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СпутникиРНSpaceXРоскосмосNASAInsights from Yi-Ling Liu.
The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Yi-Ling Liu – author of “The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet” (Knopf 2026) – is the 494th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Compare and contrast the characteristics of the Chinese internet within the Great Firewall and the internet beyond the Great Firewall.
In many ways, the Chinese internet is an enclosed ecosystem, separate from the outside world. There are obvious differences: information is tightly surveilled and censored by the government, it operates by its own set of rules and governance structures, global platforms from Google to Facebook remain blocked and inaccessible.
Still, a bounded cyberspace hardly means a barren one. The walled garden of the Chinese web is like a parallel universe, flowering with its own innovations and platforms, cultures and communities. To step into the Chinese internet is to communicate on WeChat instead of WhatsApp, shop on Taobao instead of Amazon, scroll through Douyin instead of TikTok, query DeepSeek instead of ChatGPT. Everything from the rhythm of online interactions to the aesthetic of its user interfaces to the tone of its online slang is experienced differently.
Explain the impact of the metaphor “dance in shackles” in navigating the Chinese internet.
The Chinese internet is a space that is dynamic and contradictory – rich with innovation and yet rigidly constrained, filled with both creativity and potential. It’s a space where hip-hop music could go viral and soar to mainstream popularity within a month, then get banned by authorities the next; where a gay dating app could be shut down one year, while another one can go public a couple of years later.
I found that anyone wishing to navigate this shifting terrain needed to be agile and nimble. People have used a whole array of metaphors to describe this unstable experience: artists who tiptoed around the line of the censor described the process as a “game of cat and mouse.” Entrepreneurs compared the experience of predicting the state’s limits on their actions to divining the weather: fickle and shifting without warning. Bloggers who wanted to write provocative posts used the table tennis term “playing boundary ball” – serving a hit at the edge of an opponent’s table while staying safely within bounds.
But the metaphor that I found the most apt and enduring was that of the “dance in shackles.” It was first used in the early 2000s by Chinese journalists describing what they could achieve under state constraints on their writing. Since then, I have seen the phrase used by software engineers, musicians, and science fiction writers. It reveals this idea that to navigate the Chinese internet, in many ways, is to participate in a dance: a push and pull between state and society. Artists act as both critics and collaborators of the state. Authorities and entrepreneurs find themselves in confrontation and at other times entangled in mutual embrace.
Describe your profile of Lu Pin, journalist turned activist, and the search for freedom and connection.
Lu Pin is one of China’s most influential feminist activists, known by many young women as the “godmother of Chinese feminists.” In the book, I follow her own feminist awakening, from her first job out of college, as a journalist at the state-run paper China Women’s News to her experience in 2009 founding Feminist Voices, a magazine and social media platform that exploded in popularity and became a hub for young feminists across the country to connect with one another. In the 2010s, they successfully organized several campaigns on issues of sexual harassment, domestic violence, and gender inequality.
This kind of activism became increasingly difficult after 2015, after a group of young feminists known as the Feminist Five were detained. Lu, who was visiting New York at the time, decided to remain in the U.S. out of fear of repercussions. But while China’s burgeoning feminist movement was in many ways pushed underground, it did not end. In fact, it re-emerged largely on social media and also across the Chinese diaspora, after the #MeToo movement took root in 2018.
Although physical spaces of gathering have become mostly out of bounds, Lu adapted, learning to navigate digital spaces and create spaces of trust and solidarity online and across geographical borders.
Examine how China’s internet censorship apparatus provides insights on the Chinese Communist Party’s aspirations and fears.
China’s internet censorship apparatus is complex, with many shifting and often opaque parts. But one significant way in which they censor the internet is through censorship directives, which lay out broad rules of what can or cannot be said on the internet. There are many state organizations that can issue these, one of the most prominent being the Cyberspace Administration of China. They communicate to social media companies and media platforms instructions on new sensitive key words that must be removed, news events that must be silenced, and discussion topics that should be avoided.
There are obvious topics that are routinely censored. Since the earlier days of the Chinese web, these directives were heavily focused on attempts to gather and mobilize. The Party’s most significant concern, even more than criticism of the government, is content that spur any form of collective action – calls to protest, to assemble, to bring people together (even if they are for patriotic causes).
In the last decade or so, the scope of censored topics has expanded not just to include criticism and collective action, but any content that are at odds with the Party’s ideological views, including any information that they would dub “vulgar” and “immoral.” The purpose of censorship is now not simply to prevent dissent but to actively shape the views of its people and spread what they call “positive energy.”
For example, in recent years, banned content has included everything from the “excessive flaunting of wealth” (which perhaps might spark anger about inequality,) queer content and “sissy boys” (which do not align with the Party’s heteronormative ideals), and discussions of stagnant economic growth, youth unemployment, or the meme of “lying flat,” which goes against its vision of its citizens being part of a productive and fertile workforce.
Assess how the U.S. internet has become much more like China’s and its implications for China-U.S. elite and public perceptions and attitudes towards each other.
For all their differences, the Chinese and the U.S. internet are starting to look increasingly alike. Just as the romance of the Chinese internet as a force of liberalization has waned, so has the fantasy of a free and open World Wide Web. On both internets, we’re seeing the rise of illiberal voices, the erosion of common ground, and the proliferation of mistrust and conspiracy.
Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform, once hailed as a harbinger of free speech is both tightly controlled and overrun with patriotic trolls. Twitter – now X – once praised as a “throbbing networked intelligence” is flooded with illiberal incels, its algorithms shaped by the whims of an owner who also happens to be one of the world’s most powerful men.
Instead of being free, open and connected, both internets are closed, siloed and commoditized. Power has concentrated in the hands of Big Tech companies, be they Meta or Tencent, Alibaba or Amazon, who, through their platforms, are able to monitor our private lives, keep us locked in an endless feed, and extract our attention for influence and profit.
In China, tech entrepreneurs have always had to adhere closely to the Party line and government policy. We are now seeing this in the United States too. After Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2025, the CEOs of U.S. tech giants, from Mark Zuckerberg to Sam Altman to Tim Cook, quickly fell in line to speak his rhetoric and align their companies with the new administration’s direction.
The arrival of new AI technologies has only accelerated this consolidation of power; without checks, people are increasingly stripped of control and agency over their own lives.
| # | Наименование новости | Тональность | Информативность | Дата публикации |
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