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Sinica Podcast
Yi-Ling Liu on The Wall Dancers: China's Internet, Its Creative Spirits, and the Art of the Possible
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Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program we look at books, new ideas, research, intellectual currents and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you, I am delighted to say, this week from my home in Beijing. SYNECA is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinika Podcast is and will remain free. But if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the show and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. I am looking for new institutional support this year. The lines are open. You can reach me@senecapodgmail.com don't be shy and listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber@cicapodcast.com seriously, help me out. I know there are a lot of excellent substacks out there. They start to add up. Yes, they start to add up for me too. But this one I think delivers really serious value. You get my stuff, of course, the China Global south podcast, the fantastic content from Trivium, including not only their excellent podcast but also their super useful weekly recap. You get James Carter's outstanding this Week in China's history column in text and in audio courtesy of me. I do a little weekly narration of it. Andrew Methven's Sinica Chinese Phrase of the week, a crowd favorite and of course the you can learn Chinese podcast. I am really trying to deliver value for your hard earned dollars, so do consider helping out. I know things are tough for me too, so so help out. Okay? All right. I am back in Beijing as we record this. As I said, first few days of the Lunar New Year, the Lunar Solar New Year, the Chinese New Year. I know there's a big fuffle of what we're supposed to say, but I've been doing what one does during that holiday, which is sitting around in my in laws house at their dining room table for hours and hours, eating way more than is medically advisable, watching the younger cousins somehow transform into these fully formed adults in just a few years since I saw them last, and and trying between you know, bites of Peking duck and the all too frequent Baijiu toasts, trying to extract sociological insight from, you know, whoever happens to be within conversational range of me. It's been just wonderful. The air has been clean, there's just no traffic. You know, it's the holiday, it's not been too cold, the food has been just outrageous. And I've caught up with old friends with my bandmates. And of course, the Chinese Internet remains resolutely itself. Which is to say I'm once again reacquainting myself with the ancient and noble art of discovering which VPN server is feeling cooperative and which one has decided to withdraw from public life. Some things change, some things very much do, not all. Which makes this a strangely appropriate moment to be talking about today's book. The book is the Wall searching for freedom and connection to the Chinese Internet, but by Yi Ling Liu, a journalist whose work I've admired for a long time. I remember being back in Beijing on an earlier trip. I think it was in 2019, and chatting with Yi Ling, when this project was still taking shape. Even then, I had very, very high expectations. The finished book has exceeded them. It's deeply reported, really novelistic in its texture, and remarkably readable. And for anyone who has lived through the last three decades or so of Chinese online life, it's also just uncannily relatable. I mean, I read it with a very personal lens. I was in Beijing for much of the period that Yi Ling covers, working in tech companies, writing about the Internet a lot as a journalist. Many of these spaces that she describes Whether the early Internet forums, the music scene she talks about, the hip hop scene, the gay community, these are all places that are really familiar to me. It was like, not like reading Distant Reportage, but more like revisiting these rooms that I once stood in. There are films that get mentioned in there, one in particular that I happen to work on, and of course this constant improvisational dance between users and sensors, which is absolutely familiar to me, which only made me appreciate even more how deftly E. Ling renders all of this. I'm also somebody who really believes that there's just no better single window, no better framing available to get at the essence of Chinese life in the last 30 years or so than the Internet. It is the natural portal, in my opinion, to approaching contemporary China. I'm really glad that this book was written and written so well. So Ealing was born in Hong Kong. She was educated in the States and has worked across an unusually wide spectrum of media, from Chinese state news organizations to Western newswires. She was China editor at the excellent Rest of World, which I think I've recommended before on this program, I think I'm sure I have. And her reporting has consistently brought subtlety and humanity to subjects that are too often just completely flattened and caricatured. So, Yi Ling, congratulations on a book that's getting rave and very well deserved reviews. Welcome to Sinica.
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Thank you so much, Kaiser, for having me as a longtime Seneca listener. I'm glad to finally be here.
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B
Well, glad to finally have you. Let's begin as you have so many times, with the title, which I know you've talked about, I mean, really in every interview that you've done. So let me take what I hope is a slightly different approach. So you call your protagonists wall dancers. I remember talking about this with you way back in 2019. What does that phrase capture that something like dissident or even netizen doesn't quite get at? What were you trying to avoid with those other potential labels?
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A
Yeah, so just for a bit of context, Ri, where this idea of the dancer comes from, it comes from this Chinese phrase, dancing in shackles. And it was first used by Chinese journalists in the early 2000s to describe the process of writing and reporting under state constraints and was soon after used by all kinds of people. So I've seen like science fiction writers use it as it in the English foreword of Three Body Problem. You know, hip hop artists that I encountered use it, software engineers used it. Google was pulling out of China in 2010, and it really resonated with Me as a metaphor, because unlike, you know, the words that you mentioned, dissident or netizen, it implies a kind of dynamic relationship between state and society, this kind of push and pull relationship that can be creative, that can be artful, and, you know, really captures this experience of living in a place that's on one hand rich with innovation and creativity, and yet on the other hand, rigidly constrained. And I think there are not a lot of words that capture that relationship and. And all the other descriptors end up creating these binaries and ossify our portrait of China, particularly those for those who haven't lived in China and are kind of looking at it from it from an outside lens.
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Yeah, for sure. I think it was a really well chosen word and an excellent metaphor for the book. I did mention the word netizen, and it's a word that, you know, you use, you spend a little of time talking about. It was actually coined in the United States, I learned a long time ago in the mid-90s, but it somehow very quickly came to be used almost exclusively to describe Chinese Internet users. If you were to even, like 10, 15 years ago, if you were to Google netizen, that word in English and click on the links, almost, in all cases, it was referring to Chinese Internet users. So I'm curious what you think why that word took root so powerfully in China. What did it come to mean there that it didn't quite mean elsewhere?
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A
Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I very rarely actually read about netizen in the US context, and I always associated with China. I never thought it was, you know, a word that originated in the States. And I think there's actually like a pretty direct corollary, even though that translation was probably not intentional, of wang mean. Right.
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B
It's perfect.
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Yeah, yeah, right. Which is literally Internet citizen.
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B
Yeah.
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My sense is that especially in the early 2010s, when Wavo was coming alive, the microblogging platform, Chinese Internet users were really treating the Internet and the online sphere as this kind of digital town square. Like it was their space to express themselves, to kind of call truth, to power, to organize. It became a kind of third space, a public sphere in a way in which I think in the United States and a lot of other countries, there were physical places of that type of gathering.
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B
I think it's fair to say that there never was a public sphere in Chinese life ever prior to the advent of the Internet.
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A
Exactly. So the Internet is where one is a citizen, essentially, which is probably why netizen was so resonant at the time.
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Totally. I mean, I think they did feel a sense of belonging to a new polity. Right. That this. It was something that had just simply never existed before. I think it actually goes back. I mean, you know, Weibo launched after, you know, the Urumichi riots and whatnot in 2009, after the death of some of its competitors. You know, it sort of came along, but even well before that, you know, a full decade before that, in 90, the late 90s and the early 2000s, I think this word was being used. It was a word that sort of met participation itself. Was something meaningful when you were reconstructing that whole era. Did it feel like that to you? Did you sense that, you know, talking to the. The characters who will momentarily introduce here, that they felt like there was something sort of new and bright and beautiful that was born with the advent of the Internet in really effectively the early 2000s.
