Well, I said this before, many Vietnamese netizen reading Chinese internet novels (from Qidian, Zongheng ... etc), we used software to tranlaste them into Vietnamese.
You know, with huge population netizen, Chinese has huge number of online writer, and so huge novel resource in many section like fantasy, martial arts, romantic, science, horror ...
With a close tie in Sino-sphere culture which content China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam , so it has some influence on our reading and watching hobby.
First was romantic of martial arts fiction in 1960, from 1990, movies and TV series films of TVB (HongKong) were very popular and wide spread. (I like those films, some very good)
From 2000s, when Internet was become wide spread, for the youth, it's Japanese anime and Manga at first, then K-pop wave was come and popular in all Asian countries.
The popularity of Chinese online novel come after 2005, I think so, after a time,
Huang Yi and
Xiao Ding 's fictions become popular, a new wing for Wuxia fiction, and was translated to Vietnamese. (Chinese martial arts Comic also become good stuff to read and wide spread)
It's need time to translate, but readers was so hungry for new chapter, so some was create automatic translator software, and like I said, with so easy to got new stuff for reading, Chinese novel become wide spread, just like manga, anime from Japan or Korean's movies and TV show.
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But like
@BoQ77 , it's main reason to become popular because "goodness", not because cultural tie, so if it was good and free things, so we enjoy it. (thought I and many readers consider most of them is crap, 80% low crap, 15 % average, 5% is good stuff).
For new Wuxia style, I read some, but best at recently was
赘婿, (not include
Huang Yi's novel)