Journalist Yi-Ling Liu’s The Wall Dancers traces how the Internet affected daily life in China, showing how similar this corner of the Web is to the one experienced in the West.
An internet cafe in Beijing, 2007. (Teh Eng Koon / AFP via Getty Images)
When American pundits talk about China, they often speak in the language of binaries. It is a place of limitless economic opportunity, or of cruel oppression. Its people are either courageous dissidents or brainwashed propagandists. Such polarity affirms an idea of power as monolithic and unchanging and presents only two options for its citizens: complete resistance or complete submission. Against these extremes, the journalist Yi-Ling Liu offers an alternative language: one of dance. Her book, The Wall Dancers, is informed by a metaphor that began to gain purchase among Chinese journalists in the 2000s: “to dance in shackles.” To live in China, Liu writes, is to participate in “a dynamic push and pull between state and society,” a “tango [set] to an erratic rhythm of subversion and acquiescence.” It’s an apt metaphor: A dance is an ongoing negotiation that can unravel as soon as its carefully prescribed choreography is undone. And to evoke the language of dance is to evoke an idea often missing in conversations about China—a recognition of a common humanity; of people just like us, constrained by circumstance, grasping for freedom.
The Wall Dancers—the title also nods to the “Great Firewall” of China, which restricts access to the Internet abroad—is the product of Liu’s eight years reporting about the country, and it tells the stories of the artists and activists she deems “dancers”: individuals pushing for “greater openness and freedom within the state’s shifting bounds.” Tracing the major shifts in the country from the mid-1990s until the present day, it is billed as a book about the Chinese Internet. Yet Liu seems less focused on the Internet per se and more concerned with the vibrant countercultures dotting the country, for whom online life has been a lifeline. There is the former police officer who creates one of the nation’s first gay-dating apps; a pioneering feminist organizer; a science-fiction writer; and an Eminem fan who, faced with the unappealing “conveyor belt future” expected of him and other Chinese youth (good grades, a good job, an apartment and spouse), makes a bid for hip-hop fame. “I wanted to go places,” Kafe Hu recounts (his rapper name is a play on the word coffeepot in Mandarin). “It was like my American dream.”
The arc of The Wall Dancer’s story might seem familiar, in broad strokes, to Western readers. The Internet begins in China as a place of discovery, filled with a sense of anarchic, joyful possibility. As a closeted policeman in the 1990s, when homosexuality was designated a mental disorder, Ma Baoli went to an Internet café, looked up the Chinese term for homosexual, and discovered a like-minded community. He read queer fiction, joined gay chat rooms, watched every gay film he could get his hands on, “sobbing over his takeout noodles,” and felt like “he was no longer alone.” Meanwhile, in Beijing in the 2000s, the freelance writer Lü Pin followed the case of Deng Yujiao, a waitress who fatally stabbed a government official after he tried to contract sexual services from her and turned violent when she refused. “In the pre-internet era,” Liu writes, “Deng’s case might have disappeared and she would have been locked up for good.” This time, however, her story went viral and stoked a public outcry, and the murder charges against her were dropped. Soon after, Lü founded the digital magazine Women’s Voice in order to “popularize China’s feminist movement.” It would become the nation’s most prominent feminist publication, and Lü its best-known voice.
Ma and Lü’s stories speak to the early promise of the Internet, when it was celebrated as a tool for transparency, knowledge, and even democracy. In China’s case, this optimism also reflected the nation’s mood. The state’s embrace of liberal economic reforms was in a delicate dance with the citizenry’s newfound appetite for riches and self-invention. People turned to the private sector to try their luck: Ma, the policeman, was inspired by the rags-to-riches story of an English teacher named Ma Yun (later known as Jack Ma), who set up an e-commerce website that he christened Alibaba. Meanwhile, sci-fi enthusiast Stanley Chen had followed other idealistic and high-achieving university graduates to find a job in Zhongguancun, a northwestern Beijing neighborhood that was becoming home to the nation’s tech start-ups. In 2008, Chen took a job at Google, whose head of operations described the company’s purpose using this equation: “youth + freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation + user focus + don’t be evil = The Miracle of Google.”
This was also the year that China hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics. The opening ceremony was deemed China’s coming-out party to the world: Some restrictions on the Great Firewall were lifted; the slogan “One World, One Dream” was blasted around the capital; President George W. Bush flew in for the opening ceremony and later shook hands with then–Vice President Xi Jinping. All of this seemed to confirm the prognostication that had been offered by another US president eight years earlier. “China has been trying to crack down on the Internet,” Bill Clinton observed, adding: “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Change of the good kind seemed inevitable; that was the miracle of Google.