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A
Absolutely. Like everyone I talked to during this period kind of felt this sense of exhilaration in this opening, and they were able to kind of connect with people, consume information, access goods, and consume things in ways that they had never before. And, you know, I can go into how that experience played out for each of the characters. But, you know, just to give one example, Cafe who. Who is one of the subjects that I follow. And he is. He was a kind of rapper. Yeah, he's a rapper. He was kind of. And this is an area that, you know, well, just absorbing the full buffet of contemporary music essentially within the span of a few years, which is like just getting fire hosed down.
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Yeah, yeah, for sure.
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With everything that you've ever listened to from like a western listener would listen to from like ages, I don't know, 8 to 40. And that's just an overload of information that. That can be an extremely kind of eye opening and exhilarating experience.
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I totally remember what it was like, you know, when I first got involved in music scenes here. I was always the guy introducing people to new music. And then at some point, and I can't remember exactly when, but it flipped. And it was all because of the Internet, of course. And suddenly I was learning constantly about new bands, about what was happening in the music world. From my Chinese friends, you know, because they were, well, they were. They were thirstier, they were more eager to, you know, sort of absorb. And I was already sort of getting old and boring and, you know, listening to the same shit I'd been listening since I was 15. But yeah, that totally. It flipped at one point. And suddenly they knew a whole lot more than I did. When you were reporting on the 90s and the early 2000s Internet, was there anything that really surprised you about that early atmosphere? I mean, we've all heard about how it was this burgeoning public sphere, how there was this moment of. But was it maybe more open or less open than you had expected? Was there a sense of maybe a conditionality on the freedom that we don't remember these days? Or was it about what you had expected?
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A
Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways when we look back at that period, we might look at it with rose colored lenses. It is kind of like the first portal into a different world, but it was still very restricted in many ways. So, for example, like, another one of the subjects that I follow ended up becoming the CEO of this gay dating app. But he was a closeted cop and he kind of was able to come out and realize that he was gay and realized that there were other queer men out in China through the Internet and stepping into an Internet cafe. But you know, when he logged onto the Internet for the first time, most of the information that he could access about being gay in China was like, you're either sick and you have an illness or you're committing a crime. And he really had to like dig around to find what he wanted. And even when he created his first website, it was constantly being shut down. It wasn't like he was just able to access all of this queer content that was completely unfiltered and accessible. So I think it was a kind of moment of opening, but it really is in comparison to what came before it, which was nothing.
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B
Right, right, right.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I often find that when I'm talking to people about those early days, they kind of assume that it was more censored than it in fact was. So, I mean, people are surprised when I tell them that if you, you know, were go back in time to 2006 or 2007, you would find that, you know, the BBC or CNN or Time or Reuters, the AP or the New York Times, none of the major media sites were blocked. It was only kind of the usual suspects. It was like, you know, if, if you were like a, a rights organization focused on, you know, Tibet or on Taiwan independence, of course, or just human rights more generally, then, yeah, you were probably going to be blocked. But, but the rest of it wasn't that none of the social media sites were blocked up until, you know, it didn't begin until really 2008. Right. It was pretty, pretty amazing. You Just talked about Mob Ali. Who's that? The gay Internet entrepreneur who started off as, like you said, a closeted cop. I mean, he's such a powerful entry point, I think, for this. I mean, this guy just. Just to fill in a little background. I mean, he built Danlan, which is like the first community site, a bulletin board site, but it was specifically for gay men. And later Blued, like you said, the first gay dating app in China that was really, really, very, very successful in its time. So it's obvious to me what would draw you to him as a way into the broader story. How happy was he to talk to you about all of this stuff? I mean, you know, I can imagine it was a lot of pain for him to relive.
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A
Yeah, yeah, no, it was a very long kind of winding process. Back in 2019, I'd actually first learned about Blued. I became fascinated by Blued and I wanted to write an article about his story and the platform because, I mean, how good of a story is Closeted Cop that comes see of largest gay dating app in the world? And I reached out to the PR team at Blued at the time. They were a team of like 800 out of a, you know, working out of a two story glass office in downtown Beijing and, you know, had a presence all over the world and were about to plan to take their company public on nasdaq. So, you know, they. They had a full on PR team reached out to them, was like, hey, would love to write an article about blued. And they then proceeded to dance with me over the period of three weeks, kind of hemming and hawing. And at the end of the three weeks were like, nope, sorry, don't want to take that interview. I think 2019 was just like a particularly sensitive year and they wanted to err on the side of caution. And they were. But they were like, you know, please go ahead and write the article. Like, sounds great. We just don't want to be part of it. And so I was like, well, you know, this is too good of a story to drop. And I decided to write it anyway. And I pursued a tactic that I call Gay Talese writes about Frank Sinatra. Gay Talies was a. Yeah, I know him.
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B
I met him in Beijing when he was here.
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A
Yeah, yeah, you know him well?
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B
No, I don't know him well. I mean, but we were acquainted.
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A
I had no idea he was in Beijing. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like a total dandy of a guy who fedora and. Right, yeah, exactly, like, was the kind of father of new journalism, where you kind of write in great depth and follow and report in great depth. And when he was writing about Frank Sinatra, I think Frank Sinatra was like, no, I don't want to be interviewed. So he ended up speaking to everyone who knew Frank Sinatra, like his employees, his fans, people who ran into him at the bar. And I decided to do the same with Ma Bali. I spoke to BLUED employees, ex employees, actually BLUED users, BLUED investors, people who were part of China's kind of or Beijing's LGBT civil society scene. And so I ended up having this like much richer and fuller portrait of online queer life in China than if I just wrote the straight business profile. Fast forward a year later. I was like, hey, the article had been published already. I was like, hey, I'm still here. Do you want to be interviewed for my book? And he agreed. I think he just saw how much work I had put into actually understanding the context and communities that he was part of and was like, okay, this girl has done her homework. I think it's time to actually talk to her and fill in the blanks.
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B
That story has sort of a sad denouement. You met him and you did that first article about them before their IPO post. IPO which was in what, in what? 2022?
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A
20.
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B
2020. Okay, it was the IPO in 2020. And yeah, and so unfortunately he ended up losing control of the company. But, you know, it sounds like he's got a good life now.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
I mentioned that you had name checked. A film that was really, really important cultural touchstone of that era. It's called la, the film adaptation of. Of a web story, a web novella that had been written called Beijing Story, written by somebody with a pseudonymous name, Beijing Comrade. It happens. I mean, we have a lot in common here. That I actually did the English subtitles for that film for the producer. Yeah, yeah, they're not bad and there's some pretty funny ones in there. But I bizarrely, I ran into Zhang Yongning, who was the producer of that. Ran into him in Oxford in October, just in an open air market. I just suddenly hear somebody calling my name. I'm going, what? I see this, you know, this middle aged Chinese gentleman, you know, standing next to a bicycle and waving at me. I'm like, oh my God, it's him. Yeah, pretty crazy.
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A
Wow. I had, I mean, I was. When. When you were saying that you worked on a film on the book, I was wondering what it was that I didn't know was Lanyi but that. That's awesome. And Zhong Yongning, I've podcast with him before, hosted by Cindy Yu, who you know as well.
