Your book is called ‘The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet’. What are wall dancers?
It refers to a Chinese phrase, ‘to dance in shackles’, first used by Chinese journalists in the early 2000s to describe what it means to write and report under constraints. There are lots of different metaphors to describe the experience of navigating Chinese society, but this one resonated with me because it captured the idea that to live in China is a dance, a push and pull between state and society that is rich with innovation yet rigidly constrained. This dynamic was most evident on the Chinese internet, behind the ‘Great Firewall’. The people who I speak to in this book were particularly adept at navigating this terrain, that’s why I call them dancers.
