The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet

by Yi-Ling Liu

An indelible, deeply reported human narrative of contemporary China in which the country’s carefully controlled internet offers a lens into the broader national tension between freedom and control

In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power of the internet as a space of unprecedented connection and opportunity, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship that became known as the Great Firewall. The online world that sprouted up behind the firewall was no less vibrant for being controlled, and in the years that followed China incubated a booming tech culture and a digital public square.

But today, as the country’s leadership has tightened the reins on public discourse and western headlines reduce the Chinese populace to a faceless monolith, journalist Yi-Ling Liu argues, China’s singular online ecosystem may well be the most direct lens we have into the on-the-ground reality of life there. In tracing the evolution of the Chinese internet—from its lexicon to its memes to the precise nature of its censorship—Liu equips readers with a critical tool to assess the past, present, and future of a global power.

Far-reaching in its scope and meticulously reported, The Wall Dancers spans the last three decades in China, a period that encapsulates the country’s transformation into both the world’s largest online userbase and one of its most dominant authoritarian states—from 1995, when ordinary Chinese people first logged onto the internet, swept up by its emancipatory promise, to the present day, as China polices its physical and virtual borders with unprecedented intensity. Drawing on years of intimate reporting, Liu weaves together the stories of individual citizens striving for freedom and community within state boundaries. As Liu’s subjects experience firsthand the internet’s power as a tool of both state control and individual liberation, they grapple with universal questions of success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith and survival.

The Wall Dancers is at once an unforgettable work of human storytelling and a vital window into a global power that we simplify and misunderstand at our peril.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, History, Technology, Politics, Asia, Audiobook

336 pages, Hardcover

Published February 3, 2026

About the author

Yi-Ling Liu is a writer & editor covering AI and Chinese society, from a human-centered lens. She is currently a journalist-in-residence at the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

Reviews

[Amz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tender and humane portraits of what it’s really like to live in, and wrestle with, modern China from within. Profiles that could only be written with years of access and deep trust between the writer and her subjects - highly recommend!

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book completely rocked my socks off. It’s a deep dive on Chinese internet culture and the people who “dance” on the fringes of (navigate) the ever changing government-imposed firewall between periods of cultural openness and extreme censorship. Liu studies several key individuals throughout the book following their decades long careers in areas of feminist and queer activism via the internet; I loved following the story/career of the man who started a gay dating app in china and his desire to connect gay people w one another. Also inspired by the performance art pieces discussed.

There is so much to be understood about the firewall and Liu does it with perfect nuance. She perfectly explains for example how the US at once tries to distance itself from China’s history of information suppression while also trying to emulate it - by changing what the government claims as truth.

Liu writes emphatically, never essentializing but often reminding her reader how a western (deliberate?) misunderstanding of China has contributed both to the loosening and constricting of the country’s firewall as well as a growing nationalism and among its people. (See section on pop cultural figure’s “speech tax” or praising the gov publicly in order to continue one’s artistic career).

Completely fascinating read overall, and very fast-paced and entertaining to boot. Highly recommend

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The End of Cyber-Utopianism: “The Wall Dancers” and the Long Afterlife of the Internet’s Bright Promise
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 3rd, 2026


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

Yi-Ling Liu’s “The Wall Dancers” begins the way our current century so often does: not with a proclamation, but with a screen. A post appears. A post vanishes. Someone refreshes, watches the feed rearrange itself, and learns – quietly, with the private shame of the initiated – that the public square is not a square at all, but a corridor with doors that open only when an unseen hand approves. The book’s great achievement is that it does not treat this as either a morality play or a tech thriller. It treats it as weather: a set of conditions that people must live inside, and a set of adaptations they invent in order to stay recognizably human.

Liu is interested in walls, yes – the Great Firewall as policy, as infrastructure, as national mood – but she is even more interested in what happens to a person’s posture when a wall becomes ordinary. How do you speak, how do you desire, how do you make art, how do you build a company, how do you love your friends, when the environment is designed to reward certain phrases and punish certain silences? “The Wall Dancers” answers with a braided narrative that moves between activists, entrepreneurs, artists, and information workers, each testing a different choreography. The implicit question, asked over and over in different keys, is not “How do you break free?” but “How do you move?” A dancer does not smash the wall. A dancer learns the limit and makes a life inside it.

