Factually! with Adam Conover - The World According to the Chinese Internet, with Yi-Ling Liu

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

Seriously, what is life actually like in China? The American discourse on China is so bad, so poisoned, so laden with agendas, it’s difficult to understand what life looks like in one of the largest countries on Earth. This week, Adam speaks with Yi-Ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet, about what we can learn about life in China from looking at the Chinese internet. Find a copy of her book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. We're thrilled to have you with me on the show again. You know, our national conversation about China is really bad. It is, needless to say, one of the largest and oldest civilizations of the planet, home to a billion people from all walks of life, right? An incredibly diverse, interesting place.

But despite that, in America, we often reduce China to simply being a geopolitical, technological, or ideological rival. Or we discuss it as a place that is so different and so big. big, it's impossible for us to understand at all, so why even try? Or we say it's so repressive that we should discount it entirely. Or we say that it's so much better than America, so much more advanced than we are, that we should either concede the future to it or try to duplicate it in every way. You know, there are legitimate reasons that our discourse about China in America is so poisoned and contrary and insultingly reductive. For instance, there's the great firewall

that cuts us off from China's massive internet and cuts them off from us. But let's talk about that internet more specifically because that might be our gateway into understanding China better. Because just as the internet and AI are shaping actual people's actual lives here, just as the pace of technological innovation and change is changing American society, well, those same forces are shaping individual lives in China just as profoundly and in ways that are shockingly similar to the way our lives are being reshaped. Because, yes, there are differences between our governments and cultures and histories,

but we are all subject to the same technological and honestly economic forces. And that might be our way into establishing some level of understanding. And how about this, solidarity between the American people and the Chinese people. So today on the show, we have an author who is going to help open that door to us, and help us understand the way actual Chinese people live, and specifically how the internet, artificial intelligence, and technology have changed their lives and how they are responding to that change

in some shockingly similar ways to the ways we are in America. Her name is Yiling Liu. She's a writer and editor and the author of the fantastic new book, The Wall Dancers, searching for freedom and connection on the Chinese internet. Now, before we get to this fascinating conversation, I want to remind you, that if you want to support this and every single episode we bring you week in, week out,

head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show. Ad free. We'd love to have you as part of our awesome online community as well. And now, please welcome Yiling Liu. Yiling, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's wonderful to talk to you.

It's been a little while since we talked about the U.S. and China on the show. Obviously, huge subject to discussion right now, talking. everyone's talking about how the U.S. and China are in an AI race. Specifically, in the U.S., we have to talk about how different the Chinese system of government is, how different Chinese culture is. That's the emphasis again and again. You recently had a piece in The Times about how similar many things about the two countries are, specifically the way technology has affected our cultures and our workforce, as you wrote, moving between the two countries.

I've been struck by how much they've come to mirror and resemble each of, other. There's a shared sense of precarity that lies beneath the envy and distrust. The technological future is taking shape at vertiginous speed, yet its promise is not shared by all. Can you expand on that? What did you mean by that? Yeah, I guess, you know, having traveled between the U.S. and China, and specifically Silicon Valley and Zhong Wan Suu, which is China's Silicon Valley, I was struck by just the similarity between the sentiments of especially those who were working at tech companies, at the lower rungs who are using and being used by the technology as opposed to investing and building in it.

And I found that the most stark similarity was the kind of difference between the kind of top rungs of society who were very excited about AI and super competitive and kind of building these tools at Bradenac Speed. and then ordinary people who just felt like they were very anxious in being left behind. I think some moments of this mirroring that struck out to me was when engineers, like software engineers and people working at AI labs in Silicon Valley started to use this term 9-96. I don't know if you're familiar with this term. And this was a phrase that I knew from China since 2019.

It refers to 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week and was kind of using this like disgruntled way to describe how hard people would try to work to kind of stay in their jobs and get ahead. And it was just kind of alarming that now Silicon Valley workers were kind of using this term in this like unironic way. Oh, you heard workers in Silicon Valley in the U.S. start to use it. Oh, yes. So people started using it back in China in 2019. and now, like, this year, employers have started to hire people and in their job descriptions be like, we want people who can work 996, which is a Chinese tech term that they're using without irony. So there's this rooted in that term, I think, is this sense of anxiety, the sense of, like,

we need to work really hard. We need to kind of, like, build these tools as quickly as possible and make as much money as quickly as possible so that we can escape in Silicon Valley lingo the so-called permanent underclass. Wow. So that's really striking that like a Silicon Valley boss would use this term that's coming out of what I'm going to say is probably a somewhat toxic part of Chinese work culture. I think that number of hours, what is that? Well over 60, 70 hours a week is that's not healthy for anybody to work that much. So it's really striking for a boss to take. take that on. But do you think there's a similarity in how the underclass, how everybody else is

feeling about, you know, AI and technological advances between the two countries? Because we often have this idea, you know, in the U.S. that, oh, in China, everybody must love it. Everybody must be on board. They've seen so many advances. Things are moving along so quickly that, you know, the entire population, that there must not be the kind of AI skepticism there that there is here. What do you make of it? Yeah, I think definitely counter to that narrative. I think that narrative is not totally wrong. Like if you were to look at polls comparing public attitudes and opinions towards AI, generally in China and in East Asia for that matter,

like attitudes towards emerging technology, towards AI, towards robotics is like slightly more positive and slightly more optimistic. And that's rooted in all kinds of different reasons. But like to then lean into that and make it a trope and be like, Chinese people are obsessed with AI and, you know, they're super optimistic about it and nothing could go wrong in their eyes is totally wrong, right? And America's full of doomers and everyone's scared that the Terminator is going to take over. Like that that trope also is incorrect. And if anything, one thing that I noticed in the Chinese scenario is that like often enthusiasm is also rooted in deep anxiety, right? So like a case that I talk about in the piece is OpenClaw, which is this open source AI agent that became super popular in China.