Before we get to the downfall—it is coming!—Liu’s account emphasizes how, even early on, China’s Internet was influenced by the world, and especially by America. These worlds may be conceived as entirely separate by many today, but the truth is that cultural and commercial cross-pollination was the order of the day. Liu’s “dancers” found their love for feminism, hip-hop, and science fiction when China opened up to the world. Surplus music records sent to the country as waste products were rescued and sold in underground markets, introducing millions to Madonna, Kurt Cobain, and European metal and opera. Lü, the feminist activist, came to her politics after attending the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. Jack Ma was inspired to pivot to e-commerce after a business trip to Seattle, where he used a search engine for the very first time.
But it wasn’t only in China’s opening up that American interests could be felt. While globalization brought new cultures, ideas, and a sense of possibility to the nation, it also helped build the very infrastructure that would be used to curtail change. By the late ’90s, the Chinese Communist Party began building ways to control the Internet, with the help of international technology companies. Cisco offered an adaptation of the technology it sold to American corporations seeking to restrict employee access to certain websites. The Great Firewall, historians Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith have observed, was built with “American bricks.” And so the stage was set for the tenuous “dance” that frames Liu’s book: the tango between Chinese “netizens” pushing for change, and the censors charged with scrubbing away their voices. The very popularity of the term netizen to describe the country’s Internet users implies a deep connection between being online and participating in civic life—a life that managed to flourish against the odds, at least in the beginning.
In 2010, Liu herself had believed that “the possibilities of free expression were expanding.” The microblogging app Weibo hosted online civic debates and discussions for its 50 million users, who railed against corruption, followed prominent activists, and protested and shared rebellious memes; people even began to speak of a “Weibo Spring.” One person who did not share this optimism was Eric Liu, who in 2011 began his days at an office in a barren industrial park, where he would log into the backend of Weibo and delete sensitive posts. He was part of a team of 120 people, the human labor at the “bottom of the chain of the command” in an intricate and sweeping surveillance system that encompassed private Internet companies and state organizations. Eric and his colleagues would be given directives from the government on what to exclude, often restricting commentary on corruption, scandals, or—the government’s biggest apparent fear—calls for collective action. They were also ordered to take the initiative and preemptively delete, shadow-ban, or outright ban content or users that might be troublesome. One person examined 3,000 posts an hour under fluorescent lights that were kept on for 24 hours a day, under a banner that read: “The big eyes of Chinese people around the world.”
It’s in Eric’s work that the task of “dancing in shackles” becomes most apparent. Whenever something happened that stoked popular anger—for example, the 2011 bullet-train crash in Wenzhou, the third-deadliest high-speed-rail accident in history, which would turn Eric against his work—the nation’s netizens would track the events in real time, express their sorrow, call for explanations, and rail against attempts at cover-ups. Eric and his colleagues would delete and ban, delete and ban. Netizens soon came up with alternative terms to get around the restrictions. An alpaca dubbed the “grass mud horse” (a semi-homophone for “fuck your mom” in Mandarin) became a subversive meme, pitted against its enemy, the censoring “river crab” (which sounds like harmony in Mandarin), as would the in-joke “404,” which refers to the error screen displayed when one tried to access censored content. Others would download VPNs to jump the firewall entirely. (Eric is now in the United States, working as an editor at a news site founded by a Chinese human rights activist.)
By the mid-2010s, the sense of possibility on the Chinese Internet began to disappear. Feminist activists were arrested; hip-hop artists were asked to assume a more patriotic stance; LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were increasingly monitored and cut off from funding. Liu traces this tightening to the 2018 National People’s Congress, which abolished the two-term limit on the presidency and paved the way for Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power in the CCP. And yet, true to its argument that China can never be understood in isolation from the rest of the world (and thus pathologized), the book charts this development alongside long-term political movements across the globe. The 2008 financial crash, Edward Snowden’s spying revelations, the Arab Spring, and the rise of authoritarianism and far-right nationalism worldwide particularly after the 2016 US presidential election have all played a role by shaking confidence in Western liberal capitalism and encouraging the CCP to further restrict freedoms. Fearing the contagion of the Western world, the party moved to make China’s Internet a walled ecosystem, with its own versions of WhatsApp, ChatGPT, and even its most famous digital export of late, TikTok. (TikTok was created by the Chinese company ByteDance, which also runs its own Chinese version of the app, called Douyin. In January, ByteDance agreed to a deal to transfer TikTok’s US operations to a group of American and international investors, so the app could continue to be used in the States.)
“I thought everything about America was amazing,” Kafe Hu, the young rapper who had chased his American dream in the 2000s, tells Liu in 2020. But he had since realized that “I don’t need the American dream. Like, why did Americans elect Donald Trump?… When Americans criticize China, I don’t trust what they say anymore. I’m, like, your government is pretty shit too.”
