THE WALL DANCERS

An investigation of the Chinese internet and its place in Chinese society, reported from geographical and generational front lines and their margins.

In her full-length debut, journalist Liu dissects and dismantles monoliths, highlighting and explaining the seeming contradictions and fatalistic predictions that fuel most conversations about China’s adoption, creation, use, and control of technology. Born and raised in Hong Kong—with its privileged relationship to mainland China—educated in the United States, and having built her journalism career in Beijing, she brings broad perspective and nuance to an issue that, despite its extensive global impact, is often discussed only in terms of its extremes. Into a milieu of weaponized tariffs and proprietary technology, the author injects essential context for China’s famed “Great Firewall” and profiles five individuals who have lived beyond its constraints: Ma Baoli, founder of China’s most successful gay mobile app; Lü Pin, a leader in the country’s underground feminist movement; Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chan), a science-fiction writer; Kafe Hu, a pioneer of China’s hip-hop and rap scene; and Eric Liu, a former tech content censor. These protagonists navigate double lives, self-censorship, collaborations with the Chinese diaspora, and the exacting crackdowns of their country’s authoritarian government, as their fellow “netizens” deploy a blend of irony, humor, and wordplay to elude its control. If Liu’s text is in part revelatory of the particular ambitions, risks, and pitfalls humming beneath China’s internet domination, it is also a global cautionary tale. China’s push and pull between rigid control and loosened restrictions to serve economic growth is not an isolated story, but an example of how the entire World Wide Web has defaulted on its past promise to become a space for “the amplification of illiberal voices, the contraction of the public sphere, the erosion of common sense.”

A timely and sophisticated study that is eye-opening, and a touch eerie.