The wall dancers, p.1
The Wall Dancers, page 1
A Borzoi Book
First Edition
Published by Alfred A. Knopf 2026
Copyright © 2026 by Yi-Ling Liu
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Portions of this work have been previously published, in different form, in Guernica, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Rest of World, and WIRED.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Liu, Yi-Ling author
Title: The wall dancers : searching for freedom and connection on the Chinese internet / Yi-Ling Liu.
Description: First hardcover edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2026. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025018333 | ISBN 9780593491850 hardcover | ISBN 9780593491867 ebook
Subjects: LCSH: Internet—Government policy—China | Social media—Government policy—China | Internet—Censorship—China | Social media—Censorship—China | Information society—China | Freedom of speech—China | Freedom of information—China | Firewalls (Computer security)—China
Classification: LCC HN740.Z9 I56784 2025 | DDC 302.23/10951—dc23/eng/20250731
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025018333
Ebook ISBN 9780593491867
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Cover photograph by Andy Wong/AP Images
Cover design by Linda Huang
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Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1: Coming Out
Chapter 2: Speaking Out
Chapter 3: Plunging into the Sea
Chapter 4: American Dreams
Chapter 5: I’m Feeling Lucky
Chapter 6: Weibo Spring
Chapter 7: Unbound
Part II
Chapter 8: Going Public
Chapter 9: Walled Garden
Chapter 10: Positive Energy
Chapter 11: Burning Out
Chapter 12: Going Underground
Part III
Chapter 13: Speech Tax
Chapter 14: Swimming Against the Current
Chapter 15: Retreating Ashore
Chapter 16: Groundfire
Chapter 17: Closed Loop
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes on Sources
Index
About the Author
_154967011_
to my family
Introduction
On January 14, 2025, Chinese internet users awoke to find millions of Americans crossing into their corner of cyberspace. For decades, the Chinese internet had existed as an enclosed ecosystem, sealed off by the Great Firewall, China’s vast and complex system of censorship and control. Inside the Firewall, sensitive words vanished, dissenters disappeared, and most global platforms like Google and Facebook were inaccessible. “To go online” in China meant something different than it did anywhere else. It was not only to speak a distinct language—one shaped by coded puns and cryptic memes—and to follow a distinct set of rules, enforced by an opaque web of algorithms and human censors. It was to inhabit a parallel online universe: to communicate on WeChat instead of WhatsApp, to query DeepSeek instead of ChatGPT, to scroll through Douyin instead of its sister app TikTok—two platforms conceived by the same company but split across two cyberspaces like twin siblings raised apart.
Yet on that January day, China’s internet users discovered that a portal had opened in the walls of their web. As a TikTok ban loomed in the United States, American users migrated en masse to Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app popular among young women, who used the app to exchange tips on fashion and travel. For Chinese users, the irony was hard to miss. Long amused by Western fears of Chinese influence, they jokingly called themselves “Chinese spies” and welcomed the newcomers with Mandarin lessons, interface tutorials, and tips for bypassing censorship (avoid politics, religion, and drugs). Americans, self-dubbed “TikTok refugees,” in turn volunteered English tutoring and paid a “cat tax” (a cute photo of their cat). Chinese and new American users swapped jokes and flirty memes, compared work hours and grocery bills, and shared virtual tours of their hometowns, from Dalian to the Dakotas.
Scrolling through my Xiaohongshu newsfeed that day, I was delighted by the flurry of exchanges across what usually felt like an unbridgeable divide. As a Hong Kong–born journalist covering China for an American readership, I have long straddled these two digital ecosystems, the central fault line between them running deep through my psyche. In my years living in and reporting on the country, I watched this gulf deepen—between two internets, two worldviews, and two ways of thinking. On most days, I opened my Weibo newsfeed to a chorus of patriotic voices glorifying China’s rise, only to then turn on my virtual private network, or VPN—the essential tool for Chinese people who wanted to scale the Firewall—and open Twitter to a torrent of angry tweets warning of a dire China threat. At a time when China and the rest of the world seemed further and further apart, it felt almost miraculous to watch these two communities come together. I was under no illusions that this gathering would last; Xiaohongshu had swiftly begun to hire English-language censors to control and cleanse their speech. But for a fleeting moment, the spirit of the early internet—open, exploratory, and filled with promise—was rekindled.