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B
Yeah, Cindy's great. It's a Chinese whispers podcast. I'll have to go look for that one.
- [20:56]
A
Yeah, okay. Two years ago, I think.
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B
Oh, great. Great, great, great, great. That story represented something pretty important in the imagination of early Chinese netizens, gay or otherwise. Right. Can you talk a little bit about that film?
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A
Yeah. So Lanyu is actually based on this online web novel called Beijing Story, and it's set in the 1980s. And essentially a kind of young, poor student called Lan Yu falls in love with a older man called Handong, and he's kind of this rich, rakish, Fuardai businessman. And what begins is what seems like this, like, transactional relationship ends up becoming this tumultuous love affair. And it's kind of like set across the backdrop of the Tiananmen protests as well. So you see that kind of playing in the background, but really the. The forefront of the story is about their love story. And, you know, if you talk to most queer men who grew up In China in 80s and 90s, almost every single one I've spoken to has read the story and watched the film. Like, it's very, very much a cultural touchstone for an entire generation of queer men. And for many, it's like a moment of coming out as it was for Mob Ali or a moment of reckoning and kind of revelation and catharsis because it's like, oh, my gosh, like, I thought I was alone. I thought I was sick. I thought I was like a criminal or something. And then. And they read the story, and it's an incredibly beautiful depiction, unfortunately, a tragic depiction of queer love. And they feel a lot less alone and realize that there are other others just like them. And so Lanyu was the film adaptation by the director Stanley Kwan, and it's named after the protagonist of. Of Beijing Story.
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B
Let me just add that it's a great film. It really holds up. I watched it again a couple of years ago, and it's really, really good.
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A
It's incredible.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's very touching.
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A
The subtitles, I hear pretty. Pretty great too.
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B
I heard they're not bad. Yeah. I mean, one thing that strikes me is that many of your protagonists, we haven't met all of them yet, but we will. They're not pure rebels. They're actually, you know, they're negotiators, they're dancers. To see them, they push they retreat, you know, they recalibrate. Did you see that pragmatism as really central to how the. The Chinese Internet evolved? Was that. That seems like, to me, a dynamic that maybe I'm reading too much into this, but, you know, it says something about the way the whole industry, the whole sector, the whole phenomenon of the Internet in China evolved.
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A
Yeah, you know, I. I definitely was drawn to that pragmatism in individuals. And I'm trying to see how that, like, translated into the kind of evolution of the Internet itself. Right. Because I think that's both something that is a product of the state and a product of the people who use it. Right?
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B
That's exactly. Yeah.
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A
Yeah. Starting out narrow, but building out into the bigger picture. All of the individuals that it was drawn to, I was drawn to not just because they were kind of on the margins and kind of in the subaltern, in the underground, and that I was interested in kind of edges of society because I thought that was where the most kind of creative dances bloomed. But I was also fascinated by them because they were all insiders in some ways. They were all kind of idealistic, but deeply pragmatic. They could kind of wear many hats. They could speak the language of their communities, but also speak the language of authority and kind of code switch. And I was fascinated by that particular dynamic because I think the ability to move back and forth between maybe the edges in the center, the inside of the system, and the outside of the system allows for a certain amount of creativity. It allows for adaptability, and it allows to kind of identify leverage points for change. So I think if we were kind of like, to step out and see how that dynamic affects the evolution of the Internet, even just in terms of what gets taken down and what gets put up again. Right. I think there is. There's a level of pragmatism involved there. If we were to look at the way, you know, the state censors things, often, at least in the early days, sometimes it would leave stuff out. Right. And, like, not censor too closely to create a kind of safety valve. Right. So that they could kind of see what grievances were being aired and actually use the Internet as a gauge of public opinion instead of, like, taking things down completely. I think that's driven by a level of pragmatism. Right. That's driven by need to know what people are thinking and talking about. And then on the flip side, I think with a lot of tech entrepreneurs, for example, like Ma Bao Lee and like the guy he idolized, Jack Ma, there was this phrase, I remember that Jack Ma used in the kind of mid 2000, 2000, the mid 2000s, he said, fall in love with the government but not marry them.
- [26:01]
B
Right.
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A
So there's this sense, you know, like, in order to develop a successful Internet company, you kind of need to like, have a very tentative but productive relationship with the state where you're working together, you're gaining their approval, but you're pushing back just enough that you can kind of innovate and have bold ideas of your own.
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B
And from the state's perspective, you've already mentioned a couple of things that they do. Just this sentiment analysis that it's, you know, they're able to do by, like you said, allowing a certain amount of expression. Even, you know, under conditions of censorship, you're still able to see that, you know, what is written. I mean, that's not invisible to the eyes of the state. Right. So even stuff that gets censored, they can still see that. But I was thinking even, even just in, in the way that they treat the Internet, you know, as a whole, like when he. I'm always just struck by how in especially the first decade or so of the Internet, just about every one of the major entrepreneurs, if they weren't themselves a returnee who had been educated in the United States, they were westernized in the way that Jack Ma was English speaking, very, very sort of in tune with what was happening outside of China. Add to that that most of where they, they got their money, you know, when they raised rounds of venture, that wasn't from, there weren't a lot of local venture capitalists. So the money came from, from Sandhill Road. It came from, you know, the Valley. Then when they wanted to go to capital markets, when they wanted to exit, they all had their eyes set on nasdaq, which is where Blued ends up exiting, and the New York Stock Exchange. Right. With few exceptions, right. There weren't a lot that were going out on Hong Kong, and there weren't a lot that were going out on the other borses, and certainly not onto local Chinese markets. So in spite of all this, China, the government not only allowed it to continue, this is a government, by the way, that has always been obsessed on sort of having control of the commanding heights of strategically important sectors. And there was no doubt from the first time, you know, somebody connected to the World Wide Web that this was a strategically important sector and they wanted to control. But they, they, they made pragmatic accommodation with it and they recognized that there was going to be, you know, a lot of good that was going to come out of it as well. It's, it's continued on. I mean, I think they're the same when they look at AI today. I mean, they, they, they recognized it's a very double edged sword that they're going to need to, you know, kind of, you talk about Fong and show they need to fung when, when that's, that's correct, you know, to loosen and to, to, you know, retighten when, when they need to. But I thought it was a, again, another reason why your metaphor, your central metaphor of the dance is I think, a very, very good one to use and one that I think I'm going to be borrowing liberally in the future. Let's, let's talk a little bit about some of the other characters. You have a chapter on feminist activism and your protagonist is this woman named Lupin who ends up as one of the really important feminist activists we're all, I think, familiar with. Probably half the people listening to the show at least know about the feminist five we see again with, in your chapter chapters about her. This with empowerment and then sudden erasure. How did she understand the risks she was taking? Did she see herself as resisting the system or as working within it until the space abruptly, you know, constricted to the point where she couldn't?
