This is an extract from The Wall Dancers by Yi-Ling Liu, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here.
Outsiders have long reduced China to simplistic narratives at opposite extremes: China is at once an unstoppable economic juggernaut of boundless opportunity and an omnipotent, techno-authoritarian regime of repression. In English-language media, news on China is increasingly filtered through the lens of US national security interests, where China is often named the “biggest threat” to the United States. On bookshelves, such titles as When China Rules the World sit beside books on The Coming Collapse of China. In a scroll through my newsfeed, analyses of “China’s Two Paths to Global Domination” follow an article headlined the “great fall of china”? china “has never been weaker than it is today.” In the first China, anything is possible; in the second, the window of change is closed and locked. It follows, then, that a Chinese person can have only one of two identities: an apologist of the regime or a dissident, its beneficiary or its victim, a patriot or a traitor.
These narratives present an unchanging monolith, stripping individuals of their agency and failing to capture the society that I lived in, in all its dynamism and contradiction. Rich with innovation and yet rigidly constrained, life in China was filled with fear and ennui but also creativity and potential. Hip-hop music went viral there and soared to mainstream popularity within a month, then got banned by authorities the next; a gay dating app was shut down one year, while another went public a couple years later.
Anyone wishing to navigate this shifting terrain needed to remain agile and nimble. Those who tried to do so played with language itself. In my years of reporting in and out of the country, people have introduced me to an array of different metaphors to capture this unstable experience. Artists who tiptoed around the capricious 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 as akin to divining the weather: hazy, fickle, and shifting without warning. Bloggers who wanted to pen provocative posts used the table tennis term “playing boundary ball”—serving a hit at the edge of the opponent’s table while staying safely within bounds.
The metaphor I found most apt and most enduring was that of the “dance in shackles.” As far as I could tell, its first use came in the early 2000s by Chinese journalists describing what they could achieve under state constraints on their writing and reporting. Since then, I have seen the phrase used everywhere, by software engineers and musicians alike. “In China, every enterprise and individual has to dance with shackles on,” one tech executive wrote in a viral blog post, chastising Google’s withdrawal from the Chinese market in 2010. “Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it,” the writer Liu Cixin wrote in the afterword of the English-language edition of his science fiction epic The Three-Body Problem. “And I can only dance in my chains.” “Dancing in Shackles” was the title of a song by beloved Chinese indie rock band Miserable Faith, a shape-shifter of the Beijing music scene.
My reporting, both for this book and for stories I pursued before undertaking it, affirmed the power of this metaphor. To live in China is to participate in a dance: a dynamic push and pull between state and society. Censor and censored tango to an erratic rhythm of subversion and acquiescence. Artists act as both critics and collaborators of the state. Authorities and entrepreneurs find themselves at times in hostile confrontation and at other times entangled in mutual embrace. Nowhere has the drama of this Chinese dance been more evident than on its internet.
This book is about that dance, which has evolved over the past three decades, a period that encapsulates China’s transformation into both the world’s largest online user base and one of its longest-running authoritarian states. It begins in 1995, in the heady days of China’s opening, when ordinary Chinese people first logged on to the internet, swept up by its liberatory potential. It follows the flowering of China’s mobile internet in the 2010s, as Chinese cyberspace transformed into a walled garden—on one hand, blooming with new innovations and subcultures, and on the other, increasingly constrained and segregated from the global web. It ends in the wake of the pandemic, as China tightens control of the public sphere, closes its physical and virtual borders, and turns inward, away from the world.
This shift from liberalization toward retrenchment is not new: For much of modern Chinese history, society has moved in cycles of what scholars have observed as fang and shou, opening and tightening. The repressive era of Mao’s Cultural Revolution preceded a period of pragmatic loosening; the freewheeling reforms of the 1980s were followed by the Tiananmen crackdown. When the system opens up too quickly, destabilizing state power, authorities step in to assert control; when their grip becomes too rigid, calls for reform emerge, provoking a loosening again. But this time, this shift takes place amid a global technological turn—from the early promise of a free and open World Wide Web to one that has become closed, siloed, and commoditized.
Most crucially, this book is told through the stories of people I have come to call dancers: individuals pushing for greater openness and freedom within the state’s shifting bounds on the Chinese internet and, more broadly, in Chinese public life. How has China’s embrace of the internet both unleashed and also suppressed their dreams and aspirations as entrepreneurial, intellectual, and creative beings? Faced with the encroachment of authority on both their offline and online lives, how have they continued to navigate a dance between confrontation and compromise to challenge the status quo?
Although their backgrounds and worldviews are diverse, their stories are united by their struggles and dreams and disappointments. In spotlighting the book’s protagonists, I turned my attention to the margins, the underground, the subaltern, where I believed the most creative, imaginative dances bloomed: queer communities, feminist activist groups, the hip-hop underground, and science fiction writing circles. There is Ma Baoli, once a closeted cop from Northern China running an underground gay website, who transforms into an openly gay tech mogul, steering the largest gay social networking app through precarious political terrain. Kafe Hu, an aspiring rapper from Sichuan, who learns to toe the line of the provocative and permissible to articulate a voice of his own. Lü Pin, a journalist turned activist, who taps into a nationwide feminist awakening and builds a grassroots movement across China and its diaspora. Chen Qiufan, a tech worker turned science fiction writer, who—fascinated by and skeptical of the nation’s rapid technological rise—strives to imagine alternative visions of the future.
Although they live and work on the margins, they know how to operate in the mainstream. They are idealistic and pragmatic, wear many hats, speak several tongues. They have come to understand that survival in the system requires adaptability, creativity, and the ability to identify leverage points—situations when a right push with just-so timing and force can open possibilities for change. Having lived through a period of both unprecedented economic opening and tightening political control, each has undergone immense personal transformation and, in that process, has been forced to grapple with questions about success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith and survival. How will Ma harness the mobile internet to help millions of other queer Chinese love more freely? How will Lü sustain the feminist movement, and what must she sacrifice in the name of her beliefs?
Brought together, their stories show that even in increasingly repressive conditions, within the most sophisticated systems of control, individuals continue to push for dignity and freedom. When headlines warn of a bifurcated internet, these divisions extend down to the intimate and the individual, each crack in cyberspace running deep into flesh and bone. Changing the system, their stories reveal, begins with changing the self.
(c) Yi-Ling Liu
Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.