Liu’s reporting is patient in the best way: the patience of a writer who understands that systems are rarely felt as ideology. They are felt as exhaustion. Her cast of recurring figures – the gay-app entrepreneur Ma Baoli, the feminist activist Lu Pin, the hip-hop artist Kafe Hu, the science-fiction writer Stanley, the people who once moderated or served the system and later watched it from exile – allow her to turn what could have been a linear history of “the Chinese internet” into a series of intimate case studies of constraint. If you’ve read “River Town” or “Country Driving,” you recognize the method: a country’s transformations made legible through the lives of people who never asked to become symbols. If you’ve read “Factory Girls,” you recognize the moral stance: no cheap romance of resistance, no condescension toward compromise, only a steady attention to what choices are available and what each choice costs.

One of Liu’s craft decisions is to avoid the familiar melodrama of repression. There are arrests, yes, and crackdowns, yes. But the book’s prevailing sensation is not terror so much as narrowing. A platform grows, and then its terms tighten. A movement becomes visible, and then visibility becomes dangerous. A business scales, and then scale becomes liability. A public expression feels possible, and then it becomes conditional. The book is full of scenes in which no single thing “happens,” yet the reader feels the air change. It is the atmosphere of administrative power: rules implied rather than declared, punishment unpredictable rather than consistent, incentives shaping behavior more effectively than threats. The result is a narrative that feels truer than the cinematic version of authoritarianism – truer because it is often banal, and banality is how long-term control survives.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

Liu’s metaphors are not decorative; they are structural. A “walled garden” is not simply a description of China’s domestic platforms. It is a way of understanding how enclosure can look like convenience, how self-containment can masquerade as flourishing. “Positive energy” is not simply propaganda; it is a mood-setting technology, a demand that public life perform optimism the way influencers perform “authenticity” elsewhere – a reminder that enforced cheerfulness is a kind of censorship. “Speech tax” is Liu’s most devastating phrase, because it captures something that transcends China: the idea that language itself becomes a toll booth. You pay in slogans, in patriotic hashtags, in brand-safe declarations, in the correct posture of feeling. The tax is levied not only by the state but also by the platform economy, which rewards the frictionless, the compliant, the shareable. To speak honestly becomes expensive. To remain silent becomes its own kind of statement. In this sense, Liu’s China is not an exotic exception but an accelerated mirror.

That mirror is what makes the book so uncomfortably contemporary. You don’t need to live behind the Great Firewall to recognize the creeping privatization of public life: the migration from open timelines to closed group chats, the way a platform’s algorithm becomes a silent editor, the way “safety” and “community standards” can be deployed as both protection and pretext. In an era of renewed debates about platform bans, “online safety” legislation, and the consolidation of digital ecosystems, “The Wall Dancers” reads less like a national case study and more like an origin story for a global condition. Even in societies that like to imagine themselves immune to this kind of enclosure, the mechanisms are familiar: moderation as invisible governance, engagement as incentive architecture, virality as both power and vulnerability. Liu does not have to force these parallels. She only has to describe what her subjects have learned, and the reader supplies the rest.

The narrative arc, across seventeen chapters, is a slow tightening that feels almost musical: early chapters crackle with the exhilaration of possibility, mid-book chapters teach the reader how quickly possibility becomes managed, and the final third decelerates into something like grief. The book begins with expansion – voices finding one another, subcultures blooming online, a sense that connection itself might be liberation – and ends with contraction: underground gatherings, encrypted chats, exile, withdrawal, “lying flat,” and finally the image that gives the book its most haunting hope, “groundfire.” A wildfire is bright, public, spectacular. Groundfire burns low, subterranean, hard to see, hard to extinguish. In Liu’s hands, it becomes a theory of survival for movements that can no longer afford visibility. If earlier internet mythology suggested that scale is power, Liu suggests that scale is exposure. The durable thing is not the blaze but the ember.

