Yi-Ling Liu on Writing Human-Centered Narratives

Your Fellows project will be a book about “wall dancers,” individuals in China who are navigating the boundaries of the Chinese internet. What drew you to writing about this subject?

Most narratives I read about China were reductive and simplistic. They fail to capture the society that I live in in all its complexity. Chinese cyberspace—rich with innovation, and yet constrained by a unique form of repressive governance—can feel like a free-wheeling carnival and a barren cage all at once. In this context, I found myself gravitating to the individuals who embodied these contradictions, those who worked within the system all while challenging its boundaries—a process often described as “dancing with shackles on.”

I came to call them Wall Dancers, individuals in China who are pushing for change, openness and freedom from inside the Great Firewall. Who are they, what do they believe in, and how has the internet both liberated and constrained the person that they’ve become?

In your column for Rest of World you write about the Internet reshapes everyday lives of people in China, most recently about food delivery drivers. How do you choose your subjects, is there a thread of connection between them?

In the Rest of World column, I steer away from big-picture geopolitics, observed from a birds-eye view, and focus on human-centered narratives, absorbed at the ground level. This does not mean that my subjects are niche or marginal, but that they always have deep and rippling effects on the lives of every people.

In general, I take a specific incident that captures the pulse of the moment – say, a protest by Meituan food delivery workers, the rising popularity of a new online psychology app – then weave the story together with a bigger structural problem – say, algorithmic labour exploitation, or the growing mental health crisis.

You recently wrote an article for WIRED about Chen Qiufan and science fiction in China. Do you see any parallels between the work of science fiction writers and your own?

Absolutely. We are both attempting to write and live truthfully, creatively, and with integrity in the same environment, under similar constraints. Because of this, we are fascinated by similar subjects: most notably, the digital divide, the effects of automation, a growing turn towards the spiritual.

The key difference between their work and mine is that science-fiction writers are able to shroud themselves under the ambiguity of genre – writing speculative fiction allows for multiple interpretations. As a non-fiction writer, I have to be more straightforward and direct in my writing.

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