It’s easy to forget that the story of the internet began as a romance, and perhaps nowhere else was its promise as great as it was in China. In the 1990s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, China was opening up to the world. Private enterprises flourished, state regulations over culture relaxed, and foreign ideas and innovations flowed freely into the country, from Coca-Cola to psychotherapy to rock ’n’ roll. Amid all this, China embraced the revolutionary power of the internet: In 1994, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing built the first cable connection to the World Wide Web, opening the door to an entirely new realm. Just as the digital pioneers in the United States saw the internet as an “electronic frontier”—a vast and self-governing territory like the American West—early adopters in China saw the web through the image of the jianghu, or “Rivers and Lakes,” a mythical world from martial arts lore filled with mystery, heroism, and adventure.
At the heart of the Chinese Communist Party plan to modernize China was technology. As Chinese citizens flocked to the web, the leadership realized that the internet served as a source of both innovation and instability, growth and subversion. Deng is widely claimed to have said, “If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect flies to come in.” In 1997, authorities started constructing an online censorship apparatus that became known as the Great Firewall, designed to control the flow of information while keeping some “flies” out.
Still, a bounded cyberspace did not mean a barren one. Within the Firewall, the Chinese internet burgeoned into a space of connection, opportunity, and freedom. By the turn of the millennium, a sleepy university suburb in northwest Beijing had transformed into a bustling hub for tech start-ups known as the Silicon Valley of China. Kai-Fu Lee, the president of Google China at the time, touted the liberatory potential of information technologies, pointing to Super Girl, China’s version of American Idol—a television show where viewers vote for their favorite competitors via text messages—as a nascent form of grassroots democracy.
Growing up in Hong Kong and working as a high school intern in Beijing in 2010, I witnessed the flowering of blogs, message boards, and a vibrant online civil society. I saw how Weibo, a newly launched microblogging site, became a digital town square where millions of Chinese netizens could gather, debate ideas, and speak out. Across the globe, people praised social media as a force for democratic change. After all, Facebook and Twitter fueled grassroots movements from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, emboldening citizens to bypass censorship, amplify their voices, and mobilize against power. I believed the conventional wisdom of the time, that change was inevitable and that the internet would set China, and the world, on a path toward liberalization. Any attempt to control its spread was like “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall,” as Bill Clinton once said. “We know how much the internet has changed America…Imagine how much it could change China.”
When I returned to Beijing almost a decade later, after graduating from college in 2017, I found that the internet had indeed changed China. The country was swept up i n a mobile internet boom: Shared bikes proliferated on the streets, rural farmers livestreamed their lives to fame and fortune, and WeChat, which I once knew as simply a messaging app, had evolved into a digital Swiss Army knife, combining the functions of Facebook, PayPal, and Yelp into one. With a swipe of my phone, I ordered dinner and paid rent; I could hire a therapist and get my genes sequenced. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, once run out of a sweaty-sock-filled apartment in Hangzhou, landed the largest initial public offering in global history; its founder, Jack Ma, once a college English lecturer, was now a national idol. Chinese cyberspace had evolved into an entirely separate ecosystem, a walled garden flowering with its own cultures and innovations.
At the same time, the smartphone did not bring emancipation. In 2013, the Party suppressed the burgeoning “Weibo Spring” by silencing the platform’s vocal liberal influencers and cleansing the web of “negative energy.” New red lines were drawn around permissible expression, prohibiting not only the explicitly political content that I knew from my high school days (like the “Three T’s”: Tibet, Tiananmen, and Taiwan) but anything deemed “vulgar” (from “unhealthy marital values” to “excessive flaunting of wealth” to tattoos). By the time I arrived in 2017, authorities had indeed found a way to nail Jell-O to the wall. The Great Firewall had expanded into a sprawling system of censorship, from powerful cyberspace regulators to rank-and-file content moderators. Above all, citizens had internalized a kind of psychic self-censorship, wary of crossing a line they could not see.
Today, the Party has reversed the past thirty years of liberalizing changes, reining in China’s private sector, curtailing Chinese civil society, and closing the country off from the outside world. The Covid pandemic accelerated these developments, allowing the state to restrict public gatherings, close China’s borders, and deploy surveillance technologies to monitor citizen movement in the name of public health. Even the nation’s once-beloved tech entrepreneurs were not spared from the Party’s intensifying control: In 2021, the government launched a sweeping crackdown on China’s tech companies to curb what they called “the disorderly expansion of capital”—a broad accusation targeting everything from monopolistic practices to video games. In 2023, the Ministry of State Security created its first social media account, urging its citizens to mobilize against espionage, root out spies, and guard against perceived threats to the nation.
