Exploring the Mirror World of the Chinese Internet
· Jacobin
China’s internet is known for a vast system of censorship and surveillance that has evolved alongside its booming digital economy. Yet the story of the Chinese internet is not simply one of authoritarian control or unrestricted growth. In her book, The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet, journalist and author Yi-Ling Liu explores how people navigate within the constantly shifting boundaries of censorship, carving out creative spaces for communities and political expression.In an interview with Jacobin, Liu talks about how the Chinese internet has evolved from a space of relative openness into an increasingly tightly controlled digital ecosystem, and how the Communist Party of China’s efforts to regulate online life intersect with its broader attempts to shape social values. She also looks at the changing relationship between Silicon Valley and Beijing, arguing that the familiar opposition between a “free” American internet and an “authoritarian” Chinese one is becoming harder to sustain.Merle GronewegYour book is called The Wall Dancers, drawing on the metaphor of “dancing in shackles” to describe how people in China navigate the shifting boundaries of censorship and political expression. Where does this metaphor come from, and why did you choose it as the title?Yi-Ling LiuI first heard the term “dancing in shackles” when interviewing hip-hop artists in China in the mid-2010s. They used it to describe creating music within the constraints of censorship. But I kept encountering the phrase and found that Chinese journalists had been using it since at least the early 2000s to describe reporting under state constraints.I was drawn to the metaphor because it captured what I experienced while living in China: this dynamic push and pull between state and society. It’s not a fixed relationship but something more fluid and unpredictable. I became interested in people who were particularly adept at navigating this terrain, and I came to call them “dancers.” Those navigating the online space became the “wall dancers.”Merle GronewegOne of those “wall dancers” is Ma Baoli, who eventually went on to found Blued, a large gay dating app. Can you tell us his story?Yi-Ling LiuMa Baoli grew up in Qinhuangdao in northeastern China and trained to become a police officer. As a teenager, he realized he was gay, although he didn’t really have the language for it. As far as he understood from his school textbooks, homosexuality was either a crime or an illness.That changed when the internet arrived in China in the late 1990s and the first internet cafés opened in Qinhuangdao. One day, he came across Beijing Story, an anonymous short story about two young men who fall in love against the backdrop of the Tiananmen demonstrations. It was revelatory for him: he realized he wasn’t alone. As he explored further, he discovered an entire queer community online that he hadn’t known existed.Inspired by this, he created a website called Danlan, meaning “light blue.” For years, he lived a double life: during the day, he was a police officer; at night, he ran Danlan. The website grew, he moved to Beijing, and he eventually quit the police force and came out publicly.By the time I met him, he was the CEO of Blued, which in 2019 was the world’s largest gay dating app. He was preparing to take the company public on the New York Stock Exchange.Merle GronewegBut ultimately, things didn’t end so well.Yi-Ling LiuWhen I started meeting him in 2019, he was at his peak. At the same time, there was already a tightening around civil society and queer organizations. Blued remained successful partly because it very consciously presented itself as a company rather than as a form of political activism.But by 2020, essentially every geopolitical headwind that could have tripped up Ma Baoli emerged. The pandemic shook the initial public offering, while US-China tensions made investors increasingly nervous about Chinese tech companies. Then, in 2020 and 2021, the government launched the Common Prosperity campaign and began reigning in tech entrepreneurs, starting with Jack Ma, Alibaba, and Ant Group. New regulations significantly curtailed the relatively free rein China’s tech entrepreneurs had previously enjoyed.At the same time, the tightening around queer communities became more ideological. It was no longer focused primarily on NGOs and political activism but increasingly encompassed ideas about masculinity, traditional gender roles, and China’s demographic trajectory. Feminist groups and social media accounts on Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu have also been shut down in recent years. I see all of this as part of a broader tightening.Blued was hit on both fronts. The company eventually went private after performing badly on the stock exchange, and Ma Baoli resigned as CEO. The company he had built, with around eight hundred employees, was no longer his. He ended up running a small e-commerce start-up from an office about the size of his old one in Qinhuangdao. Since the book was published in February, Blued