季風人文講壇第100期：Yi-Ling Liu

The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Internet

with Yi-Ling Liu & Kyle Hutzler

February 11, 2026｜In English 

In Yi-Ling Liu’s newly-published book, The Wall Dancers, she tells the story of China's carefully regulated internet, and what it shows about the broader national tension between freedom and control. She will discuss the evolution of the Chinese internet as well as the individuals who shaped it, from entrepreneurs to activists, bloggers to artists.

About the Speaker 

Yi-Ling Liu is a writer and editor covering Chinese society and technology. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, and The New Yorker. She was previously China Editor at Rest of World and is currently based in London as a journalist-in-residence at the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

Moderator: Kyle Hutzler, Executive Director for Asia Pacific Policy and Strategic Competitiveness at JPMorganChase.

About the Book

Journalist Yi-Ling Liu offers an intimate portrait of China’s online world—from the birth of the Great Firewall to the vibrant subcultures, memes, and innovations that flourished behind it. Drawing on years of firsthand reporting, The Wall Dancers traces three decades of the Chinese internet’s evolution through the lives of entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and dreamers who navigate technology as both a tool of control and a source of connection and possibility. At once deeply human and sharply analytical, the book reveals how people seek dignity, meaning, and hope inside one of the world’s most sophisticated digital authoritarian systems.