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, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Technology, Social Science, Asia

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!

[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.

[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 .

[Elena Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet is an incisive and deeply human exploration of life within one of the most complex digital ecosystems in the world. Yi-Ling Liu masterfully reframes the Chinese internet not merely as a censored space, but as a living, evolving arena where identity, resistance, conformity, and creativity collide.

What distinguishes this work is its refusal to flatten China into abstraction. Through meticulous reporting and intimate storytelling, Liu centers individuals navigating a system that simultaneously empowers and constrains them. The Great Firewall becomes more than infrastructure it becomes metaphor, boundary, stage, and battleground. The book reveals how language, memes, coded humor, and digital communities function as both survival tools and quiet forms of negotiation within state oversight.

Spanning three transformative decades, The Wall Dancers captures the arc from early internet idealism to an era of intensified control. Yet the narrative never loses sight of its human core. Questions of love, ambition, faith, belonging, and authenticity thread through the geopolitical backdrop, reminding readers that behind policy and power are individuals striving to be seen and heard. This is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary China beyond headlines.

[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.