People were going crazy for it. They were like lining up in front of big tech companies to get it installed in their computers. Parents were buying it for their kids so that they could do their homework project. Wow. I mean, I know it was a big deal in the U.S. too, but mostly among like tech bloggers, like, you know, AI coders on X or whatever. Yeah. It didn't become like, yeah, parents at high schools weren't like buying it for their kids.

Yeah. No, and China was fully like retirees coming out of the woodwork to like kickstart side hustles. Wow. But the sentiment wasn't so much. I'm so excited about this new technology and integrating into my life as much as like a keeping up with the Jones is kind of they're using it. using it. If I don't learn how to figure this out, I'm going to be left behind. So much so

that when I was scrolling through social media, I think the post that I saw about OpenClaw that ended up giving the title for my piece was this guy saying, like, this is not an embrace of the future, this is being harvested by the future. Because

tech companies saw how anxious that all of these people were and started to monetize, you know, by like charging for installation. services by charging for tokens. And you realize that actually, like, people were downloading these tools without actually knowing how to use them simply because they felt like they should. And so this is, like, I think, a kind of strong sentiment in China and in the world at the

moment. Like, people are not just wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the new technology. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. It makes it seem more like the attitude among the Chinese public is there's a connection to the way Americans feel, because you see Americans say, oh, if you don't get on board of the AI, you'll get left behind, or you'll see people jump on board for that reason. It seems like that kind of thinking is more common in China.

But that's still a strain that we see in the U.S., this feeling of like, oh, there must be something important here because everybody is talking about it. Therefore, I must get on board. This episode brought to you by Alma. You know, a year from today, who do you want to be? What version of yourself would you like to meet? Would you feel less anxious or feel more like yourself? Maybe your relationship would be stronger or the grief feels smaller.

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That's L-E-E-E-S-A.com promo code factually for 30% off select mattresses plus an extra $50 off. Support our show and let the know we send you after checkout. Lisa.com promo code factually. One thing I'm curious about is, and this is extremely like me understand, a very 101 understanding of Chinese-Col, and Chinese history, but I know that, you know, industrialization, quote unquote, modernization was much more recent in China that was, you know, very short, like in the span of one or two generations you had folks moving, you know, from rural areas to very urban areas, where that process in the United States and Europe, you know, took a century or more. And that that

created a different attitude towards technology. And it also reminds me of, I had a few, you know, engineers on the show. A few months ago, one of them from India, and he said, you know, he felt that the attitude towards AI in India was very different than in the U.S. because, like, it's like the culture, the country is younger in its adoption of technology. Like, they've seen the benefits more recently. Whereas in the U.S., we saw the benefits of new technology in like the 40s and the 50s, right, in the post-World War II era. Oh, my God, look, there's skyscrapers now. Wow. You know, we got the, oh, we got the automobile. And now. it's, you know, we're a little bit older and we're a little bit more frightened of the new

technology. In the same way that I thought the internet was cool when I was 18 and now that I'm in my 40s, I'm like, oh, fuck, I'm a little scared, right? That's very natural. So he was pointing out, that's why he felt the attitude was different in India. I'm curious if any of that tracks for you about China, is any of that seem way off base. How would you look at it? I think it totally tracks. It absolutely tracks. And that's why, sometimes when you move back and forth between China and India, like there are strong similarities between those two cultures and how they think about technology as well.

And one way to think about it with China, as you said, is just like economic, growth, technological, upheaval and progress has just been over the course of a very compressed timeline. And so, and it also took place during kind of China's reform and opening, right? transformation from this like very autarkic poor communist state all the way up until the 70s, or as late as the 70s, and then like within the course of 30 years turning into this place with like skyscrapers and high speed rail and humanoid robots, right? And so the arrival of the internet and the arrival of digital technologies is very much associated with a huge

rise in economic well-being. And just like the general. wealth of the population. And so when people think about the arrival of new technology, they think, oh, this is going to make my life get better. Yeah, because in the United States, you know, I'm a member of a generation where there's one of the first generations in American history where people feel they are not doing as well as their parents or they're looking back at the past and saying that was more prosperous, whereas my parents, my grandparents would be more likely to say, oh, yeah, a couple generations back, we were dirt farmer. and, you know, now we have a middle-class life, right?

And I assume that the latter is more common in China that folks look back a generation or two and go, oh, I'm much better off than my parents were. So I assume that would have a different, make people feel differently about technology. For sure. I would say that this might be the last generation for which it's true. Ah. Yeah. So just one generation behind the U.S.

Yeah. Yeah, in that, you know, the economy is slowing youth employment is at an all-time high. People are living with their parents now. You know, I think it would have been just not, you know, not within the realm of possibility that you would not have enough money to go out and, like, find a job and do better than your parents. You know, like, I think it was expected that you would take care and out-earn your parents. I think there was this huge, like, rush of people moving out of the countryside, which was considered like the poor backwater of China into the cities to like strike gold working in

Chinese metropolises and now it's like reverse migration where people are sick of the cities they're tired they're realizing they can't live their Beijing Shanghai dream and they're like moving back to their parents hometowns and looking for a more kind of quiet subdued life making do one like a thousand, two thousand R&B a month, where, you know, before I think their parent generation would have thought like go out into the world. I mean, I could share a little anecdote. Please. I remember meeting, I was getting a back massage in Beijing and I was having a long chat with the massage therapist. And she was saying, like, she had that energy of the generation that was going to go out. And so she said she left her hometown, which was, like,

you know, in a very rural area in the northeast, moved out to Beijing, like, did really well for herself, like, made a bunch of, like, had a good salary, like, raised her family and, like, expected her kids would feel similarly. Instead, while she's like out in Beijing working, her kid, her daughter who's in her 20s has decided, like, I don't ever want to leave my hometown is making substantially less money than her mother and has decided I just want to stay in my hometown and work as a civil servant. And because that's stable, it's low paying, but at least I know it's going to be around and I don't have to like work too hard and I don't have to worry about my future. And that like that kind of reversal, like I think civil servant was a job that people like coveted

and maybe like the 70s before reform because of its stability. And then now that we're returning back to that state is quite interesting. That also seems like something that's happening in the U.S. to a certain extent. I mean, you look at the, you know, all the social media posts. about sort of people going back to traditional little house on the prairie style lifestyles, um, country living, simplicity. These are cyclical. I mean, there was a trend like that in the U.S.

