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Yi-Ling Liu, "The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet" (Knopf, 2026)
00:44:43
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Not too long ago, in the 2000s and 2010s, many felt that the Internet, even one behind the great Firewall, would bring about a more open China. As President Bill Clinton famously quipped in 2000, Beijing trying to control the Internet would be like, quote, trying to nail Jell o to the wall. Things don't look quite so certain now. China's Internet is now more controlled than it was a decade ago, with platforms, content creators and tech companies now firmly guided by rules and signals from Beijing. Yi Ling Lu charts the story of China's Internet in her book the Wall Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet with profiles of creat like Ma Ba Li, the founder of one of China's and the world's largest gay dating apps, or Chinese hip hop pioneer Kafei Hu. Yi Ling's work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Wired, and the New York Review of Books. She has been a New America Fellow, a recipient of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, and an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar. So, Yi Ling, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book. You know, the Wall Dancers Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. You know, why did you want to write about this time period, kind of the 2000s, the 2000s. What do you think makes this period so important? When talking about kind of the rise of the Chinese Internet and kind of what Chinese people are doing on the Internet.
- [01:43]
B
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. And speaking on this podcast, I will say that I'm writing a history of the Chinese Internet, really from beginning to present day. So as early as the 90s, when it was first introduced to Chinese people, and to 2025, up until the kind of chatgpt generative AI era. But the 2000s and 2010s, as you point out, are a huge section of it. And essentially the entire first 2/3 of the book follow this period. I think this period is extremely important because firstly, it was a particularly vibrant and freewheeling period of the Chinese Internet. Right. I think especially in the early 2000s, there was this sense of optimism. The story of the Internet was very much a romance. And this is not just the Chinese Internet, but the global Internet. But the Chinese Internet in particular was seen as this Force of liberalization. It was going to change China and make China more open and allow people to kind of connect with one another and mobilize and be exposed to new cultures and new ways in kind of unprecedented ways. And so during this period, we see kind of an influx of foreign music, culture, film literature coming in through the Internet. We see the blooming of an active online civil society through microblogging platforms. We see the rise of tech entrepreneurs and kind of the burgeoning of the mobile Internet in the 2010s. And so this period is very much one that is ripe with optimism and change, and. And I think we forget that now because it feels so different. But I wanted to kind of capture the vibe and the origin stories and the energy of that period.
- [03:50]
A
Why'd you want to call the Book Wall Dancers? I mean, what's kind of the meaning behind the title?
- [03:56]
B
Yeah, so the idea of the dance in particular comes from this term, dancing in shackles, which was first used by Chinese journalists in the early 2000s to describe how they felt like they could write and report under state constraints. And since then, it has appeared as a viral phrase used by all kinds of people. So I've seen musicians use the term, science fiction writers use the term, software engineers use the term. And it really captured for me and resonated with me this idea that to live in China is a dance, essentially, to engage in this dynamic push and pull between state and society. It means to navigate a society that is constantly shifting between freedom and control. It's, on one hand, rich with innovation and yet rigidly constrained. And, you know, here's a society where a gay dating app could go public on the New York Stock Exchange and then get shut down the next year. Like, here's a society where hip hop could go viral one month and then get banned the next. And nowhere I felt was this dance more dynamic than on the Chinese Internet, which, you know, is what exists behind the. Within the bounds of the firewall, which is where the wall comes from. And I called the individuals who were particularly adept at navigating this shifting terrain dancers, you know, in practice, kind of.
- [05:29]
A
How open was the Chinese Internet, you know, during this period? I mean, the Chinese Internet has always, you know, has always had censorship and control in the firewall, but at least in these early stages, kind of. How open was this space?
