Past the Firewall

As one of the world’s most robust and comprehensive content regulation and censorship regimes, Chinese cyberspace has come to develop its own suite of digital amenities. Cordoned off by the Chinese Communist Party from the global internet codified by Google, Meta, and Amazon, the Chinese public relies on the superapp WeChat, the microblogging platform Weibo, the consumer encyclopedia RedNote, and the social networking site Douban—the bedrock of contemporary Chinese social life that serves more than twice as many users as there are people in the United States. Despite the administration’s ubiquitous controls on freedom of speech and limited visible forms of civic participation, the wildcat nature of the internet has provided a forum where coded speech could evade censors, segmented content like science fiction, livestreaming, and dating apps could bloom into multibillion-dollar industries, and marginalized causes could find affinities with strangers—a public. Those who managed to optimize such social infrastructures or find tactics to survive within an arbitrary system found their way to either market success, political hope, or both.

But as state control tightened following Xi Jinping’s abolition of the term limit for presidency in 2018, this flourishing public sphere became an ever-more closely monitored venue of sanctioned and nationalist speech. In The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet, published last month, journalist Yi-Ling Liu follows four individuals’ decades-long encounters with the internet to weave an account of the vacillations of regulation, evasion, and tactical collaboration between internet users, state authority, and the censorship apparatus in recent years, as well as how this development has changed the material course of people’s lives. Deciphering the Chinese social network landscape against the backdrop of cyberspace policies at large—often formulated in reaction to major news and national events that mobilized mass opinions—The Wall Dancers traces how internet users persist in navigating an arbitrary system in pursuit of social connection, creative expression, equal rights, and market influence.

The four individuals’ trajectories reveal the limitations of the once-hopeful imagination of the internet’s emancipatory potential as a forum of free expression and conduit to liberalization for Chinese society, such as the online organization of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution that recalled the role of social media on the Arab Spring protests. Extrapolating from their experiences, at the heart of Liu’s account is a cautionary allegory of the decline of liberal movements when their platforms of operation become controlled by concentrated power and the space for free public discourse contracts or becomes siloed. While the redline of censorship rules invisibly by design, The Wall Dancers suggests that learning to read between the lines—and act accordingly—is essential to staying one step ahead of the adversary.

Liu and I first met in Beijing in 2020, where we later became part of Chaoyang Trap, a newsletter about Chinese urban and internet culture that was frequently mistaken for a podcast. We caught up on a video call as Liu was preparing for the book launched in New York. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Jaime Chu

Jaime Chu: Which part of the Chinese internet interested you initially as you were embarking on the subject?

Yi-Ling Liu: When I first arrived in China in 2018 and started working as a writer, I found that the China that I was reading about in international news headlines was very different from the kind of lived experience I was having. This was a place rich with innovation, dynamism, and contradictions, yet the understanding of China was often reduced to a simplistic binary of either the story of an unstoppable economic juggernaut of boundless opportunity or an omnipotent regime where people have no agency of their own.

I was very interested in what it would mean to engage with the place not as an unchanging monolith and not through the lens of American national security and economic interests. I gravitated toward the perspectives of people in the queer community, feminist activists, the hip hop underground, and science fiction writers—people in the margins, so to speak, who weren’t exactly representative of what mainstream China was thinking.

JC: How did that inform the structure of the book?

YL: There were two goals that were very difficult to achieve together, but I tried my best. The first was to tell the story of the Chinese internet in a way that was grounded in individual narratives and to understand the evolution of the Chinese internet through these personal trajectories. The other was to contextualize the different historical turning points in the last three decades of this evolution and situate that within the trajectory of the global internet—the romance of the Chinese internet as a force of liberalization, which didn’t pan out. Why didn’t that happen and what does it mean for the world?

JC: What do you think happened? Why didn’t liberalization pan out in this way? 

YL: We were invested in this romance of the internet as a technological force that would push for greater openness and connectedness—naively, “more technology equals more freedom.” There were many ways that this did happen: people were using the internet to access information, connect with one another, form community, and mobilize in ways that they never could’ve before. For example, thanks to the rise of microblogging sites in China, Lü Pin transformed her magazine Feminist Voices into an online a hub on Weibo that brought together women from all across the country to share ideas, support each other, and organize offline campaigns to push back against domestic violence and sexual harassment.

The trajectory of the book is realizing that these are not givens—they aren’t inherent in the technology. Just as the internet has enabled unprecedented freedom and connection, it can also be used as a tool of repression and control. There was a crackdown on the feminist movement shortly after it burgeoned in the mid-2010s. The Feminist Voices account was shut down. Weibo is now much more tightly constrained.  

