Transcript | Yi-Ling Liu on The Wall Dancers: China's Internet, Its Creative Spirits, and the Art of the Possible
Transcript (courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts) further down the page. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!
This week on Sinica, I speak with Yi-Ling Liu, journalist, former China editor at Rest of World, and author of the new book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Yi-Ling’s book traces the arc of Chinese online life through five protagonists — a rapper, a gay rights entrepreneur, a feminist activist, a science fiction writer, and an internet censor — each navigating the creative and constrictive forces of the Chinese internet in their own way. The result is a deeply reported, novelistic account of what it felt like to live, create, and push back in one of the most surveilled and dynamic digital environments on earth. We discuss the book’s central metaphor of “dancing in shackles,” the early utopian glow of Chinese netizen culture, the parallel fates of hip hop and science fiction under the state’s alternating embrace and constraint, and the eerie convergence between the Chinese internet and our own.
0:06 – “Wall dancers” as a metaphor: what it captures that “dissident” or “netizen” doesn’t
0:09 – Why 网民 (wǎngmín) took root in China as a concept of digital citizenship
0:13 – The early Chinese internet: more open than we remember, but not as free as the myth suggests
0:15 – Ma Baoli: closeted cop to CEO of China’s largest gay dating app, and the Gay Talese reporting strategy
0:20 – Lan Yu, Beijing Story, and the film that became a coming-out moment for a generation of queer men
0:22 – Pragmatism at the heart of the dance: how individuals and the state negotiated the internet together
0:28 – Lü Pin and Feminist Voices: from “playing boundary ball” to sudden exile
0:35 – Stanley Chen Qiufan and the state’s attempt to co-opt science fiction for nationalist ends
0:43 – The generational split in Chinese sci-fi: Liu Cixin’s cosmic scale vs. the near-future unease of Chen Qiufan and Hao Jingfang
0:46 – Hip hop’s arc: from underground scenes in Chengdu and Beijing to The Rap of China and sudden constraint
0:51 – Eric Liu, the Weibo censor: humanizing the firewall from the inside
0:55 – Common prosperity, Wang Huning, and the moral panic behind the crackdown on “effeminate” culture
0:59 – Techno-utopianism in retrospect: was the emancipatory internet always a fantasy?
1:03 – The convergence of the Chinese and American internets: Weibo and Twitter, TikTok and Oracle
1:07 – What it means to be free: how the book expanded Yi-Ling’s sense of what freedoms people actually want
Paying it forward:
Zeyi Yang, technology reporter at WIRED, and co-author (with Louise Matsakis) of the excellent tech x China newsletter Made in China
Recommendations:
Yi-Ling: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai; Machine Decision is Not Final, an anthology of essays on Chinese AI compiled by scholars affiliated with NYU Shanghai.
Kaiser: The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad (forthcoming);
Essays from Pallavi Aiyar’s Substack The Global Jigsaw, particularly “How Has China Succeeded in Making People Mind their Manners” and “Why I Would Rather Be Born Chinese than Indian Today.”
Transcript:
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, new ideas, research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you, I am delighted to say this week, from my home in Beijing.
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All right, I am back in Beijing as we record this, as I said. First few days of the Lunar New Year, the lunar solar new year, the Chinese New Year. I know there’s a kerfuffle over what we’re supposed to say, but I’ve been doing what one does during that holiday, which is sitting around in my in-laws’ house at their dining room table for hours and hours, eating way more than is medically advisable. Watching the younger cousins somehow transform into these fully formed adults in just a few years since I saw them last, and trying, between bites of Peking duck and the all too frequent by Baijiu toasts, trying to extract sociological insight from whoever happens to be within conversational range of me. It’s been just wonderful. The air has been clean. There’s just no traffic. It’s a holiday. It’s not been too cold. The food has been just outrageous. And I’ve caught up with old friends, with my bad mates. And, of course, the Chinese internet remains resolutely itself, which is to say I’m once again reacquainting myself with the ancient and noble art of discovering which VPN server is feeling cooperative and which one has decided to withdraw from public life.