- [05:47]
B
Yeah, that's a good question. Because at the end of the day, openness is quite relative, right? Like, open relative to where and what period of time? As you mentioned, it wasn't completely open like from the very beginning, it wasn't open in the sense that there was the Great Firewall. And the Great Firewall was first built as early as 1997. And at the time, you know, I think authorities just became aware of the fact that the Internet was going to be this double edged sword. It was going to be this source of innovation, but also instability. And Deng Xiaoping, I think, said around the time he said, if you open the window, flies will come in. And so they decided to build what was called at the time the Golden Shield Project, which is essentially a piece of software that filters information from coming in and keeps those flies out. And the Golden Shield Project is what we would come to know more informally as the Great Firewall. And since then, the Great Firewall has expanded into way beyond what we think of it concretely, which is this filter that bans blocked websites into a whole sophisticated ecosystem of high level cyberspace, regulators, rank and file sensors, surveillance, kind of Internet police. It also includes the internalized self censorship that a lot of citizens will have to kind of preemptively adapt to censors before they're even, you know, before their words are even taken down. And so all of that counts as what we understand today as the Great Firewall. But relative to the present day, the kind of scale and scope of the Great Firewall at the time was certainly much more open and much more porous than it is today. And you know, we can see this just from the amount of information and content that was allowed to be shared online at the time. If you opened up Weibo in 2011, you could see, you know, liberal intellectuals weighing in on their views on whether or not there should be a constitutional democracy. And that like, certainly wouldn't appear on Weibo today. The sophistication and scale of the censorship apparatus, like everything from numbers of sensors at a company. You know, I think if you were to look at Weibo in 2011, they might have like 150 sensors. Now that would be in the tens of thousands, I think. Whereas previously the type of content that was banned online was mostly kind of criticism of the government or anything that would allow for mobilization. Now it's just like anything that doesn't really adhere to the party's ideological values. So that's everything from like, quote unquote, unhealthy marital values to, you know, a recent one that has been actually, you know, taken down, or like a recent sensitive keyword is sissy boys or, you know, the excessive flaunting of wealth. So certainly, like, things are things were a lot more open back in the day than they are today.
- [09:23]
A
You know, speaking of kind of the values and the values Beijing may or may not want to want to support, you know, one of the. One of the kind of the main people you talk about in your book is kind of Ma Ba Lihu, the eventual founder of Blue to kind of a gay dating app in China, which eventually goes public in 2020 and then is delisted not soon after. But you know, what, what, what is kind of Ma Bali's story and how does it kind of match the. The story of China's Internet?
- [09:50]
B
Yeah, so just a bit of brief background. Ma was a young man who grew up in northeastern China in a small city called Xinghuangdao, and he was a cop. So he worked at the police bureau for more than a decade. And during this period, he also came to realize that he was gay, but was very much closeted and didn't share that information with any of his superiors, with his family. But he discovered that he was gay through the Internet, or he discovered that there were other gay people through the Internet and founded a underground gay website to help. To help everyone kind of connect with one another online. And fast forward about two decades later, he is the CEO of blued, the largest gay dating app not only in China, but in the world. And in 2020, about to take it public in on New York in an ipo. And you know, his kind of narrative trajectory, his story, and his coming out journey almost entirely mirrors this kind of romance of the Internet as this force of liberalization. He first kind of came to terms with his sexuality in the late 90s when the first Internet cafes opened up in Tsinghuangdao. And he read a online story called Beijing Comrade. Sorry, Beijing Story by an anonymous writer called Beijing Comrade, about two men who fall in love. And you know, it. It opened the portal for him into a whole world where he realized that he wasn't alone. So in that sense, the Internet was like this huge kind of like opening force for him in his youth, and it was what allowed him to connect with other queer communities. In the 2000s, as hundreds of gay websites were starting to at the time. And in 2008, when China was stepping onto the global stage and opening up its doors to the world, and its Internet was kind of beginning to in some ways open up as well, he moved his small team to Beijing, believing that if China was opening up at the time, the Beijing Olympics was happening, and the Beijing Olympics were called China's coming out party. And so, you know, he had the sense, well, if China is coming out to the world, you know, why not? Why can't our little organization of queer men also come out to the world? And then, you know, he founded blued and pivoted from his website to a gay social networking app or mobile app in 2012. And this was exactly when China was beginning to embrace the mobile Internet specifically, and shifting from websites to mobile, and when a lot of tech entrepreneurs like Ma were receiving a ton of resources and support from the government to do that. And then, you know, he took his company global on the New York Stock Exchange and began to expand to markets outside of China in the kind of late 2000 and tens as companies like ByteDance, for example, were taking products like TikTok abroad. And there was a sense that Chinese companies were no longer just Chinese companies, but global companies. And then finally, you know, he took his company private and stepped down as CEO right after the big tech crackdowns in 2021. And so we see this kind of opening and tightening of the Chinese Internet very much mirror his own trajectory as a gay CEO.
