A Paul Tsai China Center book talk event featuring Yi-Ling Liu's book, "The Wall Dancers," moderated by Jing Tsu.
Lunch will be provided. Please register in advance.
In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power and emancipatory promise of the internet, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship now known as the Great Firewall. But far from being a barren landscape, the digital world that sprouted up behind the firewall brimmed with new subcultures and tech innovations, offering many Chinese citizens previously unimaginable connection and opportunity.
Today, as the country’s leadership intensifies its control of public discourse and Western headlines reduce the Chinese public to a faceless monolith, journalist Yi-Ling Liu presents an intimate portrait of China’s online ecosystem—and a crucial lens into the on-the-ground reality of life there. Tracing the last three decades of the Chinese internet’s evolution—from its lexicon to its memes to the precise nature of its censorship—she equips readers with a critical tool to assess the past, present, and future of a global power.
Drawing on years of firsthand reporting, The Wall Dancers weaves together the stories of individuals navigating China’s transformation into both the world’s largest online user base and one of its most populous authoritarian states. As these entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and dreamers experience the internet’s power as a tool for both control and liberation, they grapple with universal questions of success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith, and resilience.
The Wall Dancers" is at once an unforgettable work of human storytelling and a vital exploration of what it means to live with dignity and hope within the technological systems that now shape all our lives.
Yi-Ling Liu’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. Born and raised in Hong Kong, and a graduate of Yale University, she now lives in London.
Pulitzer Finalist and Guggenheim Fellow Jing Tsu is a cultural historian and literary scholar of modern China. She holds the inaugural Jonathan D. Spence Chair in Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Literatures. Author of three monographs and two edited volumes, her research spans literature, nationalism, intellectual history, science and technology, diaspora and migration studies, international studies, and geopolitics. Tsu has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Financial Times. She and her works have been profiled in “Lunch with the FT,” CNN/PBS's “Amanpour,” The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, Wired, Science, among others. Distinctions and honors include the Society of Fellows (Harvard), Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard), New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She serves on the Board of Directors at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and served as cultural commentator for NBC at the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing in 2022.
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Paul Tsai China Center
Co-sponsored by the Yale Journalism Initiative