Some things changed, some things very much do not, all of which makes this a strangely appropriate moment to be talking about today’s book. The book is The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu, a journalist whose work I’ve admired for a long time. I remember being back in Beijing on an earlier trip, I think it was in 2019, and chatting with Yi-Ling when this project was still taking shape. Even then, I had very, very high expectations. The finished book has exceeded them. It’s deeply reported, really novelistic in its texture, and remarkably readable. And for anyone who has lived through the last three decades or so of Chinese online life, it’s also just uncannily relatable. I mean, I read it with a very personal lens. I was in Beijing for much of the period that Yi-Ling covers, working in tech companies, writing about the internet a lot as a journalist.
Many of the spaces that she describes, whether the early internet forums, the music scene, she talks about the hip hop scene, the gay community, these are all places that that are really familiar to me. It was like, not like reading distant reportage, but more like revisiting these rooms that I once stood in. There are films that get mentioned in there, one in particular that I happen to work on. And of course, this constant improvisational dance between users and censors, which is absolutely familiar to me, which only made me appreciate even more how deftly Yi-Ling renders all of this. I’m also somebody who really believes that there’s just no better single window, no better framing available to get at the essence of Chinese life in the last 30 years or so than the internet.
It is the natural portal, in my opinion, to approaching contemporary China. I’m really glad that this book was written, and written so well. So, Yi-Ling was born in Hong Kong. She was educated in the States and has worked across an unusually wide spectrum of media, from Chinese state news organizations to Western newswires. She was China editor at the excellent Rest of World, which I think I’ve recommended before on this program. I think I’m sure I have. And her reporting is consistently brought subtlety and humanity to subjects that are too often just completely flattened and caricatured. So, Yi-Ling, congratulations on a book that’s getting rave and very well-deserved reviews. Welcome to Sinica.
Yi-Ling Liu: Thank you so much, Kaiser, for having me. As a long-time Sinica listener, I’m glad to finally be here.
Kaiser: Well, glad to finally have you. Let’s begin, as you have so many times, with the title, which I know you’ve talked about, I mean, really in every interview that you’ve done. So let me take what I hope is a slightly different approach. So, you call your protagonists — wall dancers. I remember talking about this with you way back in 2019. What does that phrase capture that something like dissident or even netizen doesn’t quite get it? What were you trying to avoid with those other potential labels?
Yi-Ling: Yeah. So just for a bit of context, really, where this idea of the dancer comes from, it comes from this Chinese phrase, dancing in shackles – daizhe tielian tiaowu 带着铁链跳舞. And it was first used by Chinese journalists in the early 2000s to describe the process of writing and reporting under state constraints, and was soon after used by all kinds of people. So, I’ve seen like science fiction writers, there was a scene used in the English forward of Three-body Problem. You know, hip hop artists I encountered use it. Software engineers used it. Google was pulling out of China in 2010, and it really resonated with me as a metaphor because unlike the words that you mentioned, dissident or netizen, it implies a kind of dynamic relationship between state and society.
This kind of push and pull relationship that can be creative, that can be artful, and really captures this experience of living in a place that’s on one hand rich with innovation and creativity and yet, on the other hand, rigidly constrained. And I think there are not a lot of words that capture that relationship. And all the other descriptors end up creating these binaries and ossify our portrait of China, particularly for those who haven’t lived in China and are kind of looking at it from an outside lens.
Kaiser: Yeah, for sure. I think it was a really well-chosen word. An excellent metaphor for the book. I did mention the word “netizen,” and it’s a word that you use, you spend a lot of time talking about. It was actually coined in the United States, I learned a long time ago, in the mid-‘90s, but it somehow very quickly came to, to be used almost exclusively to describe Chinese internet users. If you were to, even like ten, 15 years ago, if you were to Google netizen, that word in English, and click on the links, almost in all cases it was referring to Chinese internet users. So, I’m curious what you think, why that word took root so powerfully in China. What did it come to mean there that it didn’t quite mean elsewhere?
Yi-Ling: Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I very rarely actually read about netizen in the U.S. context, and I always associate it with China. I never thought it was a word that originated in the States. And I think there’s actually like a pretty direct corollary, even though that translation was probably not intentional, of wangmin 网民, right?
Kaiser: It’s perfect.
Yi-Ling: Yeah, which is literally internet citizen. My sense is that, especially in the early 2010s when Weibo was coming alive, the microblogging platform, Chinese internet users were really treating the internet and the online sphere as this kind of digital town square, like it was their space to express themselves to kind of culture, to power, to organize. It became a kind of third space, a public sphere in a way in which I
