October 22, 2026 issue
Reviewed:
The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connections on the Chinese Internet
The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China
When I arrived in Shanghai in the early 2000s to begin a half-decade assignment covering China, I often marveled at the distance between the common Western image of the country as a repressive dictatorship and the many spaces for communication that seemed to escape the government’s control. My first inklings of this came in random encounters with Chinese people, in bank lines, on trains, or on the sidelines of public events. They were as curious about the world that had produced me as I was about the world that had produced them. Moreover, many seemed as disinclined to pull punches in expressing criticism of their society as I was of mine.
These early impressions quickly deepened as I began to explore the country’s Internet. Certainly there were clear taboos, beginning with questioning the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and criticizing the country’s central leadership. Alongside these topics were the forbidden so-called big Ts: Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen. But surprisingly large realms of online speech remained wide open. Without too much effort, one could find public threads about almost anything else. And people used bulletin boards and discussion groups on Chinese Web platforms like Weibo and QQ to report official malfeasance or corruption at the local or regional level.
During my first years in China, much of my time was spent covering localized protests that gathered strength online. Municipal and provincial officials worked tirelessly to suppress the amplification of whistleblowing and dissent, but the surge in accountability activism and citizen journalism that the early Internet brought to the country reduced their efforts to a futile game of whack-a-mole. Often all that Web-based activists needed to do to evade sanction during local crackdowns was to temporarily set themselves up in a nearby province.
A similar laxity existed about online name verification. Back then there were few practical obstacles to using assumed names on the Web. Those who sought an extra layer of personal security while commenting on risky topics conducted their online life from the grimy and smoke-filled confines of the era’s ubiquitous Internet cafés, where they periodically changed their aliases. Others frequently replaced the SIM cards in their phones.
Once in a while, what began as a very local event would suddenly mushroom into a national outcry over some injustice that hinted at the surviving, if atrophied, democratic potential of a population living under a self-proclaimed dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the case in 2003, the year of my arrival in China, when a twenty-seven-year-old migrant laborer, Sun Zhigang, was arrested in Guangzhou for not carrying proper identification papers and then was beaten to death in detention. The case was heavily covered by the seemingly fearless Southern Metropolis Daily, a muckraking newspaper. But news about it soon spread much farther via the Internet and sparked outrage in viral posts and discussion groups. Almost astoundingly in a country known for strict, top-down control, three months after Sun was killed, the central government dismantled the heavy-handed and secretive national custody system used to detain Chinese workers who violated the country’s strict residential permit system.
In March 2000 Bill Clinton had come close to predicting that the advent of the Web would bring about a radical relaxation of top-down political control in China: “Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet—good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall.” Although I wasn’t betting against the possibility that censorship would win out in the long run in China, during my early years there one could still imagine that Clinton might have been right. But that is no longer the case.
Since I left the country, the entire landscape of online life and the political space enjoyed by its citizens have shrunk radically. This has happened in part because of the ubiquitous rise of the smartphone, which has proven to be the perfect tool for state surveillance, censorship, and much more strictly enforced conformity. There are many reasons for this, beginning with the fact that China belatedly began enforcing the requirement to show official identification in order to get SIM cards, which made aliases useless and eliminated the protection of anonymity. What is worse, smartphones make it easy for the state to document their owners’ every movement and communication.
Easily as important as these features, though, has been the astonishingly fast and nearly universal adoption of China’s powerful homegrown app, WeChat, which has established itself as a one-stop clearinghouse for almost everything that non-Chinese smartphone users accomplish with a plethora of apps. In China, people not only chat through WeChat, they also use it as a social media platform, rely on it for news and entertainment, and use it to bank, shop, make travel arrangements, conduct their business, and even pay taxes and government fines. WeChat’s astonishing rise took place not long after I left China in 2008, and its hold on the society is so pervasive that for any outsider like me who wishes to stay in touch with friends there or to navigate the country during visits, maintaining an account and mastering its functions are essential.