This is where “The Wall Dancers” most sharply diverges from the genre of tech nonfiction that aims to diagnose and solve. Liu offers few solutions, and no fantasies about disruption saving anyone. In that sense the book shares a sensibility with “Uncanny Valley,” which treats the tech world not as a playground of innovation but as a factory of disillusionment, and with “The Chaos Machine,” which maps how platforms destabilize societies while leaving individuals to absorb the consequences. But Liu’s tone is less polemical and more tender than many of these books. She is closer, in spirit, to “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” in which systemic force is revealed through the daily improvisations of people who cannot opt out, and to “Voices from Chernobyl,” where catastrophe is told through the texture of lived testimony rather than through a single triumphant narrative.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

The tenderness matters because Liu refuses to turn her subjects into purity tests. The entrepreneur who builds within constraints is not simply a collaborator. The activist who is forced into exile is not framed as a romantic martyr. The artist who chooses small rooms over big stages is not condemned as a sellout. Everyone is navigating a landscape where each available path leads to loss. This ethical posture is quietly radical in an era when political writing often rewards certainty. Liu’s book is not certain. It is accurate. That is, it shows how people make choices under pressure without pretending those choices add up to a clean moral algebra.

Consider Ma Baoli, whose story carries one of the book’s central tensions: the dream of building a community at scale and the reality that scale invites regulation. His app becomes a lifeline for gay men in a society that offers few public spaces for queer life, and his ambition is, in its way, both personal and historical: a bet that technology can carve out room for identity. Yet as the ecosystem tightens, the company’s survival requires negotiation, caution, and the painful awareness that visibility is a double-edged gift. Liu does not mock this. She shows its tragedy: that something built to connect people can be forced to police them, and that the logic of markets and the logic of the state can sometimes align in ways that leave ordinary users with fewer places to breathe.

Or consider Lu Pin, whose arc captures the book’s most bracing claim: the internet’s promise of liberation is inseparable from its capacity for traceability. Early feminist organizing thrives on discoverability; later, discoverability becomes evidence. The transition from public speech to underground survival is one of the book’s emotional pivot points, and it is written with a kind of quiet horror: the horror of realizing that the tools that helped you build a movement are now the tools that help others dismantle it. This is not a story of dramatic defeat. It is a story of adaptation. The movement does not end. It changes shape. It becomes smaller, less visible, more dependent on trust. It becomes, in Liu’s metaphor, subterranean.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

What Liu captures better than almost any writer on this subject is the psychological cost of this adaptation. The wall is not only legal and technological. It is internal. It lives in hesitation, in the half-written post, in the softening of language, in the exhaustion that makes silence feel like self-care. Here the book begins to resemble philosophical critiques of contemporary life such as “The Burnout Society,” which argues that modern power often operates through overwork and self-exploitation rather than through overt force. Liu does not write philosophy, but she writes the human evidence. Her people are tired. They are tired of speaking, tired of calculating, tired of being visible. When the book introduces “lying flat,” it is not as a meme or a curiosity but as a political mood: a refusal that looks like inertia. In a culture of relentless competition, opting out becomes its own kind of statement, and the statement is not “I will defeat you” but “I will not give you my life.”

If the book has a weakness, it is the flip side of its virtue. Liu’s restraint sometimes produces a sensation of drift, especially in sections where the connective tissue between personal narrative and institutional machinery is left to the reader to infer. Some readers may want more explicit framing, more quantification, more hard edges. Liu prefers implication. She trusts metaphor. She trusts the reader. Most of the time, this trust is rewarded; occasionally, it can feel like a writer stepping lightly around an argument that might have benefited from a firmer hand. The anti-climax that makes the book feel honest can also leave a reader hungry for sharper narrative peaks. But this hunger is itself a commentary on the stories we’ve been trained to expect – stories in which power behaves theatrically, and history offers catharsis. Liu is writing a different kind of truth: the truth of tightening without an ending.

This refusal of catharsis is why the book’s final chapters feel so quietly devastating. The “closed loop” becomes not merely a pandemic policy term but a worldview: the idea of sealed circulation, of systems designed to reduce leakage – of information, of people, of risk. It is here that Liu’s China feels like a warning to anyone living inside platform monopolies and algorithmic feeds: a reminder that enclosure can be built without announcing itself. A loop is not a prison in the cinematic sense. It is a circuit that keeps you moving while preventing you from leaving. The genius of the concept is that it allows life to continue. You can work, shop, post, love, argue, scroll – all while the boundaries tighten. This is how modern constraint wins: by appearing as normal life.