in the 60s and 70s as well. Um, but that's, that's fascinating to me. I didn't realize that China was moving towards the same place. It almost seems like China is like speed running the same economic transformation. It's just, it's happening in a more compressed time and that China is sort of rapidly or the, or the public in

China is rapidly catching up to where United States consumers or the public is. Does that seem accurate? Yeah, totally. And that's also like a point that I touch upon in the piece, too, this kind of like shared rejection of consumption, industrialization, like the rapid acceleration of technology, so much so that like the most popular influencers are kind of these like back to the land, like pastoral, kind of idyllic, you know, lifestyles that are away from the city and, like, where no technology touches. The example that I give is one of China's most famous kind of YouTube influencers or Doin influencers, which is the Chinese TikTok, is this woman who lives out in the Sichuanese countryside is

completely self-sufficient. You know, she, like, cooks out of a stove and, like, rides horseback to pick magnolia flowers that she'll, like, beat into a cake, you know, and, like, hatches her own ducklings. And she's wearing traditional Chinese garb. And what's fascinating is, like, if she has a corollary in the United States, which is ballerina farm, who is this, like, Instagram influencer with a huge following, maybe you're familiar with her. I'm familiar with this type of thing. I can picture exactly what you're talking about just based on the name, but keep going. she's like basically Chinese leads at sea where like she's out in I think somewhere in Utah living with like trad wife life with her husband and her three kids and is like baking bread

and making donuts from scratch you know and it's also you just don't see technology anywhere the irony of it of course is like they have like armies of kind of cameramen you know yeah like algorithm amplifiers and on every platform helping get their message across but There's a yearning. There's this kind of like shared yearning for a past that was untouched by all this chaos and uncertainty that technology has brought. That's fascinating. Is it being caused by, you know, the same forces in society that are pressing the technology onto everybody else? I mean, here in the U.S., we have extreme wealth inequality. Obviously, we have a sense that there is not even an upper class, like a, a small group of people at the top who are forcing this technology upon everybody else. People are being forced to use AI when they don't want to. They're being, you know, they feel that they're at the mercy of the algorithms, et cetera, et cetera.

But, you know, we feel that this is coming from a place of hypercapitalism where, you know, Elon Musk is basically running the United States instead of the democratically elected government. is there something similar happening in China either in fact or perception? Absolutely. I would say both fact and perception, right? I think they're not China and the U.S. are still apples and oranges, but they both have this and China arguably in some ways more or less like deep techno authoritarian strain. They're both hyper-capitalist societies.

They're both societies where the people who are the most powerful are, some combination of the state and the tech CEOs, right? And I think one parallel that I've found most fascinating is like I've always assumed that it was mostly in China that there was this kind of relationship of patronage between the party state and tech companies, right? So tech companies really have to bend to the whims of what the government wants it to do. And like that relationship is really crucial. And you could almost say, it's like a relationship of collusion, right? It's like centralizing power into the hands of a very small few.

What I found remarkable was like during the inauguration last year, just seeing all of the people who were standing around Donald Trump and they were essentially the entirety of Silicon Valley, right? Like also what has been replicated, arguably it's been around for a long time, but now it's much more visible, this kind of like handshake like bond between, you know, Donald Trump and even. Elon Musk and, you know, Alexander Wang and Sam Altman and Dario Amo Day, right? So I think both of these societies are some people have argued, like, techno-feudalist in some

ways, like not just techno-capitalist anymore, where we're all kind of like consumers caught in the system. Some might say we're like now serfs caught in the system. Yeah, well, and there's been a lot of talk in the United States about China moving towards a more American system of capitalism or opening up over the past few decades. But it now sort of seems that America is maybe moving in what we perceive as being the Chinese direction of a sort of state capitalism, you know, more of a unified front between the folks running the government and the folks running our capitalist system. There's also comparisons to Russia, which we think of as being an oligarchy, right?

Like something similar is happening in the United States. I mean, does it feel like is there some like master pattern that it feels like these countries are converging towards, you know, some. And is it because of the competition that they are having with each other, you know, that like are, is it conscious or unconscious this convergence? Yeah. I think one part of it is just that these technologies. requires a huge amount of capital data and like compute power to run. And so whoever is in control of all of those resources and is in control of those technologies ends up being able to centralize a lot of power into their own hands,

which is the kind of mirroring that we're seeing taking place between the U.S. and China in particular, right? But I think there's also what's driving this convergence, particularly on the U.S. side, is this kind of fascination and envy and fear of the other, this desire to be more like the other and therefore emulate it. I think that's where some of the 9-96 copying comes in. particularly in the U.S. side, I've at least noticed like tons of like Silicon Valley investors or technologists like flying over to China and doing these two-week trips to just like figure out how China got it, you know, like trying to like figure out why does China have high speed rail and we don't, you know, why does China have this like very sophisticated technological infrastructure

and we don't. And out of that kind of envy for physical infrastructure, there's been a desire to be more like China. And you see that, you know, you see that in Elon Musk. He's often kind of extolling the 996 spirit. Mark Zuckerberg has often, you know, been quoted as saying having WeChat envy. Like he loves the idea of we chat is this platform in China that is essentially an everything app. It's like a Swiss army knife.