has also been removed from app stores, so its future is very uncertain.Merle GronewegThe internet came to China during the period of “Reform and Opening Up” initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Liberal economic reforms intensified in the 1990s, while at the same time the Chinese government introduced its first rules governing the web. Geremie Barmé and Sang Ye first coined the term “Great Firewall of China” in a Wired article in 1997. What happened in those years?Yi-Ling LiuIn the mid-to-late 1990s, everyone embraced the internet, both outside and within China. The Chinese government was somewhat at odds over what to do with this new technology. They knew it could be a huge source of economic innovation, but at the same time it was inherently unstable.Deng Xiaoping is widely credited with saying: “If you open the windows, you’re inevitably going to let some flies in.” He was referring to reform and opening and allowing Western cultures and ideas into the country. But this also applied to internet technologies.The Great Firewall — or the Golden Shield Project as it was called at the time — was initiated by the Ministry of Public Security to address those “flies.” It started around 1997 and became increasingly sophisticated up until 2008. “Great Firewall” wasn’t an official term but a popular one coined by Barmé and Sang Ye. Today the Chinese equivalent, fanghuoqiang, is used quite openly even among government officials and academics.Originally the system was relatively straightforward: filtering prohibited phrases, blocking certain websites, and deploying internet police who could intervene if someone searched for politically sensitive content. Since then, the Great Firewall has grown to encompass much more.It includes top-down regulators such as the Cyberspace Administration of China and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and their censorship directives, as well as censors at social media companies who scrub content from the web. And there is another part we don’t often talk about: the internalized self-censorship people experience when deciding whether or not to speak.Merle GronewegThe so-called speech tax?Yi-Ling LiuYes, which is actually quite an old term. It was coined by Wang Xiaobo, a famous writer in the 1990s, and refers to speaking in praise of the country, government, or party as a way of gaining approval.Wang used it in reference to the Cultural Revolution, when people would sing its praises even if they privately felt differently, as a way to survive. I noticed people using the term again around 2020, particularly in relation to patriotic content.One example was the controversy around the NBA and the Hong Kong protests. After Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey expressed support for the protests on Twitter, Chinese celebrities began posting statements on Weibo such as “I stand with the Hong Kong police” or “I’m a proud Chinese.”Some of that may have been sincere. But it could also be a way of signaling allegiance and gaining government acceptance, which might help celebrities secure sponsorships or boost their visibility on platforms. That’s how I came to think of it as a speech tax: you pay a tax to the party through speech, and that in turn enables you to succeed in the marketplace.Merle GronewegIndeed, the censorship apparatus as well as the directives regarding which content to censor have evolved tremendously over the past three or four decades. Non-permissible content has expanded beyond the traditional “three Ts” — Tiananmen, Taiwan, and Tibet — to a much wider range of topics, while the government seeks to actively promote “positive energy.” How and when did you observe these changes?Yi-Ling LiuIn the early 2010s, the general understanding was that you could more or less say what you wanted as long as you avoided highly sensitive political topics, such as the three Ts. Censors intervened primarily when something or someone encouraged collective action or mobilization, but when it came to sex, societal dissatisfaction, the economy, or celebrities, there was quite a bit of leeway.A new directive from 2017 showed that this was changing. There were now clearly defined “core socialist values” that needed to be reinforced and other values considered undesirable. Some of the things on the list were strange, such as endangering animals, but also striking in other ways: excessively flaunting wealth or extramarital affairs, for example. There are also campaigns against “idol worship” and excessive video gaming among minors.All of this represented a broader shift toward actively shaping what society and relationships should look like, driven by a sense that capitalism and liberalism had taken China too far and produced unhealthy values that needed to be reined in. I would put the government’s encouragement of “positive energy” in the same category.It’s no longer just: “Don’t say this, don’t say that.” It’s also: “Here are the values we want to encourage.” That includes patriotism and Chinese civilizational strength, but also more traditional ideas about marriage and social behavior.Merle