- [13:46]
A
So China does take this kind of tighter turn towards the Internet kind of in, in the, in the mid to late 2010s, obviously, kind of, that kind of continues, not just in terms of, kind of, not, not just in terms of kind of censor of the Internet, kind of controlling what gets posted and this kind of determining what values can be talked about on the Internet, but also in terms of the pressure on, on tech companies. I remember the whole common prosperity quote, unquote, kind of regulatory crackdown kind of in the, in, in the early 2000s. But in your view, kind of, what do you think explains kind of this, this, this greater scrutiny on the Internet kind of in the late 2010s, early 2020s?
- [14:30]
B
Yeah. A lot of writing this book was trying to kind of identify those turning points, you know, when the opening ends and the tightening begins. And I found, like, although it's hard to really pinpoint that exact turning point, especially because, you know, different communities and different parts of the Chinese Internet will experience it differently if we really traced it back to, I think, its earliest roots, some people will, a lot of scholars will point to 2008 actually. You know, it's funny because we think of 2008 moment of this coming out moment, this opening moment, but a lot of people say that was kind of when the turn began. One of the big reasons is the global financial crisis. There was this sense that particularly among the leadership, that the Financial crisis was a result of kind of failed Western liberalization, that this is what a laissez faire economy leads to. This is what kind of excessive liberalization leads to. And perhaps the way forward for China was not to kind of continue and copy the west down this path, but to kind of veer off the path of liberalization altogether. And so, in some sense, this is kind of a turning point for China's political system that people point to. And then I'd say, like the other kind of turning points also were the rise of Weibo and microblogging that took place between 2009 and 2011. A lot of people refer to this period as the Weibo Spring, in that it was like a super vibrant period. People were mobilizing on Weibo. They were pushing it back against government policies. They were calling truth to power, they were calling out corruption. When the Weibo train crash took place in 2010, there was this huge kind of surge of online presence of people who believed that they could use Weibo as a kind of town square to hold those government officials accountable for failing to build these trains safely and for covering up the accident. And I think this was very alarming for the party at the time because it revealed that the Internet was this kind of uncontrollable tool for mass mobilization. And that was obviously very terrifying for them. On the other side of the world, they were also seeing the Arab Spring kind of unfold. And at the time, it was called the Twitter revolution. You know, it literally was capable of bringing down entire regimes. So I think that for them was another trigger that made them realize that the Internet was this force that needed to be controlled much more tightly. And this was also the period shortly after that the party created the Cyberspace administration of China before all the different kind of Internet regulators, media regulators, were dispersed and pretty separate. There was a whole bunch of them, and they were often conflicting, and they didn't really speak with one voice. And so when you were being censored, you really didn't know who you were being censored by often. And the creation of the Cyberspace administration of China was a way to kind of bring all these voices under one umbrella and one organization. You know, you.
- [17:58]
A
You just mentioned Weibo, and kind of one of the people you talk to is someone who is responsible for censoring stuff on Weibo. You know, and his experience changes as, as. As. As the. As the controls start getting tighter. I mean, what did you kind of learn about his story as you kind of were reporting out this book?
