Yi-Ling Liu on The Wall Dancers: China's Internet, Its Creative Spirits, and the Art of the Possible
About this episode
Kaiser Kuo interviews Yi-Ling Liu about her book exploring the complexities of creative life on the Chinese internet through various personal stories.
This week on Sinica, I speak with Yi-Ling Liu, journalist, former China editor at Rest of World, and author of the new book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Yi-Ling's book traces the arc of Chinese online life through five protagonists — a rapper, a gay rights entrepreneur, a feminist activist, a science fiction writer, and an internet censor — each navigating the creative and constrictive forces of the Chinese internet in their own way. The result is a deeply reported, novelistic account of what it felt like to live, create, and push back in one of the most surveilled and dynamic digital environments on earth. We discuss the book's central metaphor of "dancing in shackles," the early utopian glow of Chinese netizen culture, the parallel fates of hip hop and science fiction under the state's alternating embrace and constraint, and the eerie convergence between the Chinese internet and our own. 0:06 — "Wall dancers" as a metaphor: what it captures that "dissident" or "netizen" doesn't 0:09 — Why 网民 (wǎngmín) took root in China as a concept of digital citizenship 0:13 — The early Chinese internet: more open than we remember, but not as…
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