GronewegDo the algorithms support this content?Yi-Ling LiuAbsolutely. It’s difficult to know how much is built into the algorithms and how much comes from human censors, but social media platforms clearly favor patriotic content, which continually rises to the top of news feeds. That makes it difficult to gauge actual public sentiment. There may be genuine grassroots nationalism, but it is also amplified by the algorithms.Merle GronewegOne of the people you spoke with for your book is a former censor. What did you learn from his experience?Yi-Ling LiuOne of the subjects of my book is Eric Liu, who worked as a “content editor” — effectively a censor — for Weibo from 2010 to 2011. At the time, Weibo was a burgeoning microblogging site seen as a harbinger of free speech.Eric was one of around 150 censors working there. He was a recent college graduate who didn’t really know what to do with his life. He found this job, and he found it incredibly boring and draining — it sucked the life out of him — but it paid a salary.Toward the end of his time there, he had a crisis of conscience, particularly after the 2011 Wenzhou train crash, in which many people died. He found himself removing posts about the accident and felt he was erasing real human suffering and preventing officials from being held accountable. He began collecting “censorship directives” sent by government authorities telling censors what content to remove and eventually leaked them to a nonprofit organization in New York. They provide an incredible window into how the censorship regime operates.I think Eric’s story is important because it puts a human face on the firewall. It’s not a precise machine that simply enforces a set of rules; maintaining it requires an enormous amount of human labor and judgment. When Eric worked at Weibo, there were around 150 censors. Today he estimates there are probably tens of thousands.Merle GronewegLooking at the decades since Mao Zedong’s death, China has gone through repeated phases of opening and tightening. Under Xi Jinping, not only were many civil society organizations shut down and other forms of civic expression curtailed, but in 2021, a crackdown on tech companies explicitly targeted the “disorderly expansion of capital.” What drives these patterns?Yi-Ling LiuChinese scholars have a vocabulary for it: fang and shou, opening and tightening. At its root is a tension between economic growth and innovation on the one hand, and political stability on the other. When the system opens and becomes too unstable, conservatives within the Communist Party assert control. When it becomes too rigid and stagnant, reformers within the government or society call for change.These phases aren’t uniform, but the broader trend over the past decade has clearly been one of closing. I would trace its roots back to 2008, with the Beijing Olympics and the global financial crisis.That was a moment when the Chinese government and intellectuals looked at the United States and the West and said, “This is where liberalization leads; this is what unfettered capitalism looks like.” In some ways, the Common Prosperity campaign was a coda to that response: we’ve seen that this doesn’t work, so instead of continuing down the path of liberalization, we’re going to clamp down.On a smaller scale, though, there has arguably been some opening around tech entrepreneurship and economic innovation in 2025 compared with 2023 — though not in civil society or politics. The pandemic had created an intense period of closure when stability was paramount. China’s growing confidence in itself amid American dysfunction may also play a role: you look at the other side and think, that actually looks pretty bad; we can afford to loosen up a little.Merle GronewegLet’s turn to the relationship with US tech companies. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Cisco provided surveillance technology that helped enable the firewall. In 2004–5, Yahoo provided Chinese authorities with email information that contributed to a journalist receiving a ten-year prison sentence. However, in 2008, Google changed course over its willingness to comply with Chinese censorship and decided to leave the country. How have US tech companies navigated China’s system over the years?Yi-Ling LiuFor a long time, the United States was invested in the idea that China would eventually become more like America: a free market and Western-style democracy. Tech companies entered China assuming they could operate within its constraints, but that liberalization would eventually follow. Bill Clinton famously compared controlling the internet to trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. The assumption was that liberty would spread through the internet.He was wrong. But these companies were also salesmen and profiteers. China was a huge market, and Silicon Valley companies were eager to tap into it. As late as 2016, you had Mark Zuckerberg jogging around Tiananmen Square as he tried to bring Facebook into China.That changed rapidly with the US-China tech wars, Donald Trump, and the tightening within China. Zuckerberg