Issues and Advice of the Research on the Export of Chinese Web Novels: Focused on the cases of Keywords Sharing of Korean, Chinese and Japanese Web Novels

Research on the overseas export of Chinese web novels can be broadly divided into two streams. The first stream analyzes that the contents and platform operating systems accumulated by Chinese web novels in China are excellent enough to be directly applied abroad. The second stream suggests that Chinese web novels are being embraced as the novels of ‘Internet humans’ that transcending nationality, due to their Internet-based nature. However, the research that garners more attention from the Chinese side is the former. Even studies that refer to Chinese web novels as the novels of ‘Internet humans’ often premise the ‘superiority’ of Chinese web novels. This paper organizes the history of the overseas export of Chinese web novels and the context of related research, identifying that the ‘superiority’ of ‘Chinese contents’ or ‘Chinese systems’ created in mainland China is frequently presented as a factor in the growth of the overseas market for Chinese web novels. Furthermore, this paper argues that the growth of Chinese web novels in overseas markets is not merely due to the ‘superiority’ of Chinese contents or systems. Instead, it is attributed to the inherent characteristics of web novels, which candidly expose the desires of the users. This is evidenced by the overlap between the keywords of Chinese web novels and those of Korean and Japanese web novels.