- [29:40]
A
Yeah, I would say probably the latter. And like, definitely it kind of evolved over the kind of many decades that she was working as a feminist activist because initially, you know, her kind of feminist awakening arrived to her in the late 90s when she was working at a state run paper called China Women's News. And she was able to write a lot about women's rights issues and she was able to have really interesting conversations with her colleagues and people who were kind of working in that sphere. She attended the UN, the 1995 UN Women's Conference in Beijing. And that was a huge eye opener for her. But I think in that space she definitely started to feel stifled, as anyone who works at state media for a long time can start to feel. And she felt like she couldn't express the types of ideas, the bold ideas, the radical ideas that she wanted to. And so she ended up quitting to write freelance. And this was a very relatively more open period on the Internet. And she decided, well, you know, I actually want to reach out to an audience that is younger and less scholarly and kind of less cloistered than the group of academics that have already been talking to. And so she created feminist voices which was at the time one of China's most influential feminist magazines and its main platform. I think it was an email thread for a few years, but then she put it on Weibo, and this was just the time that Weibo was kind of taking off. And I don't think she thought of herself as kind of a dissident or pushing back against the system. The system in any kind of explicit way at the time, because they were in many ways working within the constraints. There were no kind of explicit constraints on talking about feminism or talking about gender inequality. And the kind of feminist voices ended up being a hub for all kinds of campaigns. In the early 2010s, um, you might remember some of them. Like, there is an Occupy Men's Toilet campaign. Yeah, There was a bloody bride's protest, or it wasn't even a protest. It was more just like a performance art. That's how they thought of it.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
Where they, like, dressed up in kind of fake blooded wedding gowns and walked
- [31:59]
B
down Tianmen to talk about domestic violence. And they had an impact. They had an impact, yeah.
- [32:04]
A
And they had a huge impact. A huge impact. Like the Global Times was covering it. Like Chinese state media was covering it. Chinese media and social media was covering it. And so I think they. They used the term at the time that they were tha biancio were playing boundary ball, which is like another metaphor for ball dancing in some ways, where, you know, come from table tennis. And you're trying to hit a ball such that it skims the edge of the. The table, like just within bounds. And I think that's how they thought about their work until Lupin ended up going to New York just on a short trip in 2015.
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B
Which she thought was a short trip.
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A
Yeah, exactly. She thought it was going to be a short trip, but it ended up being a much longer trip. She is still here to this day. But there was a crackdown on a group of young women called the Feminist five. And the kind of lively, burgeoning movement that we saw in the early 2010s very much went underground and was not kind of in person anymore.
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B
Right, right, right.
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A
Yeah.
- [33:06]
B
So, I mean, your book centers people who push boundaries, who played Sabian show, who play, you know, edge ball, boundary ball. How did you think about the much larger mainstream people who adapt to comply or simply, you know, live within the system without experiencing themselves as constrained. Was this for you? Was this a deliberate narrative focus? Maybe I could even ask this more bluntly. Did you worry about the Western gaze problem in choosing your protagonists in your framing in any way.
- [33:38]
A
So I guess another way of thinking about your question is, was I worried about people thinking that this kind of particular cast of characters were somehow representative of China and everyone is kind of pushing back on the margins and have kind of overlooked the. The average Joe who is just not really thinking about their relationship to the state as a dance or kind of pushing for these particular types of social change. Is that right?
- [34:03]
B
Yeah, more or less.
- [34:04]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I guess, sure. But I think, you know, I think I make pretty clear throughout the book and the introduction that these subjects are by no means emblematic of like, the average Chinese experience, other than, I think this dance, which is something that people engage in either voluntarily or unwittingly. Right. I think the dance takes place for everyone on a. Perhaps a much smaller scale, even when they're not aware of it, even when it's just like dancing around, like, dumb bureaucratic hurdles or, you know, during COVID The COVID lockdowns, when it's kind of like trying to find workarounds, the kind of COVID testing processes. Right. Or trying to like, figure out a way to not get sent to Fang Tang? I think all of those are examples of dances, but when it comes to their particular experiences, I do lay out very clearly that, you know, these are extraordinary individuals in some way and not ordinary. I think at a certain point you, like, don't really want the fear of Western misinterpretation to kind of like guide storytelling and thinking. It's always looming. And I try to kind of like push back against tropes with nuance, with the richness of those narratives and with kind of like context and caveats of like, hey, please don't project the entirety of China onto these five experiences. But after a certain point, if I, if I were to try to accommodate like every non Chinese reader who has no understanding of China in. In fear of kind of their attempts to stereotype the. The place, I think I would go crazy.
- [35:50]
B
Yeah, no, fair enough. And I think you did enough. Yeah, Very, very good job. And it's not just caveats here and there either. It's, it's. I think you've baked it in. And it's, it's, I think, very well done. One of the characters we haven't yet introduced is somebody who I'm very pleased to be acquainted with personally, Stanley Chen Xiao Fan. He's a very well known science fiction writer. His story unfolds just as Chinese sci fi is just being elevated not just to national, but actually to international prominence. I mean, there's, you know, conferences that are attended by Chinese vice presidents who are urging writers to showcase, you know, Chinese imagination, Chinese style, Chinese spirit. Did you see sci fi though as becoming part of some national project at some point? It's, I say this because we're sort of just a couple of weeks away from a show that I did with somebody who, I think, you know, Afro Wong, who, who had written marvelously about a very popular work of Chinese science fiction, a collaborative thing called the Morning Star of Lingao, which was a, you know, a time travel piece that, that really has direct connection to China's so called industrial party. Very much part of a national project. Was part of the dance that Stanley was involved in. Try to avoid being sort of enlisted in this national project.
- [37:14]
A
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And I think sci fi is interesting because it's an example of kind of culture that is not just kind of contained. Like there isn't just an attempt by the state to contain it or curtail it, but there is very much an attempt to both empower it and co opt it for itself. Right. I think, and what makes sci fi so promising for co optation is it's a story about the future, it's a story about utopias. And that is great for turning into nationalist narrative, right. I think the sci fi films that have come out in recent years from China are really great for kind of sketching out a more positive and like patriotic vision of the future. And so there's just been so much money poured into sci fi industries. Jing Soo, whom maybe you know, has written like a lot of good work on this and articles about how the state has been kind of using sci fi to promote a particular nationalist narrative. But I think that the dance here is on one hand it's hugely beneficial, right? It's like hugely beneficial for science fiction writers to have so many resources that they can tap into to feel supported by the state and then access audiences both in China and around the world. But on the flip side, you don't want to be like co opted into that narrative. I think writers really appreciate their independence and their ability to tell stories that they do want to tell. And often those stories are not that in line with the kind of more utopian vision of the future. And often those stories are kind of deeply critical about all kinds of problems not unique to China, but that are plaguing the world. And a lot of those questions that I think Stanley was grappling with was kind of like the ugly underbelly of technological progress. So I think he was concerned with environmental degradation, with inequality, with kind of the spiritual malaise that comes with extreme productivity that we're seeing with words like ne and tangping. I think those were the ideas that he was fascinated by. And I think he has done this dance really well because he is writing about universal themes. So I don't think the kind of veiled critique that you can find in a lot of his stories are unique to China.
- [39:43]
B
No, indeed.
- [39:44]
A
And he's able to criticize the kind of issues that the world faces in a very kind of global and universalist sense. Like he doesn't think of himself as a Chinese science fiction writer as much as maybe just a science fiction writer.