And yet, Liu’s book is not nihilistic. Its hope is simply adult. It does not promise that the walls will fall. It suggests something smaller and more durable: that people create heat for one another, even when they cannot create fire in public. This is where the book’s kinship with “The Art of Not Being Governed” and “How to Do Nothing” becomes clear. Withdrawal, evasion, smallness, quiet maintenance – these are not romantic solutions, but they are real strategies, and Liu treats them with the respect usually reserved for louder forms of resistance. “Groundfire” is, in this sense, a moral thesis: the belief that endurance itself can be meaningful, and that history is not only made by spectacles but also by the invisible work of keeping a self intact.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

Reading “The Wall Dancers” now, it’s hard not to feel the book pressing against our own habits. We live in a world where the public square is increasingly curated, where political speech is both monetized and punished, where platforms reward performance and exhaust sincerity, where people retreat into private channels because the open feed feels like a “yammering madhouse” and a risk. We live, too, in the long afterlife of the pandemic, when “closed loop” is no longer a niche phrase but a way of describing the fragile dependence of everyday life on systems that can, at any moment, lock us in place. Liu’s China is specific, and the book is careful not to generalize cheaply. But its emotional map feels alarmingly portable.

If I were to praise one thing above all, it would be Liu’s capacity to make systemic analysis feel like literature. She writes with the calm precision of a reporter and the metaphoric intelligence of a novelist. Her sentences do not strain for grandeur; they gather meaning through accumulation. She notices what ideology misses: the way people arrange their days, the way they speak differently in different rooms, the way ambition bends into realism. She gives you the sensation of living inside a tightening environment – the slow shift from the exhilaration of connection to the fatigue of calculation. By the time you reach the book’s closing images, you realize you have been reading not only a history of a network but also a study of what happens to the human spirit when every form of public expression becomes either taxed, managed, or exhausted.

“The Wall Dancers” is not a perfect book, but it is a rare one: serious without self-importance, politically attuned without slogan, intimate without sentimentalizing, analytical without freezing into abstraction. Its moral intelligence lies in its refusal to judge the compromises it documents, and its literary intelligence lies in its ability to make those compromises feel, in the reader’s body, like narrowing air. It earns its final metaphors – ash, ember, loop – because it has led us there honestly, one scene at a time, without a false promise of resolution. In the end, it suggests that what survives under constraint is not the grand gesture but the small fidelity: to friends, to art, to private truth, to the quiet heat that cannot be legislated out of existence. My rating: 91/100.

[krispy · Rating 4 out of 5]

so many thoughts this review feels kind of impossible to write.

