two male leads: about 86,000. Two male protagonists sharing the story, romantic or not. Browse

多女主 · Multiple heroines: about 93,000. Harem, stated plainly, and labelled Harem on the site. Worth knowing chiefly so you can exclude it, which the catalogue's tag-exclude filter will do. Faloo uses its own 后宫 tag for the same thing, on about 65,000 books. Browse

Setting tags

架空 · Alternate history: about 126,000. An invented dynasty or an invented country, historically flavoured but deliberately not any real period. Common in court fiction, where inventing the dynasty avoids a great many problems. Browse

都市 · Urban: about 673,000. Contemporary city settings. Frequently paired with a hidden power, an inherited secret, or a returning veteran. Browse

都市脑洞 · Urban high-concept: about 100,000. 脑洞 literally means "brain hole": a what-if premise pushed hard. Modern setting, one large impossible idea, everything else consistent. Browse

历史 · Historical: about 105,000. Real dynastic settings, with real names and real events. Browse

Derivative and fandom tags

A large part of the catalogue, and a category with no real Western equivalent at this scale.

衍生 · Derivative works: about 199,000. Fiction set in someone else's world.

同人 · Doujin / fanfic: about 292,000. The same idea from the Japanese term, used for fan works generally. The site labels both of these Fanfiction.

动漫衍生 · Anime derivative: about 120,000. Specifically derived from anime and manga. Labelled Anime Fanfiction.

二次元 · Two-dimensional: about 122,000. Anime-adjacent in style and sensibility rather than derived from any one property. Labelled Anime & Manga.

Derivative · Doujin · Anime derivative · Two-dimensional

Fanfiction titles also name their fandom up front, like 火影 for Naruto or 斗罗 for Douluo Dalu, and those are now translated consistently too. How the title glossary works.

How to actually use tags

The tags are where the catalogue stops being a list and starts being a query.

Combine them. The catalogue's tag filter takes several tags at once in "all" mode, so you can ask for rebirth and face-slapping and lighthearted and get the specific book you are picturing rather than a category.

Exclude them. The tag-exclude filter is the more valuable half. If harem is a hard no, exclude 多女主 once and it is gone from every search you run.

Then sort by something that means something. A tag filter plus a sort by monthly votes on Qidian, or by all-time reads on Fanqie, is the highest-yield query on this site: a specific trope, ranked by sustained readership rather than by recency. Add the Updated filter if you only want books that are still being written.

Watch out for scale. A tag with 500,000 books is a genre, not a filter. Pair a large tag with a small one, a genre, or a word-count range.

Check which platform uses it. Each platform has its own tag vocabulary, and the same idea can be a big tag on one and missing on another. Soul Transmigration, for example, is a Fanqie tag. The tag box on each Browse page only suggests tags that platform actually uses, and each platform has a tag index listing all of them with book counts: Qidian, Fanqie, JJWXC, Faloo, Qimao and Zongheng.

A note on the translations

The English tag labels on the site started out as machine translations of each platform's own Chinese tag, and some came out literal in a way that read oddly: 魂穿 was "Soul Penetration" and 架空 was "Overhead". In September every genre and tag label got a curation pass, so those now read Soul Transmigration and Alternate History, using the terms English readers already know. The Chinese is still kept beside every label, and it is still the source of truth.

The translator's glossary covers the romance and JJWXC side of the vocabulary: danmei, baihe, No CP, quick transmigration and the rest.

Start browsing: Qidian's catalogue, Fanqie's catalogue, or read what the genre words mean first.

Explore the catalogue: Qidian (novels, rankings, stats); Fanqie (novels, rankings, stats); JJWXC (novels, rankings, stats); Faloo (novels, rankings, stats); Qimao (novels, rankings, stats); Zongheng (novels, rankings, stats).