- [18:22]
B
Yeah, so this is Eric, Eric Liu, and he used to work as a censor at Weibo from 2010 to 2011. So he was only there for a year, just as Weibo was beginning. But he gave a lot of crucial insight into how the censorship ecosystem worked at a social media company at the time, he was like a rank and file censor, and his job was essentially just to delete words. Sensitive keywords that came up. It was a very kind of boring, rote job. But it just reveals to me that the firewall. And as a reminder to readers that the firewall is a human endeavor. It's not this kind of opaque, abstract concept. There are humans who are performing this labor every single day. And through his experience, I could also kind of get a sense of how the censorship ecosystem could change quite rapidly. Even just over the course of, I think his couple years at Weibo, his work environment changed quite drastically, like it was during the period of the Wenzhou train crash. And this is when the party realized that it really needed to rein in criticism online and mobilization online. So, for example, during his period, the sensitive keyword base, which kind of showed him what words he needed to delete and keep, kind of grew dramatically. Like by 400 times within a year, the number of hires almost doubled. The censorship apparatus became much more sophisticated. There are all kinds of different things they could do besides take words down. You know, they could shadow ban people, they could hide words, they could take down users altogether. And so, yeah, he really illuminated how quickly things can change and the kind of human labor that's required to keep this system running.
- [20:38]
A
We heard you.
- [20:39]
C
Nine years of bring back the snack wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the hot honey snack wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.
- [20:54]
A
Another one of the people you talk to is, Is. Is. Is Kef who, You know, the hip hop artist and you know, like several people in your book kind of. They're, you know, they're. You talk to activists, but you also kind of. Why do you want to bring in some of the. Some of this creative side into. Into this conversation as well?
- [21:10]
B
Yeah, so his. He's actually called Cafe who?
- [21:13]
A
Cafe who? You. Right, start.
- [21:15]
B
No worries. No worries. He like, he liked. His name is after like a coffee, like the Chinese word for coffee, Cafe. And yeah, so Cafe is this kind of aspiring rapper from Sichuan, small town in Sichuan, and he was a bit of a delinquent student and eventually moved to Chengdu because He wanted to pursue his dream of being a hip hop star. And I thought that it was really fascinating to follow Chinese hip hop and as you mentioned, Chinese underground culture in general, because to me, it really illustrates how the Internet was not just, you know, a place of building civil society or a vehicle for entrepreneurship and economic growth, but it was also this incubator for new cultures. And it served as this opening in particular for foreign cultures to come into China. And finally, it was like a. It's a really important lens with which we understand the Chinese Internet's kind of shifting relationship to the United States and American culture. So if we were to look at Cafe Hu, for example, he came of age in the early 2000s as China was opening its doors to Western culture, and he fell in love with music, and he fell in love with hip hop after listening to Eminem's Stan online. And at the time, thanks to the Internet, Chinese listeners were accessing kind of like the full buffet of contemporary music all at once, which is a very different experience from how someone similar in the west might be exposed to music for the first time. It's like discovering Nirvana and Britney Spears and. And Jay Z all at the same time. And so I really wanted to capture what that kind of cultural experience looked like. And then, you know, the rise of the mobile Internet was also a very uniquely Chinese experience in how it shaped culture. You know, particularly platforms like Douyin and TikTok kind of was able to propel underground scenes like Chengdu's hip hop culture right into the mainstream within months. And this is like a very unique dynamic to China, like hip hop, for example, which was kind of small and niche, just suddenly blew up in 2017 thanks to this viral reality TV show on a Chinese streaming site called the Rap of China. And suddenly Cafe Hu finds himself in the spotlight, and he needs to be able to navigate the spotlight, understanding that visibility, too much visibility, can also be a bad thing because it does eventually lead to a hip hop ban from tv. And he must learn how to kind of adapt and retreat.
