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Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet
by Yi-Ling Liu
An eye-opening exploration of the Chinese internet that reveals the intricate dance between freedom and control in contemporary China.
In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power and emancipatory promise of the internet, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship now known as the Great Firewall. But far from being a barren landscape, the digital world that sprouted up behind the firewall brimmed with new subcultures and tech innovations, offering many Chinese citizens previously unimaginable connection and opportunity.
Today, as the country's leadership intensifies its control of public discourse and Western headlines reduce the Chinese public to a faceless monolith, journalist Yi-Ling Liu presents an intimate portrait of China's online ecosystem—and a crucial lens into the on-the-ground reality of life there. Tracing the last three decades of the Chinese internet's evolution—from its lexicon to its memes to the precise nature of its censorship—she equips readers with a critical tool to assess the past, present, and future of a global power.
Drawing on years of firsthand reporting, The Wall Dancers weaves together the stories of individuals navigating China's transformation into both the world's largest online user base and one of its most populous authoritarian states. As these entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and dreamers experience the internet's power as a tool for both control and liberation, they grapple with universal questions of success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith and resilience.
The Wall Dancers is at once an unforgettable work of human storytelling and a vital exploration of what it means to live with dignity and hope within the technological systems that now shape all our lives.
"This incisive, empathetic debut study from journalist Liu examines three decades of the internet's evolution in China...It amounts to a vital and subversive window into a cloistered but sprawling online world." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Liu brings broad perspective and nuance to an issue that, despite its extensive global impact, is often discussed only in terms of its extremes...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...A timely and sophisticated study that is eye-opening, and a touch eerie." —Kirkus Reviews
"The Wall Dancers is history told in a gripping, novelistic style. It is at once a crash course in contemporary Chinese politics and culture and an epic story about human drive, desperation, and ingenuity against inordinate odds. Yi-Ling Liu has written a masterwork." —Jonathan Blitzer, New York Times bestselling author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
"Gripping from the first page, The Wall Dancers is a work of rare urgency and insight. Moving effortlessly between the intimate and the world-historical, Yi-Ling Liu pushes beyond the tired binaries that so often define Western views of China, offering instead a portrait of human lives full of contradiction, aspiration, and desire. In doing so, she vividly demonstrates that psychic self-censorship—and the generative possibilities born of solidarity and collective power—are not unique to China but a lesson for all societies confronting ascendant authoritarianism." —Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us
This information about The Wall Dancers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Yi-Ling Liu's work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, WIRED, and The New York Review of Books. She has been a New America Fellow, a recipient of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, and an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar. Born and raised in Hong Kong, and a graduate of Yale University, she now lives in London.
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