Just as the romance of the Chinese internet has waned, so has the fantasy of a free and open World Wide Web. The Arab Spring failed as regimes repurposed the internet into a tool of repression; Edward Snowden’s revelations of surveillance by the US National Security Agency exposed governments’ capacity for mass surveillance. Once hailed as a harbinger of free speech, Weibo is now derided by the Chinese intellectual Guo Yuhua as a “maggot-infested pile of shit,” overrun with illiberal incels and patriotic trolls. Likewise, Twitter—renamed X—has shifted from what American journalist David Carr once praised as a “throbbing networked intelligence” to a widely condemned “hellsite,” shaped by its mercurial new owner, who happens to be one of the world’s most powerful men. The conventional wisdom had shifted: The internet was a force not of liberalization but of authoritarian control. The expansive frontier and the free-spirited jianghu that we once imagined had splintered into competing fiefdoms. The honeymoon was over.
* * *
· · ·
Outsiders have long reduced China to simplistic narratives at opposite extremes: China is at once an unstoppable economic juggernaut of boundless opportunity and an omnipotent, techno-authoritarian regime of repression. In English-language media, news on China is increasingly filtered through the lens of US national security interests, where China is often named the “biggest threat” to the United States. On bookshelves, such titles as When China Rules the World sit beside books on The Coming Collapse of China. In a scroll through my newsfeed, analyses of “China’s Two Paths to Global Domination” follow an article headlined The “Great Fall of China”? China “Has Never Been Weaker Than It Is Today.” In the first China, anything is possible; in the second, the window of change is closed and locked. It follows, then, that a Chinese person can have only one of two identities: an apologist of the regime or a dissident, its beneficiary or its victim, a patriot or a traitor.
These narratives present an unchanging monolith, stripping individuals of their agency and failing to capture the society that I lived in, in all its dynamism and contradiction. Rich with innovation and yet rigidly constrained, life in China was filled with fear and ennui but also creativity and potential. Hip-hop music went viral there and soared to mainstream popularity within a month, then got banned by authorities the next; a gay dating app was shut down one year, while another went public a couple years later.
Anyone wishing to navigate this shifting terrain needed to remain agile and nimble. Those who tried to do so played with language itself. In my years of reporting in and out of the country, people have introduced me to an array of different metaphors to capture this unstable experience. Artists who tiptoed around the capricious line of the censor described the process as “a game of cat and mouse.” Entrepreneurs compared the experience of predicting the state’s limits on their actions as akin to divining the weather: hazy, fickle, and shifting without warning. Bloggers who wanted to pen provocative posts used the table tennis term “playing boundary ball”—serving a hit at the edge of the opponent’s table while staying safely within bounds.
The metaphor I found most apt and most enduring was that of the “dance in shackles.” As far as I could tell, its first use came in the early 2000s by Chinese journalists describing what they could achieve under state constraints on their writing and reporting. Since then, I have seen the phrase used everywhere, by software engineers and musicians alike. “In China, every enterprise and individual has to dance with shackles on,” one tech executive wrote in a viral blog post, chastising Google’s withdrawal from the Chinese market in 2010. “Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it,” the writer Liu Cixin wrote in the afterword of the English-language edition of his science fiction epic The Three-Body Problem. “And I can only dance in my chains.” “Dancing in Shackles” was the title of a song by beloved Chinese indie rock band Miserable Faith, a shape-shifter of the Beijing music scene.
My reporting, both for this book and for stories I pursued before undertaking it, affirmed the power of this metaphor. To live in China is to participate in a dance: a dynamic push and pull between state and society. Censor and censored tango to an erratic rhythm of subversion and acquiescence. Artists act as both critics and collaborators of the state. Authorities and entrepreneurs find themselves at times in hostile confrontation and at other times entangled in mutual embrace. Nowhere has the drama of this Chinese dance been more evident than on its internet.
This book is about that dance, which has evolved over the past three decades, a period that encapsulates China’s transformation into both the world’s largest online user base and one of its longest-running authoritarian states. It begins in 1995, in the heady days of China’s opening, when ordinary Chinese people first logged on to the internet, swept up by its liberatory potential. It follows the flowering of China’s mobile internet in the 2010s, as Chinese cyberspace transformed into a walled garden—on one hand, blooming with new innovations and subcultures, and on the other, increasingly constrained and segregated from the global web. It ends in the wake of the pandemic, as China tightens control of the public sphere, closes its physical and virtual borders, and turns inward, away from the world.
This shift from liberalization toward retrenchment is not new: For much of modern Chinese history, society has moved in cycles of what scholars have observed as fang and shou, opening and tightening. The repressive era of Mao’s Cultural Revolution preceded a period of pragmatic loosening; the freewheeling reforms of the 1980s were followed by the Tiananmen crackdown. When the system opens up too quickly, destabilizing state power, authorities step in to assert control; when their grip becomes too rigid, calls for reform emerge, provoking a loosening again. But this time, this shift takes place amid a global technological turn—from the early promise of a free and open World Wide Web to one that has become closed, siloed, and commoditized.
