The rapid growth of Internet literary production and online reading practice, on the one hand, and the fact that Internet literature holds a privileged position in the cross-media chain of popular culture production, on the other, call upon us to pay close attention to the literary textures, narrative mechanisms, and interpellative orientations of Internet fictions. Under this premise, this paper analyzes “CEO romance”, an Internet novel genre immensely popular among contemporary female readers of Mainland China, and argues that, through a particular combination of feminine/affective point of view, “bidong” scenario, character reversal, and Cinderella-styled happy ending, CEO romance novels tend to propagate what Berlant calls “cruel optimism”: While apparently promoting “pure relationship”--a mode of interpersonal intimacy based on individual freedom and equality and a desirable form of “commonwealth”, these novels at the same time tacitly and persistently re-inscribe capitalist mode of production with its attendant gendered division of labor into the infrastructure of their plots and characters, hence in effect undermining the very conditions of such a commonwealth.