JC: In this light, why is the focus on individual narratives important to you?

YL: The thing about following ideas is that it is very easy to get wedded to a particular idea in a way that is ossified or less malleable. If you have preconceived notions of how China should or will turn out, it is very hard to zig once you zagged. Telling the story of the Chinese internet through people forces us out of these hardened tropes and binaries I mentioned before, and forces us to understand it through the complexity of everyday human lives.

JC: Ma Baoli’s story is an example of an individual following an unpredictable path as he went from being a cop to founding Blued, a gay social network company that eventually secured state endorsement, with 27 million users worldwide at its height and a NASDAQ IPO once valued at $85 million. (Ma considered acquiring Grindr at one point. As of late 2025, Blued had been taken down from app stores in China in a wider LGBTQ crackdown.) Lü Pin worked in a state media organization for a decade and became a grassroot organizer whose platform led to policy changes such as the passage of China’s first anti-domestic violence law in 2015. Chen Qiufan appears to be spiritually misplaced as a worker in the tech industry, but he is also an award-winning sci-fi author and collaborates with Kai-Fu Lee, venture capitalist and former head of Google China. How did you relate to your subjects’ oscillating relationship to the centers of gravity in their field as they cycled in and out of the system?

YL: I think a lot of them believed that you have to understand the inner workings of something in order to change it. As someone bicultural and bilingual—born and raised in Hong Kong, having gone to college in the United States, and then having lived in Beijing—that’s also been my personal perspective for many years. I related to my subjects as people who wear multiple hats, who knew how to put on masks, who are able to code switch. I was fascinated by their ability to move back and forth between the margins and the center because it forced them to be adaptable and creative, to look for leverage points of change within the system. Ma Baoli, for example, lived a double life as a cop by day and the leader of a gay website by night. This meant that he knew how to speak the language of authority and what relationships to cultivate. The ability to navigate both worlds was crucial to his success in building Blued.

JC: Considering the consequences for pursuing political and social freedom, what was at stake for someone like Mao Baoli and Lü Pin, who tried to instigate social changes through temporary openings in the system?

YL: For Ma Baoli, the question was: Can queer people love and express ourselves openly in a society where attitudes toward queer people are shifting? For most of his personal journey, the direction looked really optimistic, because it looked like there was an assumption that the internet would allow for a greater connection with other queer people, amplify visibility for queer communities through the marketplace, and therefore translate into broader societal and political acceptance. But his method has its limitations. As a private entrepreneur, he needs to navigate officialdom in order to survive. So when the government reigned in Big Tech companies in 2021, Blued struggled to function, the company’s share price plummeted, Ma took the company private and stepped down.

As an activist, the stakes for Lü Pin were different. Lu believed that the only way to empower Chinese women was to hold the state accountable through grassroots action. She asked what it meant to build solidarity among other women to fight for greater gender equality and keep the state accountable in that process. I think for her, the crucial process was movement building: How can I bring people together and nurture relationships that could prompt a greater feminist awakening?

JC: Do you see these four individuals as representative of their fields or anomalies?

YL: Often both. For example, I saw Ma Baoli in many ways as an archetypal entrepreneur, the way his success was attached to the state’s shifting attitudes toward its tech entrepreneurs. Chen Qiufan, for instance, is an anomaly. There are very few people who are a tech worker moonlighting as a science fiction writer. But he is an archetypal tech worker in the sense that when he joined Google, he was swept up by the promise of the internet and how these tech companies were spearheading freedom and connection. His disillusionment narrative mirrors that of many tech workers of his generation, who no longer saw meaning in ceaseless productivity and competition, and started to look for a deeper sense of purpose in life.  

JC: I read Chen Qiufan as an overeducated elite trapped in an involuted system, to borrow the viral term as appropriated by the anthropologist Xiang Biao once described in your New Yorker article as “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless”: You are smart, you have made money, you have access to influence, now what? But I don’t know if that is a fair assessment.

YL: Chen Qiufan jumped through all the hoops society required of him and maintained a conventional tech career until 2017 when he became a full-time science fiction writer. At the core, Chen Qiufan’s story is about a search for some type of spiritual freedom from a system that demands or defines purpose as a very narrow form of success. Although he was enchanted by the tech world’s idealism and understood the allure of its central belief—that a product, if scaled and optimized, could transform the lives of billions—he also intuited the corruptibility of those ideals, which were ultimately hollow at the core. He has been exploring this ambivalence towards technological progress through science fiction since he early short stories like “The Bait” and “The Fish of Lijiang.” He was looking for a different vision of society than the myth of ceaseless productivity and growth. In this sense, he was not just navigating the constraints of the state censor but also the constraints of market capitalism. This freedom is something we are all going to have to search for regardless of whether or not we live in China.