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“To go online” in China, Liu writes, means something different than it does anywhere else; it is to enter a realm of coded speech and memes with double meaning, a parallel universe with its own versions of globally famous websites and apps. If there is something missing in Liu’s book—which is written with deep knowledge and love—it is a critical analysis of what the Internet meant to her subjects, and to the country, in the first place. Perhaps this is obvious: The stories of her “dancers” are peppered with observations about how it is easier to find fellow travelers online, given the restrictions that exist in person. “If your body cannot participate,” Lü, the feminist organizer, tells her, “you have to re-create the front lines elsewhere.”
Yet it seems to me that thrumming beneath the euphoria of the 2000s Internet, with its flourishing of virtual speech and civic life, was a shared recent history in which embodied speech and civic life had proved calamitous. The book makes a glancing reference to the Chinese writer Wang Xiaobo’s seminal essay on the “Silent Majority,” which discusses how his experience watching students turn on each other in middle school during the Cultural Revolution led him to embrace silence for much of his life, and to become wary of equating speech with an expression of real belief. “I never tried to publish what I wrote,” Wang noted of much of his early life, and “still maintained my silence. The reasons for this silence are simple: I could not trust those who belonged to the societies of speech.”
Reading about the early lives of Liu’s “dancers,” I was struck by how isolated, frustrated, and even paranoid they seemed, filled with hopes they could not safely fulfill or even articulate in person. They came to the Internet for release, and under the cover of giddy, freewheeling anonymity and boundless connection, it delivered—for a while. Decades later, the treatment has become the cause. Both China’s model of state control, and the dominance of private corporations in America, give the lie to the seductive idea that the Internet was a democratic medium for and by the people. Just as an overworked censor might sit in an office block in Tianjin, scrubbing mentions of the latest government scandal, an overworked censor sits on the other side of the world, in San Francisco, working according to the whims of a (likely Trump-pandering) billionaire.
From the early romance of the 2000s Web to its paranoid, doomscrolling fall: In our time, two realities exist at once. We live in an era of deeply entrenched nationalism in both China and America. And yet, at the same time, the Chinese Internet has profoundly shaped the Western zeitgeist: TikTok has led to the rise of short-form video content everywhere (and more recently, seen American zoomers “Chinamaxxing”); Temu and Shein have transformed e-commerce; and the online nihilism of Chinese youth has been embraced far and wide. By the time Liu’s book draws to its close, the early-2000s hustle culture of China has come to an exhausted standstill; the economy has slowed, youth unemployment has skyrocketed, and the lucky ones who do have jobs hate their stultifying and all-consuming routines. A new counterculture has emerged: one that valorizes doing nothing. Viral terms like involution, tang ping (lying flat), and bai lan (let rot) speak to a deep disillusionment with modern life. That they have struck a chord internationally suggests that despite the defensive nationalism sweeping the globe, the forces shaping us, which are making life seem so tiring and the future so foreclosed, are one and the same everywhere.
This could have been a very different book about the Chinese Internet. Liu’s subjects are broadly young, educated, and progressive, though she occasionally mentions another crucial group of netizens: highly patriotic and angry young men, who were first deemed fen qing (angry youth) and are now known as “little pinks.” “A more plural Internet did not necessarily incubate a more liberal online populace,” Liu writes of the emergence of this movement back in 2008, which now reads like a huge understatement. Given this, I wondered how wide a vista The Wall Dancers really opens up on the nation: Would this be akin to trying to learn about the contemporary US by following the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America? There are rare moments when the work of activists spills into the mainstream, and while countercultural memes and posts do go viral, the true extent of their influence—and the number who support them—seems less clear. Then again, that was the very point of the Internet for Liu’s “dancers,” and its early liberating promise: It could be diffuse, fluid, and impossible to pin down, thus creating more room for dance.
That these artists and activists might be relatively small in number and on the political fringes does not diminish their work or make them less “real” as people. By the end of the book, Liu’s “dancers” are either living abroad in exile or have opted for a quieter life away from the big cities. You could see this as a sign of defeat, an indication of the narrowing of political possibility in our decade so far (a metaphor made literal by the fact that, as Liu observes in the conclusion, the Chinese Internet is now actually shrinking, due to increasing censorship and algorithmically honed content-moderation programs). But not everyone sees it that way. Liu gives the final word to the feminist movement, whose ethos of grassroots care and community has provided a crucial antidote to the trend of isolating, depressive withdrawal. “When so much of society has become atomised,” one activist tells her, feminist organising “gave young women the spiritual oxygen to speak out.” Their exiled compatriots in America are pessimistic about the future, but they disagree. There’s still plenty of work to do.
Rebecca LiuRebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at the Guardian Saturday magazine.