The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet - Hardcover

Liu, Yi-Ling

 
9780593491850: The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593491858 ISBN 13: 9780593491850
Verlag: Knopf, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

An eye-opening exploration of the Chinese internet that reveals the intricate dance between freedom and control in contemporary China

“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

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: Coming Out

Qinhuangdao, Hebei, 1995

When Ma Baoli felt that he could no longer contain his secret, he would go to the beach. He’d walk out of the squat police bureau building, where he worked as an officer, across the train tracks that cut through downtown Qinhuangdao, straight down the sandy path to the sea. The police bureau was his home, but the sea was his refuge. Standing alone on the stretch of golden sand, watching the tides come and go in silence, he’d calm down. His secret was safe with the sea.

Ma grew up in Qinhuangdao in the eighties, when the city was just a quiet port town where container ships picked up coal and timber, a passing point between Beijing and China’s northern hinterlands. As a child, he was raised in a working-­class household with modest means but was happy; his father was a factory worker at the local distillery, and his mother took care of him as a housewife. The three of them shared a courtyard home with two other families and had everything they needed. If it became cold in the winter, they lit the stove under their large wooden kang; if they got bored, they passed the time chatting with their neighbors in the courtyard.

The Mas were proud of their son, who enrolled in the all-­boys Qinhuangdao police academy when he was sixteen and was training to become a great officer one day. As a student, Ma was hardworking and diligent, quickly commanding the respect of his peers. He kept his hair short and neatly trimmed, spoke with a voice that was gentle but authoritative, and smiled with his brows slightly furrowed. He aced his classes—­not only math and physics but specialized police courses like constitutional law and criminal investigations. Outside of class, he managed the school paper and ran the campus radio station, playing cassette tapes of the latest pop hits. He loved the academy, its rules and routines, and the students’ easy camaraderie. Every morning before sunrise, they gathered by the courtyard and jogged to the beach to complete their daily sprints and wrestling exercises by the sea. Every evening, they slept together in dorms, eight to a room, huddled together for warmth in winter. The world was simple. His ideals were clear: Learn how to be a good cop, enforce the law, keep the city in order.

When he turned seventeen, a secret began to take root and bloom inside him, quietly and unannounced. While his classmates boasted about girls they wanted to date, he nursed crushes on boys. He became infatuated with his best friend—­a playful, mischievous student from the Hebei countryside. The two spent all their time together—­during their morning exercises, at meals, after class—­and, sometimes at night, shared the same bed. “We’ll issue you two a marriage certificate after we graduate,” their classmates joked. During the holidays, they exchanged long letters. Few households had their own phone then, so if Ma was desperate, he used the convenience store phone booth and called the number of his friend’s neighborhood committee, the only phone in his village. That feeling of anticipation—­receiver pressed to his ear, lightheaded with pleasure, waiting to hear his friend’s voice—­was delicious and disorienting, like tasting ice cream for the first time.

“What’s going on between us? What do you think our relationship is?” Ma blurted out anxiously during one of their conversations.

“Do you think we’re homosexual?” his friend responded.

“No, we’re not,” Ma said. “Of course not.”

The first time Ma encountered the word “homosexual,” or tong­xing­lian, was in one of his school textbooks, entitled Criminal Psychology. The book dedicated an entire page to “sexual deviancy” and explained how men who desired other men were more likely to commit crimes. At the time, homosexuality was still prosecuted as “hooliganism,” a vague descriptor that encompassed crimes like “humiliating women” and “stirring up a crowd to create brawls.” As a small-­town boy, Ma did not know this, but in larger cities, police routinely raided cruising spots; in Beijing, one man—­dubbed “Lady Paris” for his dalliances with a Parisian chef at the French embassy—­was arrested at a popular spot on the east side of Tiananmen Square and sent to a labor camp for two years.

Homosexuality was then also officially classified as a mental disorder. Across the country, clinics offered pills, injections, and electroshock treatments as forms of “conversion therapy.” Desperate parents sent their gay sons and daughters to psychiatric institutions in hopes that their “illness” might be cured. Doctors told their gay patients that if they did not change, they would get sick and bring shame to their families. Deep-­seated Confucian values—­an unshakable emphasis on having a respectable marriage, giving birth to sons, and honoring one’s elders—­meant that the family was one of the most intense places of discrimination. To not bear offspring, a popular proverb declared, was the greatest act of disrespect toward one’s ancestors.

Ma was terrified of being found out. As far as he understood, the textbooks were right, and his feelings were deviant and perverted. The secret grew like a tumor in his chest, threatening to overtake the order of his life. After graduation, he would go to the hospital to fix himself, he thought. For now, he would keep his secret to himself and the sea.

• • •

One night in 1998, Ma stopped by a new internet café that had opened next to the police bureau. He had graduated two years before and started working as a police officer, first in the investigations department, then writing speeches, strategy documents, and public announcements for the police chief.

The first internet cafés had recently arrived in Qinhuangdao, and everyone was flocking to these cramped, computer-­filled establishments to get a taste of the online realm. In 1995, after China’s first private internet service provider, China Infohighway Communications, gave ordinary users access to the web, China was swept up by an internet fever. Computer companies sold hardware from street stalls and department stores; roadside billboards advertised Acer and Microsoft. Internet start-­ups proliferated, launching China’s first search engine, instant-­messaging platform, and popular email service, 163.net. The number of internet users doubled every six months. People waited in line to visit China’s first internet café, Sparkice, in Beijing’s Haidian district, paying 20 yuan per hour—­to spend a whole day would cost nearly the average monthly income at the time—­to surf the web. As these cafés sprouted across the country, news reports insisted that the traditional greeting of “Have you eaten?” was being replaced with “Have you logged on?” Ma wanted to see what all the hype was about.

The café was a small, dim room, sandwiched into an alleyway, lit by two rows of desktops with buzzing screens. Ma picked a computer and searched tongxinglian—­homosexual. First, he scrolled through what he expected to find—­a messy jumble of advertisements promoting electroshock therapy clinics and conversion medication. Then he stumbled upon a discussion forum entitled “Chinese Men’s and Boy’s Paradise,” which featured a link to an online novel called Beijing Story. The novel was penned by an author who went by the pseudonym Beijing Comrade. Ma clicked on the link.

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593491858
ISBN 13 
9780593491850
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
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