You do everything on it. And he like so, so wants Facebook to be like we chat, you know, like, because he wants that kind of dominance. He wants to be able to like infiltrate into every part of everyone's daily life. So I think a lot of that mirroring is driven by by envy. Yeah. Are we seeing the sort of the way that the United States public is pushing back in now overtly ways against the rise of AI.

You know, if you look at the protests around the country against data centers, which are happening across political lines and it's causing, you know, leaders to not be reelected, it's causing, like, actual political upheaval. There's, like, now a measurable societal pushback on, uh, in the political culture. Is anything like that happening in China at all? No. And I think even if there was a desire for that to happen, like if there was, was kind of, first I would say, like, there isn't that much hostility channeled towards

data centers, like the idea of kind of like large scale infrastructure projects being built on someone's land. Like, that has just been for the better, for the worst, like, mostly for the worst, often, like a standard part of anyone growing up in China, right? Like evictions, like building takedowns, like land grabs has always been kind of like a big part of the developmental model of modern China. And you want to know how all the high speed rail got built. That's part of it, right? Exactly.

So, like, the building of data centers is not going to be really that much different. I would say, like, the build out of data centers in the U.S. is significant, like, much more significant, just the amount of money that has been poured into that part of private industry. And then lastly, if there was any desire to organize or protest around. data centers, like, that wouldn't be possible. Of course. Because, like, culture around protest is, like, completely different and the possibilities around that is different.

But I would say, right now, there isn't even that desire to push back. So it's both intention as well as ability. Got it. But the public is still feeling this sense of, like, technologically driven precarity. Man, nothing is scarier than trying something new, right? And I'm not talking about trying a new food. there is nothing challenging about trying deep fried lasagna balls. Those go down, easy down the gullet.

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because that is so much of what your book is about in addition to the Times piece. You know, we talk a lot in the U.S. The main thing I know about the Chinese Internet is that freedom of speech is so much restricted, et cetera, the great firewall of China, et cetera, et cetera. I think a lot of that narrative might over-emphasize how free speech is in the United States Internet.

I think it's a bit less free than it used to be. But at the same time, I know that things are more locked down in China, but the country still has a huge and vibrant Internet, right? And on some level, you can't stop people from being people. People are going to be weird on whatever media platform you give them. So tell me about the Chinese Internet. what does it actually like on there? Yeah.

You know, like, it's hard to sum up, but one metaphor that I like to use to describe the internet, just because like so much, so many of us are familiar with this metaphor of the Great Firewall. And we kind of like assume that the land that exists behind this Great Firewall is just like this barren, opaque landscape where nothing grows and everyone has no agency. Right. And like, if anything, like that is, that is so wrong, right? And so, like, the metaphor that I like to use is that of the walled garden, which is, yes, it's enclosed behind this wall.

Yes, some things can't come in and a lot of things don't go out. But the ecosystem that exists inside is like this parallel online universe. Like, there are, like, plants and fauna and by which I mean cultures and communities and platforms that just look radically different from that of the World Wide Web because they grew up on different soil. and they didn't kind of like cross-pollinate as much. So, you know, for every platform that you can think of in the U.S. or in the rest of the world, there is some corollary in China. So you don't have Facebook, but you have WeChat. Like, you don't have ChachyPT, but you've got Deepseek.

You don't have Amazon, but you have Taubo, right? And so to step into the Chinese Internet in many ways is like to inhabit this parallel online universe. and it requires a whole set of different, not just language, that's obvious, but like norms, cultures, like ways of being, slang. And that's kind of how I like to frame the Chinese web. It allows people to really kind of see it in its, like, richness and diversity instead of this, like, barren monolith. Yeah, and by the way, if you're describing, I want to describe like a barren monolith,

how else would you describe Instagram? I'm not sure. How vibrant is the American Internet anymore? Certainly used to feel much more vibrant. Now it feels like three websites where all the output sort of tastes the same, right? It's like a similarly textured gruel is often feels like what it's coming out of my phone. But what are some of your favorite examples of how vibrant the Chinese Internet is? Yeah.

I mean, I guess I could maybe discuss one of the stories. that I profile in my book. I would love that. So one of the characters that I follow in the kind of late 90s, early 2000s, was a policeman. He was a cop, a student at the police bureau first before he became a full-time policeman, very closeted. And he, you know, started having crushes on boys as everyone around him was. you know, dating women, and he, according to his kind of school textbook, understood that being gay was either an illness or a crime. And this was like the early 2000s, late 90s.

Wow. He summals upon, he goes into an internet cafe, one of the first internet cafes in his city at the time, and sunbles upon this online novel called Beijing story written about this anonymous writer about two men who fall in love and have this affair. And he's like completely transformed has this moment of revelation, I'm not alone in the world, and founds an underground gay website to call Dunlan, it means light blue, and was named after the color of the sea next to where he lived in the town where he lived. He would have basically this double life for the next few years as a cop by day, like gay website leader by night. The team grows to

five people as he invites people to work with him. Eventually, he moves to Beijing. The team grows to like 20. He comes out. He leaves his job as a cop. Fast forward to when I meet him in 2019, he's the CEO of a company called Blude, which is the largest gate-eating app, not just in China, but in the world. So I think it was doubled the size of Grindr. He was about to take his company public on the New York Stock Exchange and the team was like 800 people working out of downtown Beijing with offices in I think at some point in like London like Vietnam, India, at some point they were like paying for couples to go get officiated, get their weddings officiated by the mayor of West Hollywood to fly them out to California.

And I said, what? You know what? How do you get from A to B, right? I'm sorry. That's a great fact. But the mayor of West Hollywood is such, just living in L.A. is such a funny person to want to fly to Los Angeles to meet. I mean, it's just, it's not that prominent of a position, but that's, that says something.

