The Wall Dancers
Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An eye-opening exploration of the Chinese internet that reveals the intricate dance between freedom and control in contemporary China
“The Wall Dancers is history told in a gripping, novelistic style. It is at once a crash course in contemporary Chinese politics and culture and an epic story about human drive, desperation, and ingenuity against inordinate odds. Yi-Ling Liu has written a masterwork.”
—Jonathan Blitzer, New York Times bestselling author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power and emancipatory promise of the internet, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship now known as the Great Firewall. But far from being a barren landscape, the digital world that sprouted up behind the firewall brimmed with new subcultures and tech innovations, offering many Chinese 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 China’s online ecosystem—and a crucial lens into the on-the-ground reality of life there. Tracing the last three decades of the Chinese internet’s evolution—from its lexicon to its memes to the precise nature of its censorship—she equips readers with a critical tool to assess the past, present, and future of a global power.
Drawing on years of firsthand reporting, The Wall Dancers weaves together the stories of individuals navigating China’s transformation into both the world’s largest online user base and one of its most populous authoritarian states. As these entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and dreamers experience the internet’s power as a tool for both control and liberation, they grapple with universal questions of success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith and resilience.
The Wall Dancers is at once an unforgettable work of human storytelling and a vital exploration of what it means to live with dignity and hope within the technological systems that now shape all 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.