The other development of enormous consequence for freedom of speech and the degree of openness in China, of course, has been the ascension of the country’s current leader, Xi Jinping. Since he became president in 2013, the ruling Communist Party has placed an emphasis on social control unseen in China at least since Mao Zedong’s heyday. Mao relied on neighborhood committees to surveil behavior down to the street level and often encouraged family members to inform on one another. But Xi enjoys powers of real-time monitoring that Mao could have never dreamed of.
Xi has also doubled or even tripled down on the once-leaky online censorship system known colloquially as the Great Firewall, which not only polices domestic online communications but is also a powerful filter of information from the outside world. I can’t forget my surprise at glimpsing some of the crude inner workings of the early Great Firewall. When I visited a university in Shanghai in 2006, students ushered me into a control room where dozens of campus volunteers were monitoring the online communications of their peers. After my visit, the university’s party secretary told me sheepishly that this wasn’t something the authorities were interested in advertising.
Nowadays, although armies of Web censors are not altogether obsolete, they take a distant backseat to highly sophisticated automated monitoring and surveillance systems, and every Chinese person I’ve ever known is aware of this and assumes its effectiveness, which deters risky speech. As a result, rather than facilitating political change in China, the Internet and the associated world of the mobile phone have become formidable tools the government uses to maintain tight control over the society.
Yi-Ling Liu came of age just as this tide was shifting. After being raised in Hong Kong, then still a wide-open global city where near-Western levels of personal liberties and the rule of law largely prevailed, she went to Beijing in 2010 to work as an intern for a Chinese media company. Learning about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre as a high school student had fed her interest in China’s history, including in recurrent attempts by both ordinary Chinese citizens and political insiders to spark national reform. After graduating from Yale, she writes in The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet,
I returned to Beijing to live and write, because I still wanted to know—not just what could’ve been changed at the square that day but also what could be changed today and who had the power to do the changing.
Liu’s account differs from most recent writing about China by Western journalists in eschewing assessments of the country based on its elite politics or on insights gleaned from interviews with experts. Western journalists have faced sharply restricted access to China under Xi’s rule. In following the history of Internet activism in China, what Liu offers instead is a bottom-up sense of life and the state of personal freedom in the country. Along the way, something striking happens. Rather than confirming the West’s smugness about its individual liberties and democracy compared to China’s, her book slowly builds to the disquieting conclusion that the crushing power of the Internet is steadily making the United States and China more like each other.
The Wall Dancers serves up any number of milestones—like the Sun Zhigang case—that would be familiar to anyone who has followed the country closely since the 2000s. As she recounts, these culminated in what became known as the Weibo Spring, the name given to a period of extraordinary online activism in 2011 that followed the more familiar Arab Spring of protest and reform movements.
Perhaps the biggest catalyst for that year’s breakout activism was a deadly collision in Wenzhou between one of China’s brand-new bullet trains and another train that was stopped on the same track. The impressively rapid introduction this century of high-speed rail service, by now virtually nationwide, has been a major focus of the government’s nationalist propaganda. The crash officially killed forty people and injured nearly two hundred, making it the world’s third-deadliest high-speed rail collision.
The first post about it on Weibo, which went up almost immediately, was a cry for help by a university student who was a passenger. It was immediately reposted by others, as millions of people turned to the social media platform for a more detailed picture of the crash than the government’s sanitized news offered. What ensued was a dramatic, real-time contest between citizens and censors. The next day the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department issued a terse directive to the country’s media: “Do not question. Do not elaborate. Do not associate.”
This meant that only official accounts of the accident would be allowed to circulate. But citizen skepticism had been boosted by official actions that hinted strongly at a cover-up. These included the prompt burial of the wreckage near the crash site and the failure to publish a list of the victims. The online outcry that followed was so intense that China’s then premier, Wen Jiabao, felt obliged to visit the site and promise a full investigation. “If corruption was found behind this, we must handle it according to law, and we will not be lenient,” he said. Later the railway minister at the time was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for bribery.
The central government’s inability to suppress citizen grievances that forced an official as high-ranking as Wen to promise justice gave the Wenzhou train crash the feeling of a watershed. For the first time in China, it was becoming possible, it seemed, for citizens to use the Internet to hold their remote and controlling government to account. What the accident seems to have accomplished instead was to make the state even more determined that it would never again be so vulnerable to waves of public outcry spreading online.