Yeah. Okay. Sorry, please, please go on. But, you know, like, and through this story, I was like, how did this guy get from A to B? Like, and how does this app? exist, right? And what are, like, Chinese society on one hand is not like a lot of, kind of predominantly Christian or Muslim societies that have like a deep tradition of like being repressive against homosexuality. But at the same time, it's like gay marriage is not legal.

Like it's quite taboo. Most people don't come out to their parents. Right. And so how is it that this app exists and has created this like flourishing online queer community on China's internet, right? And the kind of, um, the, the paradox of that is fascinating, right? And just being able to like dive into these little subcultures and find like entire communities on Blud, like people meet through Blude and they like find surrogacy services on Blude was just like one microcosm of how many other communities like this exist on the Chinese internet. Yeah, I mean, that's a very natural thing to happen on the internet. It's the same thing that happened on the United States Internet.

I mean, it's impossible to look at the changes in queer acceptance and queer culture over the last 30 years, my lifetime in the United States without looking at the Internet, right? People literally look at the rise of Tumblr as a website as being, you know, important in queer history. You're like with other, oh, I remember the Tumblr years when we figured out this and everyone was talking about that. And then we moved on and now we're doing something new, et cetera. When you give people who are, you know, walking around with their different experience, they think there's nobody like them when you give them a way to come together and communicate in this sort of semi-anonymous way or distributed way, it results in different cultural movements, different cultural pockets.

It's like you naturally have this sort of flourishing. So it sounds like the exact same thing has happened on the Chinese Internet, despite the more repressive regulatory framework, which is there. Exactly, exactly. And I would say, you know, one thing that I find unique about the Chinese Internet is how people navigate those constraints. So like one difference about the U.S. Internet, though that may change is that it's relatively unconstrained, right? And so an example is like the Me Too move. that took off in the U.S., totally blew up online. And the same thing happened in China.

Like a few months later, Me Too became a huge thing. People were speaking out about their experiences with sexual harassment. And, you know, the hashtag Me Too started to appear. Those quickly got deleted by censored and by censors. And then they were replaced by the Chinese phrase like Woyishu, which is a direct translation. When those get taken down, you get dialects with the same phrase coming up. Those get taken down. And eventually people were posting emojis of a bunny and a rice bowl.

Or sorry, a rice bowl and a bunny because the characters for rice and bunny in Chinese are Mi and Toot. So, like, you know, they're using the homonym of this kind of word play to express, you know, their sport for the Me Too movement. And that is a very typical kind of part of expressing yourself online in China. Because inevitably, if you even dance around something that's politically sensitive, it'll get taken down. And you'll need to think about some meme or some slang phrase or some emoji with which you can kind of communicate what you want to say. Yeah, this is one of the few things I've heard about the Chinese Internet, you know, just from reading media in the U.S. about this sort of these veiled references to censored topics. But I've never had a sense of, oh, is this just a one-off story that's bubbling up in the U.S.?

Is that really sort of part and parcel of daily life on the Chinese Internet? Oh, yeah. Like, it happens all the time. It's like a primary mode of communicating anything sensitive. It's like it almost becomes intuitive to anyone who is online in China. And I think something that's fascinating about the Chinese Internet is like we always talk about this, wordplay as a product of dissent or a product of trying to skirt around the sensor. But sometimes it's really just for like shits and giggles.

You know, like people are being funny. Like, it's a very playful language that's like full of tones and full of like double entendres. So like one viral meme this past lunar new year was everywhere if you walked around like on window panes, on doorways, like on buildings all over the internet, on. we chat feeds were photos of the face of Tom Felton, Draco Malphoy. Okay, yeah. Because Malphoy's name in, if you were to like translate it to which Chinese characters is Ma or Fool, which means horse and luck.

And it was the year of, it was a lunar year of the horse and people wanted wish good fortune. and someone just figured that this was a funny meme and then you have like Malfoy's face on like skyscrapers. The same tool with which like playfulness is used for dissent is just like here for no reason just because it's funny. Tom felt it is he coming to China?

I got to go on tour now. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I think he was pretty flattered. He said something for you. He was like pretty psyched about having his face around everywhere. No one told him. It was just the name of his character is a pun. It's got nothing to do.

He's like, they love me. I don't know what to say. I'm just magnetic. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there any, look, the flip side of people from different backgrounds coming together to discuss something they have in common and a subculture flourishing is, you know, in the United States, we've also had some very damaging reactionary movement start, that sort of thing.

Is there any similarity in China with that? Is there a dark side of that connection? Yeah, definitely. I would say, like, one of the strong parallels that I have found between the U.S. and Chinese Internet is just, like, the rise of in-cell culture, like, particularly when that culture is, like, misogynist, illiberal, and nationalist, right? I think, like, those have become, like, potent cultures on the Chinese Internet. I think they used to be similar to the, similar to the Chinese Internet.

the U.S. subcultures in the early 2000s, and I feel like those voices have very much become amplified to the mainstream. And in the Chinese case, a lot of the times it has to do with platforms encouraging them. And I think often it's because kind of misogyny and nationalism and patriotism go hand in hand. And so when, you know, know, in cells, for example, are attacking feminists online. They realize that a very smart way to do about it is to kind of attack the feminists as being anti-China or kind of like pro-foreign or pro-West. And these platforms, you know, realizing that they need to drum up nationalist sentiment, which is also tied to kind of the broader direction that the country is going in, will let their voices bubble to the top.

so much so that there's a phrase now, and this is about like a decade old, that refers to online patriots. And in China, it's called Little Pinks or Siaof and Hong. And Little Pinks, I think of them as kind of like the mix of the Patriot and the Stan. They're like patriots who use very much the methods of Justin Bieber fans online, you know, or just like, Like the fandom toolkit where if there's someone they don't like, and usually it's someone who has liberal views, you know, or like spoke out in support of Ukraine in the war, you know, or like is speaking out for queer communities, they'll kind of come in and like rabidly attack and spam and docks that person. And that's, you know, that sounds pretty familiar. It's not so different from what you see in the U.S. But are they doing so in that case with more the support of the government or the people who run the internet?