it would be naive to think that any country is a static monolith but this and some other recent reads have really made me actually confront how dramatically china has changed since the establishment of the prc and in every successive decade. thinking about my parents who immigrated from china at the cusp of the world wide web’s emergence, i can’t help but think the internet in china has so radically influenced society and governance that on our visits back, despite their familiarity with the language and culture, they have never really returned to the same home that they left. even for more recent émigrés or just for students living abroad for the length of a degree, it seems as if a few years is enough time to return to a totally different online and in-person landscape. in particular, i don’t think i understood the extent to which censorship has intensified in china just in the past decade or recognized so keenly the ways in which america has come to resemble a similar state of unspoken surveillance. it made me think of the concept of a very chinese time of life in a totally different light. in some ways it almost feels as though our present echoes the lessons china and its people have learned since the introduction of the internet: the shiny new potential for connection and empowerment, the entrepreneurial hope of bootstrapping individuals and marginalized people, the flood of investment and limitless possibilities, the simultaneous shrinking and expansion of worlds, the balancing act between existing in a flawed real world and a neatly curatable virtual one, the eventual dependence on online tools for offline living, the inevitable pandering to the hands that hold the purse strings (or puppet strings), the invisible yet pervasive social manipulation enabled by internet platforms, the atmosphere of ambiguity governing the use of words and their consequences, the adoption of memes and slang to euphemize what can’t be said explicitly, the seemingly equally futile choices to run away or to stay, the disillusionment of doing nothing at all rather than be exploited or an accessory to a disintegrating state. at first, i thought it was kind of clever to see the improvisation of numerical references to the tiananmen protests, numbers like 8964 or 8^2 being harder to censor than actual language describing protest or massacre, but i also began to see that the use of numbers sort of conceals the significance of the students’ lives and their motivation for protest, obscuring and gradually reducing meaning through censorship. it made me reflect on january 6th in the u.s., popularly referred to as a date instead of called what it is — an attack on the nation’s capital to overturn democracy induced by trump — because the truth would serve as criticism and contradict the legitimacy of his now presidential power. but at the same time it feels in part like he was only able to repossess that power because rather than acknowledge the severity of the attack with words bearing the full implications of it, it feels safer to use a date that doesn’t actually provide any descriptive labels or judgment of right/wrong. in addition, the rise of nationalistic online rhetoric during china’s 2010s positive energy era feels akin to the current trend of political influencers and the huge investment of the republican party into conservative influencers. how tradwife influencers (li ziqi the chinese og) harkening back to simpler days distract us from how irreversibly we are spiraling away from those ideals and how the manosphere recalls efforts in china to remind men of traditional masculinity while reversing the progress of feminism. i am grateful that neither zuck nor musk has thus far been able to satisfy their “wechat envy” but just the fact that they would want this and that even without centralization, all these platforms that demand our constant attention are tools for surveillance that are increasingly dependent on and likely to cater to the whims of power when the government has already done a number on traditional media. lol all of this is super negative but from this doom and gloom, i found it inspiring to see the humanism underlying the original uses of web-based technologies and i found it cool how the newness of the internet made it possible to operate outside of any existing systems and just invent whatever, which facilitated the explosive growth and innovation in the early days. these days with AI being the big bubble looming over us, whether in the u.s. or in china, i wonder if these meta conversations about alignment, agency, creativity, safety, authenticity, consciousness, purpose, etc. are at all similar to questions that were posed as the internet began to take shape. maybe being able to ask and answer those questions about our humanity supersedes any economic or quality of life benefit that we could see from the adoption of these technologies. just as the chinese government is able to adapt them as tools to suit their cycles of fang and shou, i want to imagine that the individuals profiled in this book and their fellow wall dancers (and i) experience their own cycles of despair and ultimately hope and that as they traverse new frontiers or landscapes, they have the opportunity to once again imbue them with their own wills and energies.

[Justin Gerber · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Informative for sure (things in China also very bad but for different reasons), but I wish it had solely focused on either personal stories or overarching narratives rather than both.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Many artists in China lived with a split mind, constantly juggling personas, playing roles, concealing their private selves behind the public mask." What a superb, detailed analysis of how a totalitarian regime tightens and relaxes its hold on its citizens in an ever more connected world. Having been born in a communist dictatorship myself, it was interesting to see how in 1989 China itself was on the verge of transitioning away from a dictatorship. Alas the Party made a very different decision from those made by the politicians of Europe, and what followed was a brutal suppression of free speech and a closing of the country that allowed the Party to regain control. The subsequent years of re-opening and allowing more entrepreneurial ascent, in parallel with allowing some more speech (albeit still controlled) is now being reversed abruptly, in ways that I fear are spreading. By focusing on the narratives of a few people--a feminist, a gay former cop who launched a successful dating app, a hip-hopper, a former social media censor--Liu manages to create a comprehensive picture of the diverse ways in which Chinese people chose to engage with the totalitarian state. Some chose to fold their pursuits in what can be perceived as the Party's interests; some stay defiant until the safety of their family forces them to take a different route; some chronicle the stifled voices; and others chose to flee. In this ever shifting landscape, people regroup, rebalance, constantly self-censor, or re-evaluate their contributions to the "speech-tax". I know a lot of famous Chinese writers have been canceled by the American and European left for having endorsed censorship or having aligned themselves with terrible Party politic. This book makes me wonder if the cancellations were warranted, or just another example of the greater world assuming their freedom of speech is available to everyone (or just assuming that everyone should be willing to pay with their freedom for said speech which will likely be suppressed anyway). At times the book was a bit dense, and the details made the early chapters harder to follow. But Liu does her best to explain, as clearly and plainly as possible, what the Chinese society has gone through. Her dynamic picture is informed by her own life in China, albeit mostly spent in the relative heaven that is Hong Kong. The struggle between citizen and state, hunted and hunter, is ever shifting and adapting. And it may be coming to a state where you live very soon, if it hasn't already. The most straightforward response would be simply to accept one's fate, to withdraw and retreat. But it is also possible to resist the trend: to refuse the rhetoric of inevitability, to claim one’s agency and remain vigilant and awake. As the grounds shift, your dance steps quicken. You become alert to new hazards and new bonds that cannot be trespassed. And then you regain your balance and decide on your next move.