- [39:57]
B
Yeah, I mean, I guess that that is a question that. That's been frustrating to me for a very long time. I've interviewed a number of science fiction writers, translators of sci fi, who work on Chinese language science fiction. But whenever I veer close to asking what is specifically Chinese about contemporary Chinese science fiction, there's a lot of pushback, there's a lot of hesitation, there's sort of a refusal to answer that question or to grapple with it. Why is that question so damn hard for them to answer? I mean, is it just too reductive? I mean, is there something. I have to think that there is some kind of common thread that makes Chinese science fiction, Chinese science fiction, you know, aside from just that it's written in the Chinese language, that is there something that shows up a lot again and again themes, you know, in. As how Chinese project themselves, their nation, their culture, into imagined futures? Do you, having now read quite a bit of it, do you sense any of that? Or do you think that there's like a hard line between the state project science fiction and what independent authors produce? Or how do you feel on that?
- [41:06]
A
Yeah, no, and I've definitely gotten that reaction when I've spoken to a lot of Chinese science fiction writers, particularly those who were of a younger generation. And I think a lot of it is kind of this, you know, no one, no writer wants to be pigeonholed or, you know, boxed in. Yeah, exactly. No writer wants to be orientalized. And I think maybe there is this like knee jerk reaction to. To anyone, both in China and outside China, reading their work is kind of some tea leaf into like how China actually works. You know, I think like when I was writing a lot about science fiction, the pundit Niall Ferguson wrote this article that was like, to know what China is really up to, you've got to read the. And I think, you know, A lot of that is a reaction against that. Like, we don't want our stories to be these like one liner op eds that will guide the Western gaze into like understanding how to China really works. That being said, there are, I think, universal threads, but I think they differ generation to generation. So if you were to read Liu Cixin's work, they're gonna look quite different from the next generation of writers like Stan Lee's, like Ha Jinfang's and Xia Jia's, and some of the kind of younger sci fi writers. I would say, you know, Liu Cixin's work in some ways is maybe more emblematic of some of the themes that you can see in the national project as well. They're kind of bigger in scope. They've been compared to Isaac Asimov's kind of like the golden age of sci fi, right? Like the stuff that was coming out of America in the 1950s. There's a lot of like time travel through universes, space travel, you know, like the scale with which they're operating on, he's operating on is a lot larger. Whereas I think with some of the newer generation, if you look at, for example Chen Xiao Fan and Hao Xingfeng's work, they're kind of concerned with the near future. They're writing at a time when living in China already feels like living in a kind of science fiction world. Right. And so the kind of narratives and the environments that they're writing about feel quite familiar, if not just a little uncanny. One of Chen Jiaofan's stories, which I think is one of the verse he's written and like pretty emblematic of some of the stories he's written, though he does have wide range.
- [43:35]
B
Waist Tide.
- [43:35]
A
Waist Tide is one, but also the Fish of Lijiang, which is one of his first. And Liu translated. And it's just about this like burnt out office worker who's like really sick of his job and goes to Li Jiang for a vacation. And you know, like that, you know, you could have taken that story out of the present day. That happens all the time. And he realizes that in Li Jiang, actually they've twiddled with the time setting so that they've deliberately slowed it down to make him feel better. And he's realizing, oh, wow, time can actually be warped and I'm not in control of that. And I think it's a reflection on how time in our present days are also kind of warped by corporations and warped by the environments that we're living in. And we don't have control over that. But I think that's kind of emblematic of maybe this generation or Stanley's work in particular. It's kind of focus on the near future and a forcing of us to reflect on, like, who we are and what our values are at this current moment of like, rapid technological upheaval.
- [44:38]
B
So, I mean, just for a blunt confession, I have not read too much Chinese science fiction, but what I have read is it's almost all in translation. I tried to read 3 body in Chinese at one point. It just sort of, it stumped me too quickly and it got frustrating. But the translations are excellent, you know, Ken Liu for the first and third volume and Joel Martinson in the second volume. But I, you know, waist tied a whole bunch of other stuff that Stanley wrote. I read Folding Beijing by Ha Jingfong. But often these selections that are translated into English, they seem to lean, you know, either dystopian or sort of cyberpunk. Are those representative, I wonder, of the broader domestic scene? Because, you know, when I have talked to a lot of my, you know, my peers, people who are really avid science fiction readers, they don't seem to think so. They will all tell me, no, no, no, what gets translated is for the Western taste. I mean, it's because they want to read all this dystopian stuff. I. They'll insist to me that they haven't encountered anything written, you know, after the 1970s in English, you know, that wasn't deeply dystopian. And they say that, you know, Chinese science fiction is different because it's, it's, it's, you know, it still does embrace, you know, sort of bright, technology driven futures. And they'll even argue with me that those themes are there. If you look at a lot of the futures into which Earth in three Body passes through, they're quite utopian. You know, some of them are not all of them, of course, but some of them are. I wonder whether Western readers are encountering a kind of skewed slice of Chinese science fiction. Do you have a sense of that?
- [46:19]
A
Yeah, I mean, to be, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure. Like, maybe I'm also getting it at a skewed lens. Right. But I think that a lot of the work that is being translated is not necessarily the work that Western readers will find the most palatable, but also just like the work that has resonated a lot domestically. I think maybe some of the. Correct me if I'm wrong, the sci fi nerds that you were talking to are like, really Deep in the weeds. Like, they're on the forums, they're reading everything. And, like, when you really read what's out there on the web and all the fanfic and all the, like, iterations of the Three Body problem, I'm sure there's a ton of stuff that's, like, incredibly utopian. But, you know, when you're reading the stuff that has gotten really popular and then translated, maybe to a certain extent because it's. It's accommodating what they believe English readers will like, it does represent the kind of tone that I'm talking about. But, you know, folding Beijing 2016, kind of dystopian narrative, it took off first in China. Like, it took off first in Beijing and really hit a nerve there. So I don't know to what extent we can say it's like a kind of a story that just resonated outside of China and therefore is kind of representative of kind of the outside world's understanding of it.
- [47:37]
B
Yeah, I don't have a view on it either. I was just. Just wondering whether you, having read more than I have, you might know, but from science fiction, you move to hip hop and Cafe who. We've met him already. His arc feels structurally similar to those of the opinion and others. I mean, where you go through sort of exuberance, rapid growth, sort of sudden constraint adaptation. So across tech, activism, music, did you see recurring structural patterns in how these different communities navigated governance?