Yeah, it's a very blurry line and it's difficult to identify. Because like you have the full spectrum. You have people who are just directly paid by the government to post certain like messages that are like pro party and pro nationalists online. Then you have people who maybe have like collaborations with the conversations with the content. Communist Youth League, right, or are endorsed by a state organization and their voices are therefore kind of amplified by the platform. And then you just have like grassroots nationalists who people have started to like and like veer towards because they like their ideology and it's become compelling, right? So it's like the full range of state support there that's kind of enabled by the platforms as well. in the same way, like, you can't really tell on the U.S. internet or just like on Twitter, for example, to what extent, for example, what's Laura Lumer?

You know, like, is she acting on her own accord? Is she drawing from, like, grassroots sentiment that really believes in what she's saying? Or is she like a running dog for Trump, right? Like, it's hard to really parse out at this point what is top down. and what is bottom up. Yeah, I assume there's also the phenomenon of, you know, in the U.S., the right wing is always complaining about cancel culture, but there is, of course, the right wing version of cancel culture where something becomes so hot and so upsetting to that corner of the internet that it becomes unsayable or they harass or docs or try to shut people down. Does the same thing happen? Yeah, one thing that is unique to China and maybe different is like if anything gets way too out of hand, and that could be someone who's like very liberal or that could be someone who's like radical nationalist, it will get shut down. Because at the end of the day, regardless of what the ideology is that's being espoused, it could be super patriotic and super aligned with the government.

if it's getting too viral, if it's getting too popular, and if it's mobilizing people, it's probably bad news. And so a government directive will come in and shut it down. And so often you have like ultra-nationalists, for example, who are like so hot for the government and like really are just singing praise. But they too will be quieted because, you know, it got too popular or too out of hand. And so it's harder to find. kind of like very extreme views that are super provocative and mobilize like a large segment

of the population. For example, I don't know. I mean, I'm just speculating here. I don't know if you'd find a Nick Fuentes on the Chinese internet. Uh-huh. Or a Nick Fulence who gets really popular. Uh-huh. Well, Nick Fuentes is very popular.

He's not like determining, you know, the, what everybody talks about on the internet day to day. and not like overwhelmingly popular. But it sounds like what you're talking about is almost the Chinese government taking a like teacher in the classroom approach of like, oh, the kids are just being too rowdy. I don't care what you're saying. Does everyone needs to quiet down and listen kind of chill out kind of vibe? Yeah. Like if any kid threatens the teacher's power, then like even if the kid is like, I like this metaphor, by the way.

But even if the kid is like, I love you so much teacher, you are literally the best teacher in the world. If he's like forming a little cult of like students around him. Yeah. Teacher will shut it down. Yeah. Yeah. What do you make of sometimes, and again, it's one of the few times that the Chinese internet will like bubble up to my level as you'll see. Sometimes like a Hollywood movie or a Hollywood star will like say something that like seems to accidentally go viral on the Chinese internet.

in like, among reactionary nationalists in a way that pisses people off. And when I see that happen, I don't know, like John Sina will have to apologize or something like that. And that's when we all learn that John Sina like speaks a load of Mandarin because he'll speak in a clip or whatever. To me, it looks a little bit like when the American right wing internet gets mad about Cracker Barrel or something like that where there's like a little tempest in a teapot happening. but to American media figures, it's a little bit like mysterious what's going on. Does that comparison make sense to you at all? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is direct parallel,

but like something that will happen often is like, this actually has happened multiple times where like a Chinese celebrity will go to Japan and then we'll accidentally, maybe accidentally, take a photo or a selfie next to a show, shrine that is celebrating or like the grave or something a shrine that celebrates the um a japanese general or someone who worked in the military who is like really instrumental in the sign of japanese war and like killed a lot of chinese people right and then the internet will just like completely

go ballistic um and sometimes that person will be like all their um film contracts and like record label contracts or whatever it is will get canceled um i don't know if that's like a corollary to what you're saying. I think it is. Yeah. I mean, what's funny is it really, the world that you're peopling of the Chinese internet is like so recognizable to me that you have like rises and falls of, you know, uh, uh, uh, queer culture, feminist culture, uh, a more open point of view. Uh, and then you'll have the sort of more repressive nationalist reactionary hair trigger folks. There'll be sort of like a rising and falling of who's sort of driving the conversation.

But it seems to be full of the same type of people that I recognize from my own day to day on the internet. And that is really striking to me, especially because, again, we're brought up in the U.S. to think of China as being a completely different universe politically. I mean, just the fact that China is a quote unquote communist country in the U.S. is coded as a left-wing position, right? But what you're describing is people associating anti-feminism with nationalism, which to me is a very traditionally right-wing like thing in America, despite the fact that in that case they'd be doing so in support of a quote-unquote communist government. So the more that I talk to you, the more it sounds like, hey, there are some large differences, but that the overall political world of, you know, digital communication is very similar to the world that I live in. Is that seem correct to you?

Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of the old labels that we used to describe the differences between China and the U.S. just don't hold. Like, capitalist and communists, no, they're both very capitalist. I mean, like, Democratic and authoritarian. No, they're both quite authoritarian now. You know, like, I think those old labels just don't hold in the same way. We need to have some fresh eyes and fresh labels of looking at them. Can you share another story with me from the Chinese?

