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 1,360 distinct tags in this catalogue. These are the ones worth knowing, grouped by what they do, with the book count each carries and a link into the catalogue.

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 520,000 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 171,000. 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 293,000. 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. Also written 系统流. Browse system · system-flow variant

魂穿 · Soul transmigration — about 68,000. Specifically the soul moving into an existing body, usually one that just died, inheriting its memories and its problems. Browse

开局 · The opening — about 54,000. 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 110,000. 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 · Satisfying fiction. 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.

虐渣 · Punishing scum — about 55,000. Revenge against people who genuinely deserve it. Overlaps heavily with rebirth, where the protagonist arrives back in time already knowing who the scum are. Browse

轻松 · Lighthearted — about 63,000. Low-stakes, comedic, no grimness. A genuinely useful filter when the last four books you tried all opened with a massacre. Browse

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 · Sweet pampering — about 98,000. 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 — about 97,000. 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 (rich CEO, ~78,000) and 豪门世家 (wealthy family, ~62,000). Browse CEO · rich CEO · wealthy families

宫斗宅斗 · Palace and household intrigue — about 69,000. 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 78,000. Male-male romance, the mainland term now used more widely than 耽美 (danmei). Browse

双男主 · Two male leads — about 65,000. Two male protagonists sharing the story, romantic or not. Browse

多女主 · Multiple heroines — about 63,000. Harem, stated plainly. Worth knowing chiefly so you can exclude it, which the catalogue's tag-exclude filter will do. Browse

Setting tags

架空 · Alternate history — about 71,000. 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 217,000. 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 66,000. 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 82,000. Real dynastic settings, with real names and real events. Browse

Derivative and fandom tags

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

衍生 · Derivative works — about 133,000. Fiction set in someone else's world.

同人 · Doujin / fanfic — about 127,000. The same idea from the Japanese term, used for fan works generally.

动漫衍生 · Anime derivative — about 77,000. Specifically derived from anime and manga.

二次元 · Two-dimensional — about 58,000. Anime-adjacent in style and sensibility rather than derived from any one property.

Derivative · Doujin · Anime derivative · Two-dimensional

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.

Watch out for scale. Tags are catalogue-wide, so 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.

A note on the translations

Every English label here is machine-translated from the platform's own Chinese tag, with the Chinese kept beside it throughout the site. Some translations are literal in a way that reads oddly: 魂穿 comes out as "Soul Penetration", 架空 as "Overhead". The Chinese is the source of truth, and the English is there so you can find the tag at all.

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