The Wall Dancers
Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet
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- 7,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
An eye-opening exploration of the Chinese internet that reveals the intricate dance between freedom and control in contemporary China.
In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power of the internet, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online censorship now known as the Great Firewall. But far from being barren, the digital world behind the firewall brimmed with new subcultures and tech innovations, offering many citizens previously unimaginable connection and opportunity.
Today, as the country's leadership intensifies its control of public discourse and Western headlines reduce the Chinese public to a faceless monolith, journalist Yi-Ling Liu presents an intimate portrait of the entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and dreamers navigating China's transformation into both the world's largest online user base and one of its most populous authoritarian states.
Drawing on years of firsthand reporting, The Wall Dancers equips readers with the tools to assess the past, present, and future of a global power. A vital exploration of the internet's power for both control and liberation, and an unforgettable work of human storytelling, it ultimately asks what it means to live within the technological systems that now shape all of our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This incisive, empathetic debut study from journalist Liu examines three decades of the internet's evolution in China, from the mid-1990s explosion of microblogs and message boards that corresponded with the country's increasing liberalization, to the mid-aughts raising of the Great Firewall. Liu contextualizes these events, linking them to China's larger historical cycles of "opening and tightening," but her account focuses on the up-close perspectives of five Chinese "netizens" impacted by the rise and fall of the open internet. They include Ma Baoli, a formerly closeted police officer who started a website as a "sanctuary for gay men" that evolved into a popular gay hookup app, and Lü Pin, founder of "the nation's most influential feminist publication." Liu conveys how these individuals' emotional and interior lives were shaped by events in the digital world, from their excitement at discovering a community online to the pain and isolation caused by growing restrictions and even the outright deletion of their platforms (Lü describes the latter as "like having a part of myself die before my eyes"). Through other interviews, including with a Weibo editor pressured to silence posts about a high-speed train crash, the author spotlights the state's chillingly singular promotion of content with "positive energy," as well as netizens' coy means of evading censorship, such as #MeToo activists' usage of the phrase rice bunny, pronounced "mi tu." It amounts to a vital and subversive window into a cloistered but sprawling online world.