[Mick de Waart · Rating 5 out of 5]

China is, in many respects, a different world. The combination of vast geographic distance, significant cultural differences, a language barrier, and the Chinese firewall that splits the internet in two makes it virtually impossible to form an accurate picture of the country—to the extent that you, as an outsider, ever truly can. The result is that the West tends to think about China in enormously simplified terms, and moreover as though it were a unified monolith.

The Wall Dancers guides the reader through this enigma in an accessible yet penetrating way. We follow the stories of several Chinese people who, throughout their lives, have ‘danced’ with the ebbs and flows of censorship and freedom that define China: periods in which the regime tightens its grip, alternating with periods of relative breathing room. Each of those stories is gripping, moving, and illuminating.

What Liu has achieved is a remarkable feat. The people interviewed know better than anyone that saying too much can come at a steep price. And yet they told their stories. I can barely imagine what it took to bring these accounts to light. It makes the book all the more impressive.

The Wall Dancers is highly recommended for anyone looking for a more nuanced portrait of China. One in which the country is portrayed neither as its own government would like, nor as the great enemy of the West.

[Ryo · Rating 4 out of 5]

从95年开始（主要从05年前后）讲到动态清零，社会从有条件的开放转为全方位高压保守。讲了耿乐/马保力、吕频和女权姐妹、刘力朋、几个文艺工作者（说唱歌手、科幻小说家等）。感触较深的还是马保力的完整故事（so far），从深柜警察秘密创业到与李克强握手+美国上市再到对赌失败后清零重启。“社会将变得更加保守，趋势不能逆转，感觉唯一能做的就是旁观并且接受新的现实”。

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative book. Not big into the tech-bro entrepreneur stories, but these are inevitable in a book about the Internet.

I love the concept of tang ping.
Read more at this link:
https://chi.st/bugs/tang-ping

[Cynthia Wang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a beautifully written human-centric lens to a space (internet culture, China) often lacking humanistic approaches. Learning about social microcosms in China was so interesting, especially in the new context of a post-Covid China. Highly recommend to anyone remotely curious about modern culture in China!

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was last year after reading “Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China” that I finally settled on a concept for what to call China’s internet: “The Great Happiness Space”. Yes, this also is the name of an excellent (or perhaps “great”) movie about Japanese hosts released in 2006 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiKWv...) and both—the Japanese hosts (fun fact: I used to be one and that’s a story for another day) and the Chinese internet tongue-in-check play on this as both are indeed “great happiness spaces” with the former being so for reasons of comforting (at any cost) those society has rejected and the latter as a form of an authoritarian government giving its denizens an avatar of “freedom”. That now a book has been written that takes that sliver of focus on China’s Great Firewall and massively expands on it I have met with great joy.

However, a concern: if one is interested in China’s Great Firewall and how it’s used (and abused) from a tech perspective, this may not be the book for you. Written by Yi-Ling Liu, a journalist who has been covering China for some time, this comfortably emulates the outline employed in “Let Only Red Flowers Bloom” complete with each chapter focusing on how another marginalized person makes use of Chinese internet (for book’s sake, the characters come and go throughout most chapters rather than being shoehorned into their own). Thus, this is not a “just the facts” book; it’s a “people” book and this should be kept in mind. Objective this is not and one can always say a bunch of anecdotes may not amount to meaningful data. On the other hand, seeing how those society wishes to ignore (or worse) attempt to remain in said society and use its restricted digital spaces including all the ways to get around it makes for fascinating reading.

From a “freedom of expression at any cost mindset”, what China allows and doesn’t allow on its internet is very troubling. But as usual, it’s a story that taken in binary can lead to misunderstandings. We’ve the now defunct app Blued (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blued_(...) whose owner could be painted as a capitalism nightmare seeing real success only coming from nothing less than pounding a hammer in New York to announce an IPO. Capitalism with no guard rails meets authoritarianism with guard rails so tight even, as we are told, private messages are being monitored. The author obviously cannot be totally impartial and neither can we: do we want nothing but “positive energy”, the name of a chapter in the second part, the translated name of a book by an Englishman that blew up in China, and the ‘official’ euphemism for my own take on it, “the great happiness space”?