illustrates the shift well. By around 2018, he was arguing that the United States needed to protect its data from China and compete with Chinese companies.That’s now the dominant narrative among major US tech companies, particularly companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Progress is increasingly framed as a zero-sum game. We’ve moved from a “complicit dance” model that was very profit-driven to an “antagonistic race” model that is still very profit-driven. The incentive structures have simply changed.Merle GronewegThis liberal binary between a supposedly free internet and a censored one seems increasingly difficult to sustain, especially when we look at X. Do you see a convergence in how algorithms and content are controlled?Yi-Ling LiuThe idea that the American internet is free and open while the Chinese internet is closed and authoritarian is falling apart. I’m skeptical when that binary is used to justify policy agendas. In the US AI Action Plan, for example, the race to defeat “authoritarian AI” with “democratic AI” is invoked to justify building more data centers, rolling back regulations, and weakening intellectual property rights for artists and creatives.The two systems aren’t identical, of course, but the distinction is increasingly difficult to sustain. TikTok is a good example. For years, the concern was that because ByteDance had links to the Chinese government, it could shape what users saw. Now, after TikTok was sold primarily to US investors and companies, similar concerns remain because of Oracle’s role and its close links to the Trump administration. People are now asking to what extent Trump and Oracle can shape the feeds of users.So despite the shift in ownership, the underlying system of algorithmic control, tied to state and Big Tech power, remains. If anything, the two systems increasingly resemble each other rather than looking like polar opposites.Merle GronewegWhat role do social media and apps play in the lives of people in China today?Yi-Ling LiuThere are two things that are unique about the Chinese internet experience. First and foremost, it’s ultimately walled off from the rest of the world. It’s not a completely impenetrable wall, but the Chinese internet exists in what I like to call its own walled garden — a separate ecosystem, a parallel online universe where people are not on TikTok, they’re on Douyin; they’re not on Facebook, they’re on WeChat; they’re not taking Ubers, they’re taking Didis.For every kind of platform, culture, or community that exists outside the firewall, there is some equivalent within it. To step into that space means to inhabit a completely different world. And if people move in and out of the firewall, it can create a jarring bifurcation. The news you’re reading on Toutiao is going to look very different from the news you’re reading on a Western news platform.The second thing is that the internet is very deeply embedded in people’s daily lives. The rise of the mobile internet really took root and accelerated in China early on. Using your phone as a tool for everything, with mobile payments as the dominant form of payment, is very much a Chinese phenomenon. It’s therefore hard to determine where your online life begins and ends. This became particularly clear during the COVID pandemic, when your health status was indicated by whether you had a red or green QR code. Your identity is inextricably bound with your online identity.Merle GronewegFor a brief moment in January 2025, American and Chinese users exchanged glimpses into each others’ everyday lives when “TikTok refugees” from the United States opened accounts on the Chinese app Xiaohongshu (RedNote). How did you experience that exchange?Yi-Ling LiuIt was a small and transient but also beautiful moment. It reminded me of the promise of the early internet: bringing people together in unexpected ways, unmediated and unfiltered — although technically, they were still filtered through the RedNote app.What struck me was how much people cared about the same things. They wanted to know what people on the other side paid for groceries or rent, whether they found meaning in their work and what their everyday lives looked like. They were sending each other photos of their cats.It was a genuine example of grassroots exchange, and I think it felt so good precisely because that kind of interaction has become so rare. Often people approach China with preexisting ideologies, whether from the right or left political spectrum. There’s a tendency to project our desires onto the country. Among parts of the American left, that can mean glorifying China as an ideal communist state and a counter-model to imperialist America.But I think people should pay closer attention to the experiences and voices of people in China. The 996.ICU movement is a good example: tech workers at Microsoft in the United States followed what was happening to tech workers in China and engaged with them directly on GitHub, without ideological or third-party intermediaries.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.
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