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[Weibo] launched in 2009, it quickly became the nervous system of China's civic sphere. Before Weibo, feminist organizers could hand out newsletters or hold a small meeting but never get on state TV; afterward, they could turn a street protest into a nationwide conversation. A clever slogan or striking image could trend for weeks.

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This rise of the mobile web in China in the 2010s produced a flowering of digital creativity even as suppression intensified—a tension at the heart of Yi-Ling Liu's eye-opening book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Writing as someone who grew up alongside this digital universe, Liu reveals how censorship does not simply extinguish voices, but reshapes them—training a generation to speak sideways, turning repression into a culture of coded speech, creative improvisation, and stubborn survival.

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Western observers have long swung between two caricatures of China—booming economic miracle or iron police state—and then demanded to know which is "real." Cultural historian Ian Buruma tried to look past that binary. In his 2001 book,Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels From Los Angeles to Beijing, he traveled through the Chinese-speaking world to portray a scattered cohort of mavericks pushed to the margins yet still feeling out the system's blurred edges: disillusioned activists, political prisoners-turned-businesspeople, human rights lawyers, Christian sect leaders and followers, and online critics. By tracing this unruly mix, Buruma punctured the myths of Chinese sameness and pointed to a messy underground current.

An early online dissenter was Liu Xiaobo, who had been released from a labor camp two years earlier, in 1999. He recognized quickly how the emerging internet could allow everyday people to reach one another without passing through official channels. Cases that once were ignored—corruption scandals, police abuses, violence against women—could suddenly circulate everywhere. Liu, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, encouraged this new civic scrutiny, supporting figures such as Dr. Jiang Yanyong, whose revelations about the true scale of the 2003 SARS outbreak ignited a fury. Commentators began calling 2003 "the year of online public opinion."

From the state's perspective, this was dangerous in a new way. [...] In 1998, the Ministry of Public Security launched what it called the Golden Shield Project—an effort to create an integrated surveillance-and-filtering system that would let the authorities watch, sort, and erase content, and block and arrest violators. Outside China, it became better known as the Great Firewall of China, the title of a Wired article. As Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu note in Who Controls the Internet?, the wall was built partly with "American bricks," with key technology from Cisco and other firms.

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The good times would not last. In 2011, amid protests over illegal land grabs and Weibo chatter about a Chinese "Jasmine Revolution," party leaders were terrified of social media's ability to organize mass movements. Then-President Hu Jintao ordered significantly greater control of the internet and public opinion; within a year, Xi Jinping was elevated as his successor. Nicholas Kristof infamously predicted that Xi would be a reformer, and that Liu Xiaobo, who had been imprisoned in 2008 for a fourth time, would be freed.

nstead, one day the "Big V" writer Murong Xuecun found his social media accounts deleted. Months later, the outspoken billionaire investor Charles Xue was jailed for soliciting a prostitute, in what appeared to be a warning aimed at social media users. Xi created the Cyberspace Administration of China and installed Lu Wei, a zealous former propaganda official, as its first chief. The CAC drafted a cybersecurity law requiring that data on Chinese citizens gathered within China be kept on domestic servers and mandating that platforms edit content and monitor private chats. Unauthorized virtual private networks, or VPNs, hitherto used to bypass the Great Firewall, were criminalized, and several sellers were jailed; Apple removed hundreds of VPNs from its Chinese app store.

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The state's attitude toward culture shifted from wary tolerance to active engineering. Hip-hop was banned from state television. A single quip by a stand-up comic prompted regulators to accuse him of insulting the People's Liberation Army and resulted in a multimillion-dollar fine for the company that booked him, casting a chill over the entire comedy scene. [...]
On March 6, 2015, while Lü Pin was away in New York, five other core members of the feminist movement, including Li Maizi, were detained and charged with "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." That summer, in the "709" campaign of July 9, more than 300 human rights lawyers were interrogated or arrested on accusations of "subverting state power." When China's #MeToo movement began spreading under yet another animal homophone—mi tu sounds like "rice bunny"—Feminist Voices joined in, but soon the account was purged by Weibo and WeChat, erasing the country's most influential feminist outlet from cyberspace.

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Does this sound familiar? What begins as bare-knuckled politics ends as outright silencing. It is no longer culture war—it is delegated repression and state persecution. The First Amendment still offers a legal shield, and the United States lacks a centralized Great Firewall. Yet the pattern of control is unmistakable. The tools differ from China's; the methods rhyme. We are not living behind China's wall, but America's own dance of censorship has already begun.

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