- [24:16]
A
So, you know, how. How do the stories of these various kind of activists and artists and maybe even small startup founders, I mean, there are the stories. I've known China's tech tycoons like Jack Ma. I mean, how are the stories of people like Jack Ma kind of connect with the stories of the people that are in your book?
- [24:35]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think maybe like the most obvious parallel here is Ma Bali, given that Ma works as a tech entrepreneur and so does Jack Ma and Ma Ba Li. Also very explicitly admires Jack Ma's trajectory and kind of designed his own career trajectory to follow Jack Ma's. And so I like, purposely kind of braided their narratives together throughout the book to. To make that parallel clear. But yeah, if we're looking at this kind of opening of the Chinese Internet, the flowering of the mobile Internet and then the tightening of it, Jack Ma's career very much mirrors that too. He founded Alibaba in the late 90s, early 2000s, as China was opening up to the west, as the Chinese Internet was opening up to the West. And the goal at the time was kind of to innovate by copying Western sites and making better, faster, cheaper versions of them.
- [25:38]
A
Right.
- [25:38]
B
Alibaba was seen initially as this kind of Chinese ebay and its goal was to compete with ebay and beat it in the Chinese market. And then by the time the mid 2000s comes or the 2010s come, the story of Chinese innovation shifts and no longer is it this story of China can't innovate. Or China is just a copycat country that is replicating American apps or Western apps in their own country, but making entirely new innovations of their own. So, for example, Blued, Maballi's Blued was not going to be just, you know, a Chinese grinder or Chinese Jack. It was going to be an entirely different platform of its own that would include everything from public health services to Life live streaming. WeChat was not just going to be Chinese Facebook, as it was referred to much earlier, but it was going to be this super app that even Mark Zuckerberg would later kind of envy. He would have WeChat envy. So this sense of the story of Chinese innovation shifting. And during this period, Chinese tech was also going global. So as Jack Ma and other Chinese founders and entrepreneurs were starting to take their products onto the global stage. ByteDance being the classic example, putting TikTok into the global Internet. So we're Mob Ali, for example, putting Blued into markets from everywhere from the Philippines to Mexico to the United Kingdom. And then of course, we have the kind of tightening and the crackdowns right after, I think in 2020. You know this well, Jack Ma deliver speech to financial regulators kind of criticizing the party's approach to financial regulation, and was quickly reprimanded and financial IPO was cancelled. He disappeared for a few months. And what preceded was like one of the largest kind of crackdowns on big tech in history. And as I mentioned, you know, Ma had to withdraw and kind of deal with that as well. In the way that many tech entrepreneurs did. So, yeah, like all entrepreneurs, like Jack Ma, like Ma Ali, have to navigate this kind of fluctuating relationship with a state that kind of swings between patronage and antagonism, like compromise and conflict.
- [28:24]
A
So how does your own story kind of mirror this change as well? I mean, because you're. You work as a journalist kind of throughout this whole period, kind of both in China and outside China. But. But how does your own kind of experience kind of tie into these changes as well?
