Yi-Ling Liu, "The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet" (Knopf, 2026)

**Yi-Ling Liu** (0:00)
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**Yi-Ling Liu** (0:14)
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**SPEAKER_4** (1:25)
Welcome to the New Books Network.

**Nicholas Gordon** (1:29)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Not too long ago, in the 2000 and 2010s, many felt that the Internet, even one behind the Great Firewall, would bring about a more open China. As President Bill Clinton famously kept in 2000, Beijing trying to control the Internet would be like, quote, trying to nail jello to the wall. Things don't look quite so certain now. China's Internet is now more controlled than it was a decade ago, with platforms, content creators and tech companies now firmly guided by rules and signals from Beijing. Yi-Ling Liu charged the story of China's Internet in her book, The Wall Dancers, searching for freedom and connection on the Chinese Internet, with profiles of creators like Ma Baoli, the founder of one of China's and the world's largest gay dating apps, or Chinese hip-hop pioneer Kafe Hu. Yi-Ling's work is in publish 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. So, Yi-Ling, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book, The Wall Dancers, Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet.
You know, why did you want to write about this time period? Kind of the 2000s, the 2010s, you know, what do you think makes this period so important when talking about kind of the rise of the Chinese Internet and kind of what Chinese people are doing on the Internet?

**Yi-Ling Liu** (3:07)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me and speaking on this podcast. I will say that, you know, I'm writing a history of the Chinese Internet really from beginning to present day. So as early as the 90s when I was first introduced to Chinese people and to, you know, 2025 up until the kind of ChatGPT generative AI era. But the 2000s and 2010s, as you point out, are a huge section of it. And essentially, you know, the entire first two thirds of the book followed this period.
I think this period is, like, extremely important because firstly, it was a particularly vibrant and freewheeling period of the Chinese Internet, right? I think, especially in the early 2000s, there was this sense of optimism. The story of the Internet was very much a romance. And this is not just the Chinese Internet, but the global Internet. But the Chinese Internet in particular, you know, was seen as this force of liberalization. It was going to change China and make China more open and allow people to kind of connect with one another and mobilize and be exposed to new cultures and new ways in kind of unprecedented ways. And so during this period, we see kind of an influx of foreign music, culture, film, literature coming in through the Internet. We see the blooming of an active online civil society through microblogging platforms. We see the rise of tech entrepreneurs and kind of the burgeoning of the mobile Internet in the 2010s.
And so this period is very much one that is ripe with optimism and change. And I think we forget that now because it feels so different. But I wanted to kind of capture the vibe and the origin stories and the energy of that period.