JC: A big part of the book illustrates how online life is not a disembodied activity, and cyberspace governance is intrinsically linked with the material lives of the characters. Ma Baoli’s “server guerrilla warfare,” for example, required his team to shuttle the server for his gay online forum from province to province in order to evade shutdown by any single one local public security bureau.

YL: I think the boundaries between online and offline life are totally blurred and there is nowhere that statement is more relevant than in China, in terms of how online life has penetrated into every facet of people’s daily lives. The more interesting boundaries are about where the Chinese internet ends and where the global internet begins. That was a boundary that I didn’t realize would become so blurry in the course of writing my book.

On one hand, the Chinese internet has become more tightly enclosed. On the other hand, its reach is expanding to the rest of the world. Xiaohongshu [RedNote] shapes culinary tastes in Dusseldorf and tourism trends in Laos. Shein is influencing fashion trends in LA. TikTok, made by China’s ByteDance, is perhaps the most influential social media company in the world. Airbnb and many Silicon Valley companies use Alibaba’s AI model Qwen. Manus is now based in Singapore, was developed by Chinese founders and was just acquired by Meta. It’s created an interesting question of identity: What exactly is a Chinese tech company?

JC: As a journalist who covered China in the past seven years, do you think the level or area of interest in China has changed since then?

YL: I would isolate 2025 as a very unique, broader shift in how China has burst into mainstream American public consciousness. I think the turning points were probably last year with TikTok refugees on RedNote and the launch of DeepSeek. After that, many tech leaders visited China on these two-week trips and suddenly everyone was fascinated with Chinese industrial prowess.

If we were to talk to our friends in China, they probably would say nothing has changed that much. It’s not like our lives have suddenly become shinier and more well-built. That reveals to me less about China as much as it reveals about America’s massive projection of their fears, dreams, envy, and desire onto a two-dimensional understanding of another country. As if Americans are suddenly aware of their own dysfunction and the erosion of its political system, so suddenly, that place we have been demonizing for all these years, it actually doesn’t look that bad anymore.

JC: How conscious were you in framing your reporting for an American audience? I am conscious that you could not have predicted this moment of America’s response to China in 2026 when you started the project. Were there any details that you might have emphasized or even removed for American readers?

YL: At the end of the day, the book that I really wanted to write was a book that I wish I could have read but couldn’t find. I went to an international school where a lot of my frames of understanding were borrowed from American culture, and I went to college in the States. So I was keeping an American audience in mind in so far that I am part of that readership.

When I try to write to readers who have no understanding of China, it was always about addition and not subtraction. I would never take out details that I thought were not relevant or interesting to them, as long as they were relevant and interesting to me, but I would add context and explanation where it wouldn’t have been necessary for me.

I remember writing about the handshake between Ma Baoli and the then-Premier of China Li Keqiang: shortly after Blued’s launch in 2012, Ma was invited to the World AIDS Day conference in Beijing, where Li met Ma on stage briefly and shook his hand. The handshake, shared widely across the media, was a stamp of approval from the government not only for Ma but for queer people across the country. It was visceral to me because I had grown up in Hong Kong and lived in China, I knew how big of a deal that handshake was and how it must have felt, and there was no way I could drill that significance into someone who did not grow up in this context.

JC: It would seem that as much felicitous connectivity the internet had generated in China and as much as the burst of White Paper protests, feminist actions, and wildcat strikes had shown the capacity for collective action, the absence of democracy poses a hard limit on civic participation. In this light, do you see the social connectivity enabled by the internet as a salve or a replacement for the inherent political limitations on democratic participation?

YL: The question is a gigantic one that I really ask in the book, and one that is not unique to China. When we are faced with these hugely sophisticated and powerful technological systems, wielded by very powerful forces of the state or of monopolistic tech companies, what is the individual supposed to do? The naive answer would be to try to find a way to dismantle it, and the nihilistic and equally incorrect answer would be to give in and accept our fate as disempowered automatons in this system under which we have no agency.

The hope that I am trying to convey is that even within these increasingly sophisticated systems of control, it is still possible for an individual to carve out your own space of freedom and dignity within. It is not just a salve but a precondition to changing the system.