The wall dancers Searching for freedom and connection on the Chinese internet

This incisive, empathetic debut study from journalist Liu examines three decades of the internet's evolution in China, from the mid-1990s explosion of microblogs and message boards that corresponded with the country's increasing liberalization, to the mid-aughts raising of the Great Firewall. Liu contextualizes these events, linking them to China's larger historical cycles of "opening and tightening," but her account focuses on the up-close perspectives of five Chinese "netizens" impacted by the rise and fall of the open internet. They include Ma Baoli, a formerly closeted police officer who started a website as a "sanctuary for gay men" that evolved into a popular gay hookup app, and Lü Pin, founder of "the nation's most influential feminist publication." Liu conveys how these individuals' emotional and interior lives were shaped by events in the digital world, from their excitement at discovering a community online to the pain and isolation caused by growing restrictions and even the outright deletion of their platforms (Lü describes the latter as "like having a part of myself die before my eyes"). Through other interviews, including with a Weibo editor pressured to silence posts about a high-speed train crash, the author spotlights the state's chillingly singular promotion of content with "positive energy," as well as netizens' coy means of evading censorship, such as #MeToo activists' usage of the phrase rice bunny, pronounced "mi tu." It amounts to a vital and subversive window into a cloistered but sprawling online world. (Feb.)

An investigation of the Chinese internet and its place in Chinese society, reported from geographical and generational front lines and their margins. In her full-length debut, journalist Liu dissects and dismantles monoliths, highlighting and explaining the seeming contradictions and fatalistic predictions that fuel most conversations about China's adoption, creation, use, and control of technology. Born and raised in Hong Kong--with its privileged relationship to mainland China--educated in the United States, and having built her journalism career in Beijing, she brings broad perspective and nuance to an issue that, despite its extensive global impact, is often discussed only in terms of its extremes. Into a milieu of weaponized tariffs and proprietary technology, the author injects essential context for China's famed "Great Firewall" and profiles five individuals who have lived beyond its constraints: Ma Baoli, founder of China's most successful gay mobile app; Lü Pin, a leader in the country's underground feminist movement; Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chan), a science-fiction writer; Kafe Hu, a pioneer of China's hip-hop and rap scene; and Eric Liu, a former tech content censor. These protagonists navigate double lives, self-censorship, collaborations with the Chinese diaspora, and the exacting crackdowns of their country's authoritarian government, as their fellow "netizens" deploy a blend of irony, humor, and wordplay to elude its control. If Liu's text is in part revelatory of the particular ambitions, risks, and pitfalls humming beneath China's internet domination, it is also a global cautionary tale. China's push and pull between rigid control and loosened restrictions to serve economic growth is not an isolated story, but an example of how the entire World Wide Web has defaulted on its past promise to become a space for "the amplification of illiberal voices, the contraction of the public sphere, the erosion of common sense." A timely and sophisticated study that is eye-opening, and a touch eerie. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.