Yi-Ling Liu traces how freedom and connection can be discovered on the Chinese internet in her latest work
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In the late 1990s, as the world woke up to the power of the internet, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online censorship that became known as the Great Firewall of China. The intention was to establish an enclosed ecosystem, carefully shaped and policed by an opaque web of algorithms and human censors. Yet any wall, if you look hard enough, has weaknesses, cracks to exploit and break through.
Pushback from citizens online began simultaneously, often through ‘coded puns and cryptic memes’, as author Yi-Ling Liu writes, alongside inevitable self-censorship. This new online world was one where users knew to skip politics, religion and drugs. A complex and intricate dance between freedom and control in contemporary China had begun. As Yi-Ling writes, ‘a bounded cyberspace did not mean a barren one’.
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Censorship and regulation in China can be more nuanced than expected, a dynamic rooted in the era of Deng Xiaoping, who sought to balance economic openness with firm political control. An autocracy prepared to sentence Jimmy Lai, the British pro-democracy media tycoon, to 20 years in prison for spurious breaches of national security laws will still at times elect to withhold the clunking fist. This isn’t for altruistic reasons: authorities perceive their long-term purpose can be best served by periods where looser boundaries of expression apply. Things are not Orwellian all the time, everywhere. This is one of the author’s key messages, that, as she writes, ‘we misunderstand China to our own detriment’.
Into this long-running play entered the wall dancers. While the internet can be controlled and used as a tool of coercion and censorship, its very existence also created unprecedented opportunities for those with a creative bent or a social or political agenda. Wall dancing is more subtle and substantial than simply poking a finger in the eye of authority and running away. The Chinese internet isn’t just a parade ground for authoritarian leadership but also a home for counterculture. Yi-Ling focuses on several figures: a gay policeman who set up Danlan (a vastly popular gay website), victims of domestic violence behind China’s ‘Bloody Brides’ movement, a rapper, the founder of the Alibaba e-commerce marketplace, a sci-fi writer, a feminist writer and even a disillusioned censor. All show nerve and bravery and prove that, while being true to your values is hard work anywhere, nowhere is this truer than in China.
The book follows their journeys navigating a system that can feel less like a wall than a set of sliding doors.
‘Authorities and entrepreneurs find themselves at times in hostile confrontation and at other times entangled in mutual embrace,’ writes Yi-Ling. The wall dancers employ a variety of tactics. Li Maizi, a feminist writer, declined a respectable government job offered in return for stopping her activities; she did not acquiesce, but learned when and how to lie low. Ma Baoli, the gay policeman, was ‘hypersensitive to the ways power moved in the country’, knew that he had to build the right alliances and align his goals with those of the state. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, saw engagement as necessary: ‘as always be in love with them, but don’t marry them’.
The book’s reportage, storytelling and messages are powerful and moving, offering lessons that apply worldwide as citizens struggle to assert their individuality against the forces of homogenisation. Anyone criticising the Chinese government for its censorship of the web should look closer to home, Yi-Ling argues, pointing out that the fantasy of a free and open web has waned. ‘Through the stories of China’s dancers we might better understand the shackles within which all of us must dance.’ One of the greatest threats of authoritarianism is its ability to make people dumb and thoughtlessly conforming – something that applies in both autocracies and democracies, where the public sphere is contracted by the amplification of illiberal voices and the erosion of common sense.
China is now turning inward with renewed force, prompting talk of a second Cultural Revolution – ‘an ideological cleansing of decadent Western values’. Writing the book was ‘a race against disappearance’, as websites, Weibo posts and the online presence of many interviewees vanished before her eyes. Right now, it’s all show and no openness. Yet, as Ma Baoli recalls Jack Ma’s call to hope, ‘Today will be hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.’ What is clear is that this signifies neither the end of the wall dancing nor the end of the story. The wall dancers continue, carving out spaces of freedom within constraints – revealing, in the process, the cracks in the system.
