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Cover of Korean web novel “The Second Coming of Gluttony”, a popular read on Wuxiaworld. Picture: Breathe

How web novel site Wuxiaworld, born of the Asian-American experience, connects Western readers with Eastern fantasy fiction

  • Jingping Lai began translating wuxia web novels on fan forums while at university before creating Wuxiaworld in 2014, which now has about 1 million active users
  • The site, acquired by Korean media giant Kakao in December 2021, plans to start releasing original wuxia stories in English before they’re available in Chinese
Tamar Hermanin United States

Jingping “JP” Lai was working for the US State Department as a diplomat, assigned to locations in Malaysia, Canada and Vietnam, when he decided to turn his passion project, the English-language web novel site Wuxiaworld, into his full-time career.

“There was a lot of money flowing in and out of China and I realised eventually either I leave or [the State Department] was going to kick me out, and it wasn’t going to be a pleasant kick-out,” Lai says.

The founder and now CEO of Wuxiaworld, which he created in December 2014, left his role with the US State Department about a year into the site’s existence. Seven years after its creation, in December 2021, Wuxiaworld was acquired by South Korean media giant Kakao, via subsidiaries Kakao Entertainment and Radish Media – the latest of Kakao’s high-profile investments to expand Asian, especially Korean, language content into English-language markets, investments which now total well over US$1 billion.

Wuxiaworld was a perfect fit for Kakao, Lai says, because of its dedication to translating Asian martial-arts-oriented web novels into English, born out of Lai’s passion for wuxia, or Chinese martial arts fiction. Wuxiaworld is a multifaceted company that acts as translator, platform, distributor and, on occasion, a publishing house, he adds.

Wuxiaworld founder and CEO Jingping Lai.

Korean-translated content drives almost a quarter of the site’s revenue despite making up only about 5 per cent of Wuxiaworld’s library, which focuses mainly on Chinese content. That made Kakao’s acquisition offer too exciting to pass up, Lai says – even though Wuxiaworld has a history of buying out past business partners whose vision for the company differed from their own.

Lai is a big action and fantasy fan – he says he’s eager to watch Amazon’s new Wheel of Time show, based on Robert Jordan’s books, which he says is his favourite Western series. He moved with his parents from China to the United States when he was three years old and grew up speaking mainly English, only turning to his native tongue, Mandarin, for familial “kitchen Chinese”. When he began studying Mandarin in university, wuxia became a medium for him to connect with his cultural heritage.

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He started translating wuxia web novels on various fan forums, out of which Wuxiaworld eventually came. As reader numbers grew, Lai and his original team realised they should start getting licenses for their translated works, after which they were able to build a brand and more loyal readership.

The important shift, Lai says, was going from a YouTube, or fan creator, mindset to that of a more professional content producer, like Netflix, while maintaining some of that indie ethos. “Because we are by fans, for fans.”

It’s paid off: Lai says Wuxiaworld has retained many users since its origin. “We have pretty good user stickiness and a very good relationship with that community.”

Open communications with the community play a role in that: a 1,400-word post titled “Wuxiaworld Merger-Acquisition” was published on the site in December 2021 to lay out the site’s plans regarding the news to assuage readers’ concerns.

A screenshot of Wuxiaworld’s website, showing its most popular web novels on January 14, 2022. Picture: Wuxiaworld
Lai’s staff consists of a full-time operations team as well as contract translators and editors, located all over the world. The company itself is based in Hong Kong, for both practical and ideological reasons: Hong Kong’s history makes it relatively easy for a website targeting Western markets to make deals with Asian, especially Chinese, publishers, while the city has a unique identity important to Wuxiaworld.

“What we really do is sort of be at the crossroads of Western culture and Eastern culture, Asian culture. Hong Kong is kind of the logical place for that, right?” Lai says. “That’s literally what Hong Kong was built off of and got rich off of over the past few decades – being sort of the two-way door between Greater China and the Western world as a whole.”

Wuxiaworld has around 1 million active users, most of them male, with about 85 per cent of its revenue coming from paid monthly subscriptions, which confer benefits such as ad-free content and sneak peeks of upcoming novels. Most users come from North America, Southeast Asia and Europe.

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The website’s bare-minimum aesthetic with no flashy functions is because users come simply to read, and Lai claims the company has never spent a single dollar on marketing. The partnership with Kakao may change that, but Lai says they’re determined to keep Wuxiaworld’s focus on what it does best: providing good wuxia-oriented reads.

The company is working on a new project that will see some original wuxia stories from popular writers published on the site in English before they’re available in Chinese on China-based platforms – a bit of a 180-degree turn on the flow of content the site was originally based on.

“There’s a lot of things in flux here,” Lai says. “That’s what makes it really exciting for me.”

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