“Speech tax” she coins it: when celebrities and other notable figures with large followings almost are compelled to voice support for the system to keep their standing. Those out of the spotlight, the rank and file of society can hum along so long as that aforementioned “positive energy” remains constant. Where it gets interesting is how this “tax” is applied as of late to dissidents abroad: intersectionality, something we have seen elsewhere where those traditionally liberal may align themselves with specific conservative causes appears in the form of anti-CCP Chinese living abroad since the last decade going “full MAGA” (as the author notes) due to seeing it as the only way to remain on the offensive. And yes, near the end the book does start taking aim at American politics because liberal democracies—USA in particular—and the slide of some towards authoritarianism can serve as a mirror image leading one to wonder when we may have our own Wall Dancers with their own stories to tell.

[Allison T · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic read following the lives of five main characters growing up in China, experiencing the whiplash of shifts between more open and closed government policy. Liu's eight years of research are impressive, and I appreciate her thorough notes section & index.

As a mixed-race Chinese person who began visiting China only in 2018, I've been playing catch-up to understand China's internet culture while learning the language. In China, I've battled feelings of vertigo and paranoia, both marveling at the country's infrastructural progress but also feeling the weight of the state's surveillance apparatus while witnessing the rapid closure of underground spaces. Because I've only experienced China on multi-week trips, I am very grateful for this book, which allowed me to delve more deeply into topics I care about.

Despite China's shrinking Internet and growing crackdowns on online speech, it is inspiring to see the creative ways that Chinese citizens adapt their dances to keep grassroots movements alive, building new virtual/public spaces when others get taken away. Amidst a binary narrative of China in media/books/Twitter, I appreciate how Liu illustrates the parallels between Americans and Chinese in the current moment.

My favorite chapter was Chapter 4, American Dreams, which documented the beginning of Chinese hip hop in the 1980s-early 2000s. I spent several nights diving into the music of the artists mentioned, along with their American inspirations. I'm looking forward to reading more of Liu's work!

[Maura Elizabeth]

Ma Baoli found himself on the internet. It started one night, in 1998, when the young policeman from north China seated himself at a computer in a newly opened web cafe and searched for the word that was buzzing through his mind: “tongxinglian.” Homosexual.

Mr. Ma scrolled through the search results, clicked into a discussion forum called “Chinese Men’s and Boy’s Paradise,” and finally saw that he wasn’t alone in his feelings for other men. The experience, Yi-Ling Liu writes, was “a revelation” for Mr. Ma, “knowing that there were people who shared his secret.” Within two years, Mr. Ma would start his own website, “a sanctuary for gay men to share their hopes and dreams.” In his daily life, he kept his sexuality hidden; online, he built a community where he and others could freely express themselves.

Mr. Ma is one of five people Ms. Liu, a freelance journalist, profiles in “The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet.” Covering a 30-year span from the 1990s to the present, “The Wall Dancers” employs the stories of Ms. Liu’s interviewees to show how “dancing in shackles” is both possible and ever-changing.

Read my full review at The Wall Street Journal .

[Kai Waluszewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book felt like watching “Platoon” as a Vietnam veteran, having been in China for most of the events from 2016 onwards—trade war, HK protests, Tiananmen vigils, Zero Covid, White Paper protests and all the deaths in the wake of Xi’s botched re-opening.

Sometimes, reading a particular thought, I felt like I could’ve passed the author in the street or a cafe as they were thinking it (even if not all our dates in Beijing and Hong Kong overlapped).

I could also relate to the anxiety part. A pleasant cool rush at first, making you feel so very alive! And then, as you do more risky things, the rush gradually devolves into a kind of compulsion.

I love the fact that this book mentions C-Block—the real kings of uncensored Chinese rap! They’ve since broken up, but I love their music so much—especially the 以下犯上 album. 功夫胖 has performed some of the most political Chinese rap I’ve ever heard, like his 《出埃及记》 with 西奥—a direct repudiation of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

In a nutshell, I’m so grateful this book exists. In his essay “Why I Write”, Orwell gave as the third reason: “Historical impulse—the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.” This volume stores a lot of truth from a strange period in a strange place, bolstering it with touching human perspectives.

