Culture Current-Yi-Ling Liu on finding freedom in China’s digital margins

Speaking to Reuters from New York ahead of her Feb. 3 book launch, Liu discusses how people can innovate despite overwhelming constraints and how the internet shapes Chinese and American perceptions of each other. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Hong Kong-born and London-based writer Yi-Ling Liu has spent the past decade immersed in China's evolving tech landscape, witnessing first-hand how the rise of its big tech firms, flourishing mobile internet ecosystem, and subsequent crackdowns shaped the lives of its citizens. Her upcoming book, "The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet," is an intimate social history of the Chinese internet told through the lives of characters who experienced profound transformations and empowerment while also navigating shifting red ‌lines of government censorship and regulation. Though the book has secured publishers in the U.S., U.K., and South Korea, it will not be available in the Chinese market. Speaking to Reuters from New York ahead of her Feb. 3 book launch, Liu discusses how people can innovate despite overwhelming constraints and how the internet shapes Chinese and American perceptions of each other.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Your book is not just a history of the internet, but also a social, cultural, and queer history of contemporary China. Why did you ⁠decide to tackle this subject now?

In recent years, from the outside, China and Chinese technology in particular (are) often reduced to pretty simplistic extremes. On one hand, you have this kind of omnipotent oppressive regime where people have no agency of their own. And, at the other extreme, you have this unstoppable economic juggernaut of boundless opportunity, building humanoids and high-speed rail. Those narratives are even more pervasive today with the rise of AI, with (institutions) like OpenAI saying that China is the greatest threat to humanity and then a lot of Silicon Valley startups extolling China's incredible bridges and infrastructural might.

China is always presented as this unchanging monolith, and we often see China through American national security interests and economic interests. I wanted to do something different by telling the story through people, ​because it kind of forces us out of those tropes and forces us to really see a society in the full complexity of an individual human life. What were some challenges you faced when reporting this book?

One of the biggest challenges was that, on the one hand, I wanted to tell this very mainstream and important narrative about the ‍evolution of the Chinese internet and technology. But on the other hand, I wanted to do it through untold perspectives, like queer perspectives, feminist perspectives. And those two kinds of narratives had never been woven into one braid before. So, a lot of my work was neither to write a straight history nor a series of individual profiles, but to actually weave them together in a coherent whole. What made these particular characters the right vessels for telling the story of China's broader digital transformation?

The main organizing principle was I wanted to turn towards the margins. I was interested in subcultures, the underground, the subaltern. That is where I believed the most interesting stories were being told. I spoke to feminist communities, science fiction writers, queer communities, the hip-hop underground. But even though a lot of these subjects occupied the margins, many of them knew how to operate in the mainstream. Many of them knew how to ⁠speak the language of ‌authority. They could code-switch, they could wear many hats. They were creative and adaptable and knew how ⁠to identify leverage points for change. And that was something I was fascinated by.

Many people assumed that the internet would inevitably lead to greater political freedoms in China, but that turned out not to be the case. Still, your characters learn to survive and innovate despite these constraints. To what extent do you think that is still possible today? I'm less hopeful about the technology itself and more hopeful about the ingenuity and the creativity ‍of Chinese (internet users) to use the technology in ways that will embolden them and empower them to connect with each other authentically and live within the truth. And that actually might become increasingly difficult in the years to come, but I still think it's very much possible. And the AI question is one that I'm following closely. I also think I'm very worried that it will allow for greater control over ​private lives and deepen inequality.

How has your experience of using Chinese social media changed in recent years? Many of my friends complain about very polarized discourse or digital slop. I feel like this dynamic has been on the Chinese internet for a long time, right? That what we see on Chinese social media … is not ⁠necessarily an accurate reflection of reality, but a warped depiction of it. And that is not just the filtering and sanitizing of different content as a result of censorship, but I think it also is — and this is something that we forget a lot — the amplification of voices that are nationalist or illiberal. And in recent years, I've seen those voices become a lot louder — not necessarily because that is how public opinion has shifted, but because that is what ⁠the platforms are incentivizing and giving a lot more airtime to.

And that has also resulted in polarized opinions, perspectives being more hardened and myopic. But these forces are not unique to China. And also, people just withdrawing from the public sphere and retreating into anonymity and, you know, the Reddit incels (members of misogynistic online communities of self-described "involuntary celibates") and Weibo incels (their counterparts on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform) are kind of the same breed. "Living in the Chinese century" and "Chinamaxxing" have become memes on X among American Gen Z youth. What do you make of this phenomenon? This I would say is a new dynamic of the past year. I would say it's part of this broader vibe shift — or this wave of what people have ⁠called China envy — sweeping through the United States. And I'd probably point to the turning point being last January with the arrival of DeepSeek and the TikTok refugees migrating to Xiaohongshu (RedNote). There is this sudden realization or bursting of China into the American consciousness as this technological superpower. And it started with maybe the intellectual elite in Silicon Valley who ⁠were reckoning with the fact that China could build high-speed rail and they didn't have high-speed rail (and) ‌a lot of the "Abundance" policy wonks who were like, "Wow, they have Huawei cars and dancing humanoids."

And then it started to burst into the mainstream celebrity influencer consciousness with influencers like Hasan Piker or IShowSpeed going to China and being like, "Look at the drones in Chongqing." It doesn't really tell me much about China (but) it tells me a lot about Americans' shifting perspectives of China. What was the core message you want readers to take away from your book?

Even within increasingly sophisticated systems of technological control, which we're seeing not only in China ⁠but across the world, it is possible for you as an individual to find your own ways to carve out a little space of freedom and integrity, and (to) live within the truth. The perspectives expressed in Culture Current are the subject's own and do ‍not necessarily reflect the views of Reuters News. (Editing by Yasmeen Serhan and Aurora Ellis)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)