- [48:11]
A
Totally. And like, in many ways, I think of kind of the narrative of hip hop and the evolution of hip hop as a kind of foil to the evolution of science fiction, which is why kind of placing Cave who and Stanley's stories kind of side by side throughout the book highlighted some of those different. I think, you know, both hip hop and science fiction started out as a kind of niche subculture. They were both formed as a result of the flood of culture coming in from the outside world in the 80s and 90s, and little underground scenes popping up across the country. And of course, with music, you're familiar with what that scene looked like and actually experienced it. And there's like a ton of space to move, right? There's a lot of room to grow. There are huge kind of underground hip hop scenes both in Beijing, but also in Chengdu, but also across China. And I think what was really exciting about maybe that moment was that it was hyper localized. Like, each city in each province was like finding its own voice. I think Chengdu and Sichuan was really exciting for me because, like, hip hop, that's spoken in the Sichuan dialect is just, it just sounds cooler, you know. And I think that both of you know, both hip hop and science fiction then experienced this, this sudden propulsion from niche subculture to the mainstream roundabout. I think for science fiction, like 2015 onwards and with hip hop kind of 2016, 2017 onwards and both cultures experience this moment and the artists in those scenes experience this moment of wow. Like we are not just on the mainstream stage, but we've also taken the international stage. Like the Higher Brothers, which you are familiar with. Chinese hip hop band from Chengdu that used to be kind of very much in the underground scene, was just like blasted onto the international stage in 2017 and was like playing in bars in Brooklyn. And I think there's this moment of wow. We are being seen for the first time by everyone. But also like, oh no, visibility is also a potential risk, like too much visibility. And you know, with hip hop right after the wrap of China, this TV show made hip hop viral and mainstream in China, like shortly after. And I write about this in my book and the government steps in and bans hip hop specifically off television, which is interesting. And you know, you have this like soaring height of fame followed by this sudden constraint. And by the time I arrived to Chengdu, everyone was just kind of scrambling to interpret it. It's almost like there wasn't like a clear red line or clear directives. There's just like no hip hop on tv. So artists were like, well maybe I don't need tv. Maybe you can just like keep doing concerts or actually like the ban is good for me because it has this like Streisand effect where now everyone is paying attention to my music. And some hip hop artists who just got unfortunate and were the target of censorship. So the kind of leads of the rap of China TV show PG1 and Guy, they were like the, the ones who got the big slap on the wrist. They just took a total 180 and started putting out like super patriotic hip hop. So like Guy who used to do essentially what he called gangster rap and like had videos of himself like shirtless and waving knives around, was suddenly like doing videos about like how amazing the Great wall was and extolling China's 5,000 years of history. So you know, everyone was kind of adapting in different ways. I think the last thing I'll say is the key distinction between hip hop and sci fi, which I find fascinating, is that one is just fundamentally an American counterculture. It's very hard to co opt that. So I think it's much easier to just try to constrain and limit the influence of that. Whereas science fiction, there's so much more potential for the state to kind of bring that into its own narrative.
- [52:26]
B
Not that they haven't tried to cooperate. I mean, we've all been subjected to, you know, the 15th Five Year Plan rap and that kind of thing.
- [52:34]
A
Right? Exactly, exactly. And those just don't sound good. So I think they've kind of like tried to stop.
- [52:39]
B
Well, you know, I mean, I thought one of the really interesting things was that you managed to, to get quite close to somebody who worked as an Internet sensor who actually, you know, in from Tianjin, where apparently a lot of these companies actually have their, their, their censorship operations. This guy who very bravely actually downloaded a lot of the censorship instructions and then now I think works for China Digital Times. I don't know if he's still there right now, but, and I know, you know, CDT for a very long time they had this sort of Ministry of Truth. I, I suspect that these, these individuals were connected in some way. But let me, let me ask you about what, what that whole experience was like talking to this guy. I mean, if we can, without giving away too much of the book, people should still go out and buy it and read it. Tell us a little bit about Eric Liu's story.
- [53:32]
A
Yeah, so Eric was a censor working at Weibo in 2010 and 2011. And this was like right after Weibo was first launched. And he was just kind of a recent college graduate who was looking for a job. He didn't do very well in school and he just needed something to do and stumbled upon this role as quote, unquote content editor for Weibo. And he decided, okay, why not? Signed up for the role and essentially spent a couple of years waking up every day in the wee hours taking a bus to some random place in Tianjin and doing the very boring and laborious work of deleting stuff off Weibo posts on the Weibo back end. And I brought him in. I wasn't actually going to have him as a subject in the book until I realized that I needed to explain how the firewall worked. And the only way I could do that was by humanizing it and kind of giving a face to it and illustrating that every day. There's a lot of human judgment at work in censorship as well. And that is a certain kind of dance. And so, yeah, that is the main reason why I wrote about Eric's story.
- [54:50]
B
I imagine in the years since it's gotten a Whole lot more algorithmic, though.
- [54:53]
A
Yeah, definitely, definitely. Even back in the day, a lot of that process was automated, so very sensitive keywords were just automatically deleted. That being said, I think it still requires a lot of human labor. And Eric was telling me, you know, he was one of 150 content moderators at Weibo in 2010, and he estimates that there's something like tens of thousands by 2020, so it's expanding.
- [55:24]
B
Wow. Wow. I guess one of the things that people, I feel like never quite got, or a lot of people were getting wrong about the way that Internet censorship worked in China was a lot of them assumed that there were a whole, you know, there were rooms full of thousands of these, you know, uniformed individuals simply reading everything that went, went by on the Internet that these were, these were government employees. And I, it was, I was, I was trying to explain to people that, no, no, no, they outsourced that it's the companies themselves, the operating companies that have, you know, the final responsibility to censor content on the Internet. And your, your reporting here, talking to Eric, I mean, it really, I think, is the first time that we've seen it with such granularity that it is these companies that operate these teams of sensors. And he's, yeah, what. What a find. How did you find this guy? How did you get in touch with him in the first place?
- [56:20]
A
Yeah, so he actually, by 2020, had already left China and he, he was sharing his story on social media and sharing his story. I think the first time I read it was maybe in Protocol. It was either in Protocol, which no longer exists anymore, or Voice of America. And he had shared his story. And I was like, that's too good of a story to not follow up with. And so I reached out to him through the writers of those articles.
- [56:49]
B
You know, the later chapters you describe how this party's kind of turned toward the common prosperity idea was it was framed not just as sort of economic regulation, but also as a kind of moral recoiling. Right. Sort of hauling it all back in again, an effort to prevent what was seen as kind of unraveling with too much liberalism. Right. And there were some leaders who explicitly feared the kind of inequality and social fragmentation that they associated with the United States. I mean, you'd spend quite a bit of time talking about Wang and, you know, his admiration for so many facets of American society, but also, you know, his diagnosis of what was wrong. I'm wondering whether you think that was purely rhetorical or do you think that it reflected genuine anxieties within the leadership about social cohesion. And, you know, were they entirely wrong? What? They were looking at the United States not, you know, in the 19, late 1980s and early 90s like wanging was when he wrote America Against America. But looking at contemporary America, did they not see things that they found to be things that they would hope China would avoid, and did they see phenomenon like rap music as somehow behind? I mean, it sounds like silly moral panic to us, but I'm wondering, not objectively, whether they were right or wrong, but were they sincere in that belief?
- [58:13]
A
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's. It's always hard to judge the sincerity of someone that I don't know very well. But, you know, when I read Wang Huning's America Against America, it does. You know, it definitely does come from a place of sincerity. I think maybe at the time, he was not the kind of dominant voice. You know, he was not ideologically, at least among other intellectuals in China. And within the party itself, I think there is still this kind of pragmatism and this desire to catch up with the west and no matter what, no matter what the kind of cultural potential for cultural corrosion could be. I think Wang Huning, in that sense, had a lot of foresight or maybe was maybe before his time in some ways. My sense is that kind of rejection of liberalism and everything to do with liberal culture, though, you know, you've been in China for much longer than me. Kaiser is, like, as late as, like, 2008. You know, I think it feels like only when the structural issues with liberalism, particularly with the financial crisis, became an issue, that the rest of the package deal also became deeply unappealing. And obviously, this is, like, taking place alongside America's trajectory. So I think they kind of wanted to see how it all played out. And it's, like, easier to be like, oh, look at the corrosive effects of liberalism, when that narrative just plays out very badly. And I think that narrative begins to play out badly with 2008, but then, like, 2016, with what they perceive to be a joke man taking the presidency and steering the country into an even crazier direction.