Liu’s book distinguishes itself by going far beyond well-known events like this, with rich, extended profiles of individuals who had begun using the Internet to try to build new lives for themselves or to change China during the era when the Internet still seemed to offer the possibility of a freer future. For example, in the late 1990s Ma Baoli, a gay junior policeman in the provincial town of Qinhuangdao, began spending his free time at a new Internet café that had opened near his police station. There he began a process of self-discovery and growing awareness of the existence of large numbers of gay men who, like him, lived in the shadows. He joined online forums like Chinese Men’s and Boy’s Paradise, read online gay fiction, and watched “every gay film he could get his hands on, sobbing over his takeout noodles.”
Using a pseudonym, Ma created a website for gay men, Light Blue Memories. After he primed it with his own stories about unrequited love and loneliness and with melancholy reflections about fleeting youth, it took off. In its early years, Ma was obliged to sustain a guerrilla-style backup operation that could relocate his servers from one municipality to another each time authorities tried to close the website on the grounds of indecency.
As it exploded in popularity, Ma rented space in Beijing, a four-hour train ride from his hometown, and commuted back and forth as he managed his dual identities: police officer and host of a social platform for gay people. In March 2012, though, he made the fateful decision to be featured in a documentary about his website, which prompted a huge and unexpected response. The film was covered positively on the home page of Sohu, one of the country’s biggest news portals. It also prompted an angry summons from his boss, who called Ma’s site humiliating for the police.
Ma resigned from the department the next day and, far from being discouraged, created a dating app for gay men, which he named Blued. It soon rocketed to number nine in downloads from China’s Apple app store. In November 2012 China’s minister of health invited Ma to participate in that year’s World AIDS Day conference in Beijing. There, to his surprise, he found himself face-to-face with Premier Li Keqiang and introduced himself, saying, “Greetings, Premier. I run a gay website.” In a scene that played that night on national television, Li shook his hand without missing a beat and said, “Thank you for your hard work, comrade.”
The story of another of Liu’s characters, Lü Pin, follows a somewhat similar arc. After acquiring a graduate degree in Chinese literature in 1994, she took a job at a stodgy state-run newspaper, China Women’s News. Although she had had little prior interest in women’s issues, Lü underwent a steady awakening and soon found herself chafing at the limits she faced in writing about gender inequality for a quasi-official publication. With her sharpness and drive, she nonetheless rose steadily up the paper’s hierarchy and found herself one step away from the deputy editor’s job at age thirty.
In a decision that shocked friends and colleagues, Lü resigned rather than pursue the promotion. To enter senior management, she would have had to join the Chinese Communist Party, and as someone who identified as part of the “1989 generation”—people who came of age around the time of the Tiananmen demonstrations—this was something she couldn’t do unless the party properly faced up to the history of the massacre there.
Lü then took a job in local government in Gansu, a relatively poor province, where she began writing freelance stories about the condition of women in China. Her goal all along was to reach a general audience, not just specialists and intellectuals, but these stories had a sparse readership. Another national public scandal, however, eventually provided Lü the opportunity to reach many more people.
In May 2009 Deng Yujiao, a twenty-one-year-old waitress in a karaoke club in Hubei province, was cornered in the club’s restroom by two local officials who demanded “special services” from her, meaning sex. When she refused, one of them smacked her in the face with a wad of banknotes, shouting, “Don’t you want money? Would you believe if I am going to beat you to death with money today?” Deng stabbed him in the neck with a fruit knife and called the police as he bled out.
Liu is almost certainly correct when she writes that in the pre-Internet era, this incident would have gotten little attention and Deng would have been convicted of homicide, especially since the victim was an official. Instead it went viral, with citizens expressing outrage over a range of issues, from the hints of official corruption in the wad of cash, to the male presumption of a right to sex, to the imagined impunity of the assailants. Amid a gale of public outcry, the charges were dropped.
