As internet in U.S. and China looks more alike, she wrote a book on 'dancing' around censorship

For decades now, the Chinese government has limited the Chinese public’s access to the internet.

But the results of that intervention haven’t exactly gone according to plan. The government’s policies haven’t made it impossible to access the internet — they’ve just made it necessary for Chinese innovators to get creative.

Journalist and Arizona State University New America Fellow Yi-Ling Liu has a new book about this called “The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet.”

As she told The Show recently, back in the late 1990’s, the Chinese government recognized the rapid spread of unfiltered internet access might pose a threat to their interests.

Full conversation

YI-LING LIU: And so to solve this problem, they constructed an online censorship system called the Golden Shield Project, which would informally become known as the Great Firewall. And the goal was to just control the flow of information while keeping some things out.

So concretely, it started out as this piece of software that filters traffic passing through the web, blocking IP addresses. But since then, it's evolved into a much more complex system of censorship. And that's everything from kind of cyberspace regulators to rank and file content moderators to the kind of self-censorship that many citizens internalize.

SAM DINGMAN: Well, so this gets to the phrase that is in the title of your book, and that is “wall dancers.” Tell us what you mean by wall dancers.

LIU: Yeah, so this term, the wall dancers, comes from a Chinese phrase, dancing in shackles. And it was first used in the early 2000s by journalists, Chinese journalists, to describe what it meant to write and report under state constraints.

But since then, it's become much more widely used. And I've heard all kinds of people use this phrase, from science fiction writers to musicians to software engineers.

And it resonated with me in particular because it described this experience that I found I was having living in China, which was this kind of dynamic push and pull between state and society. It was this experience of living in a place that was on one hand rich with innovation, and yet on the other rigidly constrained, that kind of swung wildly between freedom and control. And I came to realize that this dance was most dynamic on the Chinese internet.

DINGMAN: And this is an important subtlety, right? Because I think for some people, when they think of the Chinese internet, there is this assumption that there is this wall that makes certain types of innovation, as you put it, impossible, when in fact, a tremendous amount of innovation has taken place.

And that has happened, in your framing, through this dance. It's not so much that it's in spite of the golden shield. It's more of this interplay, right?

LIU: Absolutely. I think often people who aren't on the internet or haven't been to China kind of assume that the ecosystem that exists behind this Great Firewall is totally barren. Nothing is allowed in. You can't have Facebook, you can't have Google, sensitive words vanish, and there's no innovation and no culture and no community.

But that couldn't be further from the truth. Instead of becoming a barren landscape, the Chinese internet within the wall flowered into this entirely alternate ecosystem.

DINGMAN: Let's talk about the individuals who you were really drawn to and who you profile and chronicle in the book. One of them is this former police officer who ends up founding a gay dating app, named Mao Bao Li.

LIU: Yeah, I just found it fascinating that here was a man who grew up and was a teenager at a time when homosexuality was still not yet decriminalized in China. It was still considered a mental illness. And yet on one hand, he was able to keep his job as a cop for 10 years by day and by night, run this underground gay website that would grow and grow. And fast forward to a couple of decades later, become the largest gay dating app, not just in China, in the world.

So it was fascinating to me how he could get from A to B. And I think what allowed him to do so was that he straddled many worlds. He was a dancer while he belonged as part of a minority community and was trying to gain greater queer visibility for the Chinese queer community.

On the other hand, he knew what it was like to work within the police bureau, and so he could speak the language of authority. And he could know what red lines not to cross and what allegiances to build. And this allowed him to identify leverage points for change.

DINGMAN: Yeah. And another reason it seems like this work is significant up to this moment is that as you have pointed out, the U.S. internet and the Chinese internet are really starting to resemble each other, potentially necessitating American internet users to learn some dance steps.

LIU: Absolutely. I'd say this is something that I wasn't expecting as I started writing this book, but the parallels have become increasingly resonant, particularly in the last year. My book is very much about the kind of romance of the Chinese internet as this force of liberalization and how that's waned and faded. But I've realized that so has the fantasy of a kind of free and open World Wide Web.

One parallel that I like to draw is just between Weibo, which is China's largest microblogging site, and X. Back in the early 2010s, Weibo was kind of called this harbinger of free speech. And today it's completely constrained and overrun with incels and patriotic trolls.

And Twitter, now X, was once kind of praised as this throbbing networked intelligence and was going to bring about the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, my fellow journalists now called a cesspool, right, or a Helsinki, and its content moderation policies is shaped by the whims of one of the world's most powerful men. I think both in China and the United States, we're seeing this allegiance between the tech elite and political power.

DINGMAN: Yeah. I mean, just to share an experience of my own that I had recently that took place after the transfer of ownership of the TikTok algorithm to a U.S. company, I had been reporting on a protest against an ICE warehouse here in the Valley.

And I went to post a video that I had created, and I went to tag it using the tag ICE. And it said there were no videos on the entire platform that had this tag. And I thought, that seems impossible.

LIU: Absolutely. I mean, I think the TikTok sale is and the reaction to the TikTok sale is perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of this trend that in some ways the U.S. and Chinese internets are starting to look alike. Because I think for the longest time, this sense of, this questioning of how much is TikTok being influenced was very much rooted with ByteDance, which is the Chinese company that owned TikTok.

And people were questioning, well, to what extent can ByteDance influence the feeds on TikTok? And to what extent does the relationship between ByteDance and the Chinese government then shape what shows up on user feeds? And now that TikTok has been sold, it's not like those concerns have really gone away because the U.S. companies that have acquired TikTok, some of them include Oracle, for example.

And the questions are now, well, to what extent does Oracle have influence over shaping what shows up on user feeds? And, you know, to what extent is it influenced by Oracle's tight links to the current administration? So even though ownership has shifted, the systems of algorithmic control and influence are very much still in place.