The founding Qidian team, an online original literature platform under Shanda’s Cloudary, officially announced the new site, a sub-site under Tencent. Yang Chen, former editor-in-chief at Qidian, is the chief editor and the former Qidian team would be in charge of the operation, as reported (in Chinese).

Yang claimed that chuangshi.qq.com had contracted with hundreds of writers, including the most popular ones, and many more were yet to come. In terms of copyrights, the newly-found site’s contracts with writers run limited years, different from the perpetual copyright held by other literature sites.

However, the site was born with two toubles. Luo Li, co-founder of Qidian, was jailed for possible embezzlement. CEO of Cloudary revealed, the former Qidian team including Wu Wenhui all signed employment prohibition contract. If the site goes alive, the prosecution is unavoidable. But Wu Wenhui tweeted on 28 May that the Luo Li hadn’t signed the contract.

The Qidian team experienced ups and downs. Mr. Luo and other members of Qidian’s founding class and management engineered an exodus in March and obtained Tencnet’s investment in May. As soon as May 23, the overall structure of Tencent literature became known: it may integrate platforms including book.qq.com, QQ Reading( based on Qzone), WAP reading platform, QQ bookstore and mobile app QQ reading.

Chelsea Dong

She reads, travels, photographs and writes, with interests in chronicling China tech scene and interpreting how technology disrupts the way people live.