- [60:07]
B
Well, they're not wrong about that.
- [60:10]
A
But.
- [60:10]
B
No, I mean, it's funny. It's the thread between financialization, which maybe I can understand them going after, and somehow feminization. I don't necessarily see that these are connected in any way. But, you know, I want to ask about, because this is something that I've talked about an awful lot and I'm really fascinated by. And you you treat it really well in your book about this sort of move away from techno utopianism. I mean, I think many of us, and it's not just in the west, but also I think in China, for a long time, we believed the Internet was in inevitably going to expand personal freedoms. In writing this book, did you find yourself reassessing that earlier optimism that. That techno optimism or utopianism, this idea of this sort of emancipatory narrative? I mean, after Snowden, after the failure of the Arab Spring and all this stuff, you seem, maybe I'm reading you wrong, but also to take a darker look at some of our earlier enthusiasms.
- [61:09]
A
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think the book started out just focusing on kind of the romance of the Chinese Internet. Right. And I think even when I began, I, like, wasn't quite sure how this romance would end. This is like 2018 when I started thinking about the book. And it became very clear to me kind of throughout the writing, the writing of this book, that that romance is dead, the honeymoon is over. This idea of the Internet and technology being a force of liberalization has waned. But I think what has become even more clear to me and is a thread that undergirds the book throughout is also this fantasy of a free and open world Wide Web also kind of waning and fading. And so the kind of context of all the different touch points on the Chinese Internet where we can see that turn, shifting place. I also weave in moments where that's taking place on the global web. And so the Arab Spring is one example. And the failure of that. The kind of revelations of Edward Snowden's kind of. Sorry, the. The revelations that Edward Snowden gave through hazel leaks of NSA files was another example of that. Right. The capacity for governments to surveil their own people. And then I think the rise of autocrats like Donald Trump and Brexit was another example of that, that kind of turning taking place on the global web as well. And for me, I think I have realized that we were definitely naive, like, technology does not equal freedom. There's not this inherent liberatory force in the technology itself. And it's very much how we use it and are being used by it. And I think that's a question that we're confronted with right now with the arrival of AI, where these same techno optimist narratives are playing out and we kind of need to push back on
- [63:09]
B
them at the same time. Ealing, I don't feel like you've swung too hard to the other side either. I Mean, there's still something that you see. Some of the earlier shine of that romantic period still endures despite all of this, which is nice to see for sure.
- [63:24]
A
Yeah, I think maybe the correction is less from, like, techno optimism to techno pessimism and more like we just can't take any of it for granted. Like, technology itself is not going to be inherently kind of repressive or liberatory, but it's just the way we use it. And so we should probably think a little more about how we use it and how we govern it and, you know, happily disseminate it.
- [63:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, you. You argue early on in the book that, you know, in some ways the US Internet has become more like China's. This is something you talked about with, with Joe and Tracy on the Odd Lots podcast. You were great on that, by the way. Such a good podcast. I love those guys. But, you know, I mean, polarization, moral panic, you know, all these battles over platform governance, you see, these calls for a clean Internet. Right? So if this is true, does it change how we should interpret the Chinese story? I mean, is it still primarily about censorship or is it about something maybe more universal in how these digital systems evolve and are governed?
- [64:35]
A
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that has been one of the biggest takeaways that I've gotten from this book is just the ways in which the US Internet and the Chinese Internet have converged. And I think there are a lot of. There are a lot of overlaps there. And I think the bigger kind of question at heart is the ways in which technology can be centralized in the hands of a few people and the control of the technology can be centralized in the hands of a few people. And how that needs to be prevented. Right. It doesn't matter if it's autocrats or oligarchs, but when it's just a few people who have, like, carved out the turf of the web and are dictating how that space is being used, we're going to have problems and we're going to feel bad about it. So just to, like, draw some parallels, I think, you know, one that I like to bring up and that I write about in the book is just following the trajectories of Weibo and X or Twitter. Right? Like Weibo back in the day was going to be this, like, harbinger of free speech. And fast forward a couple decades later, I think Guo Yuhua, the Chinese intellectual, described it as a maggot infested pile of shit and kind of like overrun with incels and Trolls. Likewise, Twitter was going to bring about the Arab Spring and was like the journalist David Carr called it a throbbing networked intelligence. And today my fellow journalists call it a hell site and a cesspool. And its content moderation is like shaped by one of the most powerful men on earth. So there's very much this kind of, this centralization of the technology, this kind of we are no longer in control of it, but we are being controlled by it. I think the other example that has become, that is making this parallel very clear is the story of TikTok. Right? There's been a recent TikTok sale from ByteDance to American companies and the old question was like, oh well, to what extent does ByteDance have control over what takes place on TikTok users feeds? And like, to what extent is that shaped by ByteDance's relationship to the Chinese government? And after the TikTok sale I don't think people are that relieved because now the question is like, okay, to what extent does Oracle have the ability to shape what takes place on TikTok users feed and to what extent does Oracle's tight links to the present administration then shape content moderation? So the issue is less like a uniquely Chinese censorship and more the kind of collusion between political power and the tech elite and the ability for them to change what shows up on users feeds through a very sophisticated system of algorithmic control.
- [67:22]
B
Chinese netizens have been dancing in shackles for a long time. Do you think they kind of understood earlier than the rest of us how truly fragile these digital freedoms really were?
- [67:35]
A
Some of them, definitely. I think, you know, one, one thing that I think is clear is at least for a lot of Chinese users who are aware that they exist within a firewall, there is this knowledge of, you know, their information landscape being constrained and not taking it for granted, like not taking it for granted that if they like log on to the web, they're going to get a kind of like truthful and free and open understanding of what's going on in the world. Whereas I think for a lot of American users that has been taken for granted for a long time, like that these external algorithmic forces are not, are not present at all to shape what shows up on their feeds. And at least for some Chinese Internet users, I think, you know, they've understand, they, they can see the shackles much more clearly because they, they've experienced them for a longer time.
- [68:28]
B
So Yi Ling, just to wrap up here, when you zoom out from these individual stories and you think about the Internet as A bigger social space. Has the experience of writing this book changed, if it's changed at all, the way that you weight different freedoms or different values, expressive freedom, does it still take precedence over belonging or social cohesion or stability or safety? Has it moved up or down in your scale, in your prioritization?