- [28:40]
B
Yeah, well, you know, I was a teenager in the kind of early 2000s, the. The mid 2000s, and I was born and raised in Hong Kong and watching a lot of this unfolding from afar. But I also did once believe in the romance of the Internet, particularly the Chinese Internet as a force of liberalization. So I remember, you know, as a young high schooler, really believing that social media, be it Weibo or Twitter, was going to be this force of democratic change. And I was very hopeful about it, and it made me very excited about returning to China one day and working in China one day to chronicle that story. And, you know, I went to College in the US in the. In from 2013 to 2017, and during this period of time, knew that I wanted to return to Hong Kong, but in particular Beijing, and see how technology was going to transform Chinese society. But when I finally did make my way to Beijing in 2017, I found that the Internet did indeed change China. It was incredibly much more advanced, moving at a much faster pace, had progressed way beyond than I had imagined since I'd last visited. But the kind of mobile Internet did not serve as a liberal force. In fact, there was a much greater tightening, like censorship had become much more rigid. What you could and could not say online was not the same as it once was when, you know, back in my teens. And, you know, like, there was a sense that the story wasn't where I imagined that it would go. And a lot of the kind of reason why I decided to pursue this book was to answer the question, you know, like, what next? And a lot of the characters who I decided to pursue, and a lot of the kind of stories that I decided to pursue were questions that I was thinking through deeply myself, where I kind of shared a set of personal stakes. So, you know, I first kind of followed the Hip Hop Artist because I was thinking about what my role was as a creative person trying to write and create art within constraints. You know, I reached out to queer communities because I was trying to understand my own place in it. Given China's very shifting and ambivalent role towards its queer communities. I followed the feminist activists because I was curious what it meant for them to build solidarity online during the pandemic, during these, like, periods of isolation when it was very hard to gather offline. And science fiction writers I became interested in because they were all kind of seeking meaning and more spiritual meaning in the face of rapid technological change and these myths of productivity. And so all of these stories that I pursued during this period were kind of closely tied to my own personal experience as well.
- [31:57]
A
So you mentioned the kind of what's next question. I'm going to kind of ask you the what's next question. I mean, on the like, it does seem like Beijing is potentially has, has lightened up a little bit of its regulatory crackdown on big tech companies, whether that's because of the economy, whether that's because, you know, they need to do well in AI. Then you also mentioned this idea that Chinese tech firms can, can innovate and are going global. I mean, there's ByteDance obviously, but also with things like Deepseek and Qn Alibaba now it seems like Chinese tech companies are kind of on the, at least close to the, the leading edge of, of things like AI. And then of course there's the social aspect too, where, you know, I remember there was a period where it seemed like every, every couple months there was some news article about, here's a new term on social media, on Chinese social media, whether it's about lying flat or something else. And you know, people joke on the Internet that that was it, the great firewall keeps Chinese meat, like stops Chinese memes and from, from spreading to the wider world as opposed to stopping kind of west, like foreign stuff getting into China. And there's a lot of different stuff like there. But, but given that, you know, all these controls are still in place, and it's not that it doesn't like Beijing is going to lighten up anytime soon, but you have these other developments. I mean, where do you see kind of Chinese Internet going from here?
- [33:26]
B
Yeah, I mean, those are all great points and that is a huge question. But I can try to give a couple of kind of points that are not necessarily predictions because I do think things are very hard to predict. I do think the big question today right now is just how is China going to regulate AI in particular, and how are ordinary citizens going to use AI in light of these regulations? Because the Internet is turning into AI. But what I mean is these new AI technologies are built on top of these existing Internet platforms, one of the biggest AI tools is Dobao, and that is built upon ByteDance's Doyin. And so it's drawing from all that data, all of the regulations that once applied to the Internet now need to adapt to a technology that's much more unpredictable and much more fast moving. And the question is, how open or how rigid will the party be in governing this technology? And as you mentioned, we're witnessing potentially a bit of a shift since 2021-2023-2021-2023 I think of very much as this period where there was the big tech crackdown. If tech entrepreneurs were reined in, they became a lot more cautious, they lost a lot of confidence. This is also a period of economic stagnation. But with the rise of generative AI and particularly the release of ChatGPT in 2002, I think the whole world was kind of shook by the arrival of this new technology. And China, and the Chinese government in particular understood that it was probably pretty crucial to take advantage of this new technology and innovations in this area would be very important. So we did see a bit of a loosening, particularly on AI tech entrepreneurs. Definitely not the extent to which we saw in the mid 2010s with the mobile Internet, but definitely this sense of money being poured into the industry, a sense of loosening of regulatory constraints, a kind of rhetorical urgency with regards to infusing AI technologies into every aspect of the economy. I think we're going to see a much different emphasis on the types of sectors that government wants tech entrepreneurs to be working in. Like it's not going to be like the mid-2010s where they want people working on consumer apps like TikTok and Doyin. There's a huge emphasis on so called hard areas of technological growth instead of soft ones. So by hard I mean innovation that pushes hardware, chips, humanoids, EVs, robotics, right? Things that allow the Internet to be built in the physical world and AI to be infused into the physical world. And then I think the other areas that they're going to push hard for and that we're going to see a lot of growth in are kind of sectors that I think the party thinks is crucial for social, like the functioning of a healthy society. So education, healthcare, elderly care. I think there's going to be like a huge push to infuse AI into those sectors as well.