If I was to pick a bone with it, my only one would be the occasional jumping in style—swinging from dry facts and dates to very emotional vignettes of the four protagonists. It’s a hard point for me to make, because both were important? Perhaps I just wish more of the story was told through the characters’ eyes, with less documentary voiceover in the second half. However, I understand that 1) readers new to China would need to be brought up to speed on certain facts 2) the author also “danced” while writing, with limited access to the four people, whose explicit opinions on certain things could put them at further risk.

[Lena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a compelling work of living history told through the lens of the alternating waves of openness and repression on the Chinese internet.

Liu grounds her story in the lived experiences of those on the front lines of movements using their newfound connectivity to challenge and change China, while simultaneously dancing around the ever changing rules of engagement with the government.

Her sources include the founder of a gay dating app, a hip-hop artist, a woman's rights activist, and a former censor of Weibo whose conscience led him away.

She is a powerful storyteller, and I learned a great deal about China and how its systems are constantly evolving.

While the book ends at a time of contracting freedoms for many of those portrayed, there is much to learn about hope and how creative people can get when their urge for freedom is challenged. Fascinating and inspiring.

[Enzali · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive weaving of disparate, but impactful lives and stories on the margin of Chinese society. All tied together only by their shared social pressure towards non-existence, yet persistence to find connection and space on the internet. Yi-Ling Liu does a great job following the journey of these individuals and the wider social movements they represent from their wide-eyed and optimistic inception to their plateau and demise into forced transformation against the backdrop of political shifts.

Incredible job navigating such a layered and nuanced conversation on social freedom and progressivism in China, without it being a conversation hinging on a narrowed relation to western ideals of socio-political liberalism.

[Debi Coish · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read accounts of the Maoist Era, the Red Army and the 'reeducation' of the educated classes. I worked with a young woman whose parents were pulled out of their jobs and sent off for 're-education, leaving her in an institution at the age of 7. I've watched the bold efforts to corral the population, man the factories and become a manufacturing go-to (as our own manufacturing was crippled and became defunct). I remember Tianamen Square, and had a harrowing conversation I will never forget with a young man from Bejing a mere 10 years ago. That's about where this book picks up and takes off.

She's an excellent journalist, clearly depicting the complicated spaghetti of politics and lived experience.

[Naweed · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best things I’ve read this year so far. What I find particularly impressive about this work is the array of subjects the author is able to interview and deftly weave their tales in throughout - the creator of China’s biggest gay dating app, a key figure in China’s feminist movement, a former censor turned informant, and much more. Utilizing the cyberspace/firewall as a means to also analyze China’s approach to its borders and allowing/tightening access to information throughout its years was also super enlightening. Highly recommend to everyone.

[Adrian Hon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tremendously touching and important. If you want to know about how the Chinese Internet blossomed and then shrank, how it gave room to feminists and then hounded them, how it shaped hip hop and gay culture, this is for you. And unlike so many books about China, this is not primarily about politics or business, though it has those things; instead, it’s an intimate chronicle of people you grew up online in China.

[Ali Raza]

read this on recommendation from Tanya. really was a great insight into a culture that I barely interact with, and kind of lends more substance to conversations regarding Chinese culture but also the politics of China and the decision making of the CCP. Would recommend to anyone seeking a better understanding of how China works.

[Nabil Odulate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Appreciated the nuanced human perspective this brought to the story of contemporary China in the internet age. To get the level of detail brought to these individual tales, the author clearly had to build a deep trust with her subjects and that care massively paid off.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating subject but not as propulsive of a narrative as I’d hope for in a reading experience. Constantly was checking how many pages were left. Wished there was more about Ma Baoli, probably the most fascinating figure in the book

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting, both from a historical perspective but also as a look into our future here in the US. Many of these suppression tactics are now being used here too.

[Jerry]

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[Jonathan Leeds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well done! Poignant stories of activists behind the Great Firewall were super interesting. Looking forward to more pieces by Yi-Ling to come

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply researched, informative, and most of all human and personal accounting of the history of the Chinese Internet, and the people who live within its morphing outlines.

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal insights into the recent development of Chinas society.

[Ryan Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book and it was also horrifying

[Monica Liu · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short history of Chinese reformation and opening from the perspectives of small characters. Felt like reading a handbook

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

as good as they say!!!