That September, fired up by these events, Lü founded Women’s Voices, a digital magazine dedicated to women’s rights. At a reader’s suggestion, she soon changed the name to Feminist Voices. Lü wrote prolifically, her publication quickly gained traction with readers, and it helped spawn a loose but energized movement with headquarters in a two-bedroom apartment in Beijing that she called the One Yuan Commune. Every summer it hosted open courses on feminism to highly receptive attendees. “Our society does not allow for alternative views—be it about gender, sexuality, or politics—and those with different views find themselves isolated, rejected by the mainstream, with nowhere to go,” Lü later wrote.
With wind in its sails, the women’s movement that Lü helped create became bolder. It staged acts of guerrilla theater, such as a Valentine’s Day demonstration by three young women in Qianmen, one of Beijing’s busiest commercial districts. They dressed in cheap wedding gowns for the occasion, smeared their bodices with lipstick to resemble blood, and brushed their faces with eyeshadow to mimic bruising. “Yes to love, no to violence,” they chanted as they marched, in denunciation of domestic violence.
Liu tells the stories of Lü and Ma as a study in diverging approaches to how citizens inclined toward activism can relate to the state: the one accommodating and the other militant. But neither, any more than the Wenzhou crash, was a true harbinger of reform and opening in China.
Starting from his successful gay dating site, Ma Baoli built a queer entertainment empire that produced television shows and partnered with queer NGOs. But these early successes were deceptive, and Ma’s company eventually provoked a strong backlash from the state. After it produced a Web series about love between two high school boys called Addicted in 2016, China’s media regulators announced a ban on all portrayals of what it called “abnormal sexual relations,” including same-sex relations. Since then Ma has meekly complied, surviving, as Liu writes, by “always staying in the government’s good graces.”
Lü’s dark reckoning came even sooner. In March 2015, while she was visiting New York to attend the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women conference, Chinese police mounted a multicity roundup of five of the core members of her movement. Lü sent hundreds of emails to raise an international protest, and Hillary Clinton and Samatha Power were among those who condemned the arrests. The five were released after thirty-seven days in detention, but Feminist Voices was shut down and Lü was effectively forced into exile. The state, in the end, found ways to foreclose both of their efforts to loosen state control on gender and social mores in China from the bottom up.
During the Xi years another era has closed in China: from roughly 2007 until 2019 the appetite of young Chinese for study overseas, and particularly in the United States, seemed insatiable. In that peak final year, 372,000 Chinese were pursuing degrees in American colleges and universities. The outbreak of Covid-19 reduced this number by about 50,000, but since the end of the pandemic it has continued to drop, reaching 266,000 last year.
Jimmy Carter had made human rights a centerpiece of his foreign policy, including the right of citizens of Communist countries to emigrate. When the issue of emigration arose during Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 White House visit, Deng turned the argument on its head. “Would you like to import ten million Chinese?” he asked. “There is no question like that for China.” In fact, for many years afterward, if never remotely on this scale, China sent large numbers of students abroad, basing its hopes of catching up economically with the West on the education and training of rising numbers of its best students in American schools.
China’s modern economic takeoff, which began under Deng, has far outstripped almost all early expectations, including his. But it was long shadowed by often-stated doubts. Western politicians, pundits, and even economists said that a strategy of absorbing knowledge from overseas might enable China to catch up, but they questioned whether the country could ever become a leader in innovation and intellectual output, especially as long as it had a closed political system.
China’s economy has slowed in recent years, but its innovation across a number of domains, from electric vehicles and batteries to industrial robots, artificial intelligence, and space exploration, has finally quieted skeptics. Nowadays the Chinese government no longer encourages its students to study overseas, a reflection of another enormous achievement: the rapid rise of its own universities as worthy rivals of the best the West has to offer. The decline in the numbers of Chinese studying abroad has been further accelerated by increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the United States under Donald Trump.
In The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China, Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li argue that one of the most important factors in China’s resurgence through education has ironically been the modern implementation of the gaokao, its little-known and widely misunderstood ancient scholarly examination system. The gaokao is a grueling standardized test administered nationally to roughly 13 million students over two or four days each summer. Its core subjects are Chinese language and literature, mathematics, and a foreign language, which usually means English. Students also choose between electives of science or the humanities.