I just, I think the anecdotes are really helpful, especially beyond my pontificating. Yeah. Yeah. And any others that jump out to you? Yeah, I guess, you know, I can talk about like one of the main. reasons why I, or you know, not even a main reason, like a story or a person that drove me to write this book in the first place, which is I became really obsessed with Chinese hip hop and specifically hip hop coming out of Chengdu, which is in the southwest in China and Sichuan. And in 2017, when I started thinking about this book, hip hop, which was once this

kind of niche subculture in China, had just totally blew up into the mainstrand. stream. And this is what is like slightly different between the U.S. and China. Like the rate with which things become popular and then they like died down is so fast. It's like whiplash. And so like out of the blue, you know, this TV show came out called The Rap of China, which is like American Idol, but for hip hop. And suddenly the whole country was paying attention to Chung News hip hop artists. And there was a band called the Higher Brothers that was now like blasting in clubs, not just in Beijing, but also in like Brooklyn, you know. And so I wanted to know how is this American counterculture kind of thriving in this space where I used to think like art being quite heavily censored, right?

How is it tiptoeing the line of the sensor? And right before I decided to fly to Chengdu and report on this, the government ban hip hop. You know what I mean? I was just like, okay, cool. Like it came out, issued this directive saying specifically that it would ban hip hop from. You know what I mean? I was just like, okay, cool. Like, it came out, issued this directive saying specifically that I would ban hip hop from television. And so, you know, within months of this thing going really viral, everyone was then kind of scrambling to interpret the kind of policy tea leaves. And I was meeting all these hip hop artists who were like, yeah, I guess I'm not sure, you know, like, maybe I'm going to go underground.

Maybe I'm going to like sell out and just do patriotic rap. And everyone had to kind of adapt to what this meant, right? So one of the subjects of my book is a hip-hop artist. And it was through them that I learned this phrase, dancing and shackles, which ended up becoming part of the title of my book, The Wall Dancers. Because they were saying, you know, so much of being a creative individual in China is to participate in this dance. You have creativity, you have a lot of agency, but you're constantly kind of bound in shackles. And it really captured, I think, the sense of, like, dynamism. but also constraints, the kind of freedom, but also limitation, and how quickly that could

vacillate. And it really captured that experience of living in Chinese society, which I think is quite unique to it. That is a really fascinating story. And it makes me think of, it makes me unsure about what I think about the differences in similarities. Not that I'm trying to come down on one side or another, but in the United States, you know, it would not be the case the government would ban.

and hip-up on television that seems extreme. On the other hand, we're very used to looking at artists who are operating within a system and saying, oh, okay, well, this artist is being a little bit commercial or this artist is selling out and this artist is fake. But then, you know, in America, there's plenty of artists who participate in the music industry, which we see as a corrupting, limiting, censoring,

you know, blandizing force. but within that saying, okay, this artist is legit, this artist is playing with the constraints that are put upon them in an interesting way, et cetera. And, you know, despite the constraints of the system, we of the public are like looking for the real human thing and we're able to find it in artists anyway. And even on a very large level,

and you sure, there's plenty of bland corporate music out there, but there's also, I don't know, artist like a Kendrick Lamar, like an artist who, or a Beyonce artist who people feel are real artists saying disruptive revolutionary things in a world that doesn't always support that kind of work. And that truth sounds like it's the same, that there are, that like, that kind of real art always requires that kind of negotiation and dancing and it requires an active listening on the part of the audience to go find it. Does that sound accurate to you? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think like in both societies, there are artists who are trying to operate within constraints. I think the key difference is just that in the U.S., those constraints have primarily been by the market and commercial. And in China, you have those exact same market and commercial forces. Like you have all this bland like saccharine pop that's made to like appease, you know, like a tasteless listener. But there's also the constraint of the state.

Right. And so you cannot have a Kendrick Lamar in China because like Kendrick is really political in what he's saying. And you can have like political messages come out and be also mainstream in China, whereas like that's not possible. I will say though, America is moving in the direction in which the state is also beginning to impose constraints on artistic forms. Right. It's nowhere near where China is right now, but it's certainly like moving in that direction. Yeah, I mean, that's what I was going to say. If just to take a small example of, you know, the allyship between Elon Musk and the government and the way that the ex formerly Twitter algorithm has changed to privilege some kinds of speech and deprioritize other kinds of speech, that's not art, that's politics. But it's an example of, you know, a market-based company that was previously all about free speech moving. in the direction of privileging the kind of speech that the current government likes, right? And that, to me, looks like a move in the Chinese direction. Is there another example that you would take

from recent American history? The most overt one that I can think of is Jimmy Kimmel. Of course, yes, of course. Everyone seems even more like it's not even like an amplification on the algorithm. It's just like a straight up removal of someone. And Stephen Colbert, who is off the air and Jimmy Kimmel is still on. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's specifically the decision made by a corporate overlord to appease the government direct. The government's stated preferences, the stated preferences of a regulator, right? Exactly. And I guess the biggest difference there then is that I feel like in the back of a lot of people's minds in the United States, there is the idea, well, this is only for the next four years that Brendan Carr is going to be in there having directives like this. And maybe things will swing back in a little bit. I feel like a lot of people are still holding out hope for that because they live through

the Trump one year. They're like, ah, it's just going to be a blip again. I don't know. I feel like the Chinese example is like maybe goes to show that might not be the case, right? Yeah. I think just it cannot be taken for granted. Yeah. That's the one that I hope people will learn.