- [37:00]
A
You know, maybe to kind of close things off. I mean, you noted at the very beginning kind of overcome like there was this thought and this is like a thought from like the 2000s and 2000s, you know, or else with tens, where it's like the Internet was going to lead to more openness and lead to more openness generally. You know, I mean, that was like. Like that. That's kind of been a thought about the Internet. I mean, probably from like the 90s onwards, you know, it's like. It's like the Internet was gonna. Was gonna open up societies, more information flow, Information wants to be free. Like, all of these thoughts, and now it seems like no one thinks this. This whole idea kind of went away, and not just. Again, not just in China, but kind of globally, put it this strongly, as in, no one stopped. The Internet's been a force for good since 2020, if not earlier. But how do you see kind of what the Internet's kind of effect on society is? I mean, not just in China, but kind of using. Taking that experience and going global with it. I mean, how do you see the kind of the Internet, like, the Internet's effect on, again, the openness or closeness of a society?
- [38:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, like, you're right to point out that this dynamic is hardly unique to China. And I think that's like a huge takeaway that I want people to get from this book, that this kind of dying romance, so to speak, or this kind of tightening or centralization or siloing or splintering, however you want to call it, is taking place amid a global authoritarian drift. It's not just the Chinese Internet that's becoming closed. So is the global one. Just looking at what's taking place in the US Right now, there is this sense of algorithmic control is alive and present. There is a clear collaboration between the tech elite and political power to kind of mine our attention for profit and kind of use these technologies to surveil and keep people in place. So, yeah, this. This dynamic is certainly not unique to China. What I will say is like the Internet itself or AI itself, for all of these technologies, at the end of the day, are just technology. They're neutral, and they reflect how we use them and how we shape them. And so I think it's not like we can't be like, well, the Internet is what, you know, actually the Internet is bad. And this is what it did, you know, Internet once good, now bad, I think is maybe the wrong takeaway from this, from this kind of failed romance. I think what we should take away is that maybe we were a little naive in just assuming that more technology would equal more progress, which would be called freedom. You know that these are not givens. And we need robust institutions. We need the capacity for individual thought. We need kind of strong local communities and democratic decision making in order to use these technologies effectively. And we have neglected the importance of those. And that is what the kind of result of that neglect is what we're seeing today.
- [40:25]
A
So I think with that, that's a great place to end our conversation with Yi Ling Liu, author of the Wall Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Yi Ling, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next book project might be?
- [40:46]
B
Yeah, well, you can find my work on all kind of aggregated on my website, which is www.Yi Lingliu.com. and I can send that to you if you want to put it in the show notes. And in terms of next projects, I don't think I have another book in me anytime soon. But I am thinking a lot about AI and its impact on society and how it's shifting kind of interpersonal relations. So that's something that I will be thinking about and writing about more extensively in the future.
- [41:22]
A
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon, on Twitter at Nick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asianreviewbooks.com, find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter Book Reviews Asia. That's reviews, plural. And you can find many more authors at the new books network reviewbooksnetwork.com we're on all your favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Rate us, recommend us, share us with friends, support us interviewing those running in, around and about Asia. Next week, join us for an interview with William taubman, author of McNamara, at a new History. But before then, Yi Ling, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [42:00]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [42:08]
A
Sa.