Whereas Liu points to how the Internet, which seemed to promise greater freedom for China, has instead become an apparatus of efficient state surveillance and control, Jia and Li show how an exam system with roots that go back to the Sui dynasty roughly 1,400 years ago and that has often been derided for promoting rote learning now works to motivate academic achievement and channel intellectual talent with surprising efficiency. Their book goes on to argue that the gaokao is instrumental in sustaining positive attitudes toward education in China and in at least tempering social and economic inequality.
The Highest Exam compiles a detailed and often dry account of the history and inner workings of what amounts to China’s national college entrance exam, which also serves as the foundation for a more personal discussion of the authors’ backgrounds. Both now teach at elite American universities. Li grew up in Jilin province and scored well on the gaokao in 1989, putting him on a path to eventually becoming codirector of the Center on China’s Economy and Institutions at Stanford.
Jia’s story is more revealing. She was the unwanted daughter of a mother who put her up for adoption, and she had the good fortune to be raised by a middle school teacher in Shandong province. Her rural elementary school had only three teachers, who kept an irregular schedule because they were also working farmers. Despite this, Jia became an avid reader and developed a precocious understanding that newly mastered Chinese characters were worth their proverbial weight in gold. Her father put it to her, “What would you like your future to look like? Would you like to attend vocational school? High school? The choice is yours.”
What the questions reveal is not only the weight that educational and vocational tracking still has in China but also the extent to which test taking determines individual outcomes. Prompted by her father’s question, Jia began to compile an outstanding exam record and eventually got the fourth-highest score in her high school on the gaokao. This in turn enabled her to attend a well-regarded college in Beijing.
For Jia and Li, the gaokao and the tests that lead up to it are far more than their rough American school test equivalents, like the SAT. They form the background of an all-pervading national culture of performance metrics that give life in China something of the quality of a vast and never-ending meritocratic tournament:
The lowest-level employees in the warehouses of a Chinese grocery store chain, who likely never finished high school, have their packing efficiency ranked and displayed on TV screens. At a major Chinese tech firm, when asked whether the employees were ranked against one another, the manager responded with some puzzlement: “Of course.”
In the United States, where there is a deep but folkloric belief in laissez-faire and what people imagine to be equal opportunity, many would doubtlessly bridle at this sort of thing. Jia and Li stop short of proposing any universal applicability of China’s approach to organizing opportunity, or even its outright superiority. But they are not shy about asserting what they see as its merits.
One, they argue, is that the gaokao and other exams allow China to place a premium on the so-called STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—that have been so crucial to the country’s economic advancement in the post-Mao era. Partly because of this, they argue, the return on investment through education has been very high, albeit hard to measure with exactitude. It is also not without costs: “China’s Einsteins may not even test into elite colleges, in part because they may not score well in the non-STEM fields. After all, the gaokao is a composite score.”
They also see competitive test-taking as a partial brake on the further increase of inequality in China, which is already very high. It is all but impossible to attend one of the top universities—Tsinghua, Peking, or Fudan—without previously attending a top high school. But access to both is determined by test scores, not nepotism. Jia and Li posit this as a meaningful advantage over American university admission patterns:
In China, children from the richest 20 percent of families—in other words, the upper class—are 2.3 times more likely to go to an elite college than those from the poorest 20 percent of families—the lower class. Meanwhile in the United States, students from wealthy families are fully eleven times more likely to attend elite institutions than those from poor families.
The system they describe, despite its brutal methods, produces something that much American education does not: genuine mathematical and logical grounding at an early age. What it sacrifices, Jia and Li concede, are the critical thinking skills that American college students cultivate more effectively, along with “social skills that are extremely valuable and likely to become even more so as many tasks become automated.” America’s education system also offers greater opportunity to a broader cross-section of the society, and it is more forgiving of those who don’t begin establishing a record of academic achievement early in life.
These two books introduce useful cautions against easy thinking about China, where cultural and historical inertia run deep in both politics and education. Technologies like the Internet, which the West has long associated with freer _expression_, have become means of ever-greater state social guidance and control. On the other hand, even with its rigidities, a system of educational benchmarking with roots in antiquity has thus far been made to serve economic advancement rather handily. What no one can know is how long either of these will have such effects.