- [69:00]
A
Yeah, you know what? It's hard for me. The book didn't really shape my own personal sense of what freedom means to me, but I think it expanded and gave kind of a richer landscape of what freedoms could look like for different people. People. And that freedom can also be, as for Ma Bali, the freedom to love openly and be in relationships and start a family in the way he wants to. For Lupin, a kind of freedom to build solidarity and bring movements together and be part of a network of people who believe in the same thing. For Khafe Hu, not so much like freedom of expression necessarily to say whatever he wants, but freedom of. To kind of express himself authentically, which I think are different. Right. To express himself in a will where he feels seen and heard. And then for Chen Xiao Fan, kind of like. And a lot of tech workers that in science fiction writers that he finds himself in conversation with, the freedom to kind of have a life and self actualize and find spiritual meaning that's not dictated by society or the state. And those freedoms are all very different. Right. They're not freedoms in the ways that we can think about in very kind of ossified. So I guess they just reveal that there's a very plural and rich landscape of different freedoms. And freedom is really the ability for people to kind of define what they want theirs to be.
- [70:29]
B
Yi Ling, congratulations so much on the book. It's just so good. I'm sure that it's going to be one of the most widely read books, books of 2026. The book again is called the Wall Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. And the author is Yi Ling Liu. How's book tour been for you?
- [70:48]
A
It's been awesome. Like, it's honestly been an excuse for me to talk to friends and catch up with people who I haven't been in a long time. Like, all my moderators are just friends that I want to talk about the book with. So that's.
- [71:01]
B
Oh, you've been very lucky then. Yeah. So it's been like. Well, like Afra, I know. Did one with you. I think it was at the Asian Society. Was that right?
- [71:10]
A
Yeah, that's right. That's right. And Tinu and I just talked in Boston last night at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.
- [71:17]
B
Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. What's next?
- [71:20]
A
That's. That's it. I'm gonna give a rest and then I'm gonna go to London, and that's where the. The London tour begins.
- [71:28]
B
Okay, well, good luck with that. I'm headed there in a week and maybe I'll run into you there.
- [71:33]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [71:35]
B
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk and congrats once again. Let's move on to paying it forward. Do you have somebody in mind who you'd like to pay forward? Somebody. A younger colleague or somebody you've worked with who. Whose work really deserves more attention than it's been getting?
- [71:51]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the two people that I wanted to mention you've already spoken to, so I'm going to throw another.
- [71:57]
B
Fine. That's fine.
- [71:59]
A
So I guess, like, you know, you've spoken to Aphra and Tianyu, who are both my moderators and ex. Just excellent, smart peers who's worked over my. For a very long time. The other person that I want to mention is Zhang. Have you spoken to him yet?
- [72:13]
B
I have not. We've been in touch before. I mean, he's writing for Wired right now. He's just fantastic.
- [72:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's put out just an excellent slate of stories on Chinese technology for Wired. And I've watched his kind of career trajectory grow over the past few years, and I think he would be great to talk to.
- [72:31]
B
Yeah, I actually, when back in the days of the China Project, when we were looking to hire, I reached out. I knew he was just. He had just left. I think he was. I can't remember where. He just left MIT Tech. Oh, MIT Tech. I can't remember. But. But yeah, he'd already been snapped, snatched up, not surprisingly. Anyway. Yeah, he's great. And the newsletter, which I actually just plugged last week, or my guest did that he writes with, Luis Matsakis, is just fantastic. All right.
- [73:01]
A
Person to bring on Luis.
- [73:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, I would love to have her on. Okay. What about recommendations? Would he have a book or a film or something?
- [73:11]
A
Yeah, I can give two recommendations of the actual books I'm reading right now, one fiction and one nonfiction. The fiction book is called the Loneliness of Sonya and Sunny, and it's this kind of sprawling, epic narrative about these two Indian immigrants to the United States and their experience moving back and forth between India and the US And Kiran Desai, the author, I think, wrote it over the course of something like 20 years. So I feel a lot of kinship with her in terms of how much time she spent braiding those narratives together. But also it's just about home and belonging and, like, movements back and forth between being part of a kind of, like, home, like, communal environment, and also the loneliness of being part of the American diaspora, the kind of Indian diaspora in the United States. So as someone who's been moving back and forth between the US And China, I think it might resonate with you. Kaiser. Yeah. And then the other book is a nonfiction anthology called Machine Decision Is Not Final. I don't know if you've seen that around.
- [74:20]
B
No, no, no, not yet. Totally.
- [74:22]
A
And it was compiled by, I think, some academics in, I think, based in NYU Shanghai. But it's a series of essays on Chinese AI and really just, like, smart, sharp essays that are totally not part of this, like, broader narrative of a US China race towards AGI, but actually, like, goes deep into the history of a lot of things.
- [74:49]
B
How have I not seen this? That's crazy. That's right up my alley. And you have an affiliation with NYU Shanghai, so I don't know.
- [74:55]
A
Yeah, it's called Machine Decision and Not Final.
- [74:58]
B
Thank you. Thank you. I will definitely rush out and grab that. So the Loneliest of Sonia and Sunny and Machine Decisions Not Final. Great, great. Recommendations. Fantastic. All right, mine, I have two. One is for a forthcoming book. It should be out very soon. It's called the Coming Power Conflict and Warnings from History by Odd Arna Vestad at Yale, who is just a fantastic China historian. But this isn't a history of China, so this is actually an exploration of historical analogy. Oh, not really historical analogy, but it's. It's looking at, especially the run up to the First World War as a sort of warning for what we're now getting into with China. And it's eerie and scary and very, very highly recommended. Iron Investat is just a fantastically good writer. I cannot recommend him more highly. So I'm reading that right now, and he will be on the show. Another person who will be on the show is Paula the iar, who is an old friend of mine. We knew each other in Beijing in the 2000s before she went away, traveling the world with her husband. She writes a wonderful substack newsletter called Global Jigsaw. There are a couple of essays in particular I think will be of interest. One is about Beijing's efforts to sort of up its civilization game, you know, and instill good manners and good behavior in its citizens and its successes largely in doing so. And another called why I Would Rather Be Born Chinese than Indian today, which follows up on something that she had written in a passage in her 2008 book, I think it was called Smoke and Mirror. So Pahlavi is a fantastic writer. Her 2008 book, she, she talked about how if she were sure to be born into a wealthy family and unsure of what gender she would choose India back then in 2008 to and you know where, whereas if she, it was a sort of a toss up, she would have chosen, you know, she didn't know whether she'd be born into a wealthy or, or a normal family. She would have chosen China. Today, she says under any circumstance she would have chosen to be born in China. And it, she makes a really interesting argument as to why that is the case. So she does a lot of really good India, China, China, Japan, Japan, Europe. She's lived all over the place. She lived in Jakarta for years. She's a beautiful writer and I think she would be somebody who you would really, really enjoy meeting and talking to next time you're back in Beijing. She and her diplomat husband are back here in Beijing. I'm delighted to see and now once again part of the fun squirrel social milieu here. So yeah, I'll be having Pallavi on the show in not too long. Yeah, she's really great.
- [77:42]
A
Looking forward to listening to that.
- [77:44]
B
Yeah, I'm looking forward to that conversation. All right, well, Yi Ling, thank you so much for taking the time and congrats on a finished North American Lego year book tour and on the very, very good reviews that the book's been getting.
- [77:57]
A
Thanks so much Kaiser and thanks for staying up late on your part.
- [78:01]
B
My absolute pleasure. My absolute pleasure. You've been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Gore. Support the show through substack@cineapodcast.com where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Email me@cinekapodmail.com if you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin Madison's center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Huge thanks to my guest Di Ling Liu. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care.
- [79:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
- [79:03]
B
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A
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