Well, talking about the way that Americans, you know, think about or talk about or talk. about China, you know, you really looking into this directly and having a more direct connection with it, how would you hope that we could like adjust the way that we see China? And I don't even mean on a governmental level because that's, there's plenty of talk about that in the newspaper already. How should our governments treat each other? But in terms of like the American people and how we think about folks in China and Chinese culture, how much, how much, how much, how much might we adjust how we think about the Chinese internet, the Chinese public, etc.? You know, it sounds almost kind of like obvious, like too obvious and intuitive, but somehow

it seems to be a lot harder or easier said than done, which is just see China not as a monolith. Like, don't see it as this like two-dimensional mirror onto which people project their kind of fears and envies and desires. like actually, like, don't try to look for an answer to, like, why is China like this? Or like, how do Chinese people think? There are like a billion plus Chinese people, right? It's like any question that you wouldn't ask of America, like, don't ask of China, I think, right? I think, you know, even this idea of like a China watcher or a China book.

Like, you know, what is a China book? very rarely does the publishing industry ask for America book, you know. And so, like, engage in China through, like, watching a film about, like, a specific city and maybe, like, understand that city, right? Actually understand, I think, the people, I mean, through China, actually understand China through its people and individual stories. And I think that's, like, a big reason why I wrote this book and, like, rooted them in stories. because once you kind of foreground a person, you can't flatten the person. Right. You're able to understand the society through, like, all its dimensions, just through the lived

experience of one individual. And so I would say, like, seek out those kind of individual narratives and experiences, and they will teach so much more than, like, a RAND policy paper on how, like, Chinese actual works. That's a wonderful, a wonderful call to action. And it makes me wonder why we have so much trouble doing that in the United States. Like when I think about, for instance, Chinese artists who I can, you know, know, the name of, I think of like, you know, Wang Kar Wai films, right, which are often said a very specific,

you know, I understand more about Hong Kong as a city because of those films. I understand more about like the specificity of them, right, of his lived experience, the world he's trying to evoke, et cetera. I can picture like the decades, right, that he was portraying in this particular. city. And I'm like, wait, I can't do that for most of the rest of the country. There's like very rare that's something that specific has bubbled up. And why is that, do you think? Yeah, I think it's so big. It's so far. It's so inaccessible. You know, I think we were

chipping away at this when we were in the kind of like honeymoon period of the U.S.-China engagement where tons of people like American students and American visitors were flying to China. like we're chipping away against that that monolithic narrative. But it's very hard to like really understand and access a place that you don't visit and where the culture and the information is just not flowing out. China hasn't done itself well by like kicking out a bunch of U.S. journalists, right? And like blocking information from coming in and coming out. So it's like both, it's like a huge fault of China for kind of walling itself off in that way,

but also a huge fault of people for not being curious and wanting to it. to learn more about this place that's far and big. There has been a sort of surge in interest among young people in America about China. There's, it's just a meme from the last year or so, but people on the internet, right? I'm going through a very Chinese time in my life right now, I believe, is the phrase that along those lines. There's, you know, recent, you know, U.S. streamers going to China and talking about their experiences in often a very laudatory way, right? what do you what do you make of that i'm really torn to be honest i think like um the the benefit and the plus side and why i i think this could in some ways is a good phenomenon is at least

it's rooted in some curiosity right like anything that will get people to go to a country and see a place and experience it in this embodied way i'm all for it right anything that that is rooted in a desire for understanding i think where i feel torn is that glorifying a place is no different from demonizing it, right? It still comes from this like two-dimensional lens, a wish to kind of project American fears and envies onto China. And I think one thing that I'm noticing with a lot of like the streamers going to China, like even Hassan Piker going to China, like Isha speak going to China,

a lot of it is kind of rooted in like dissatisfaction with American dysfunction. Yeah. And so, like, when you're seeing these kind of, like, TikTok feeds with, like, what's called infrastructure porn, you know, essentially just like high speed rail, high speed rail, like, Chongqing bridge, you know, drones flying in the sky. I think a lot of it is like a kind of new form of techno-orientism where it's like, well, and also like, you know, where's our high-speed rail? Like, why can't we build this, right? And it's, it could end up being quite superficial. And so that's why I'm torn. I'm hoping that this engagement allows for something deeper. Yeah, I mean, I'm torn too because, yes, it's a techno-orientalism. But also, that happens when anybody from any culture goes to any country, right? You could make fun of the American college student who goes to France for a semester abroad and comes back and says, oh, they're so cultured there or whatever, right?

Like this is, this is just part of what it is to be a person who grows up at one culture and goes to another. And it is the first step of understanding that culture, right, is to go and have your first impression, which is going to be too reductive, right? Because it was your first impression. But then you need to have a second and a third and a fourth. I think you're right that the barrier with China is just bigger, right? It's just as an American tourist, it's easier for me to go to Europe than to China because there's more character. I recognize, not even just the language, like there's letters I recognize. There's more, there's more in common, right? And it takes an extra effort, I think, with China than, than other

places. I'm curious if as a final sort of call to action for our listeners, do you have any suggestions of places that people started? Are there any cultural artifacts or stories or films or books or music that you think, you know, might be like a particularly interesting, like, in point for people if they really want to complicate their understanding of China and get something really specific and interesting to sink their teeth into as a sort of breadcrumb to a to a fuller understanding. Yeah. I guess, like, one thing that has really seemed to resonate with a lot of global readers and watchers that has come out of China as, Chinese science fiction.

Just because China is in some ways, like, just even ahead of the rest of the world and, like, living out what a technological future it could look like. And I would say, if when engaging with Chinese science fiction, don't just read the three-body problem. Right. I did read the three-body problem. And you always strange to me about that book was I was reading that book going, I'm, I, there's something specific about.

China that I am not picking up from this book and that I felt like a lot of the conversation in the United States didn't even try to pick up. I was like there's there's something there's some deeper thing that I'm trying to understand here. Where else should people read to get an even fuller understanding? So with science fiction I would say like Ken Liu who is a Chinese American translator has this anthology called invisible planets and he has translated a bunch of Chinese science fiction stories from a range of different authors. And so like I would say get a taste of those short stories see which style resonates because it's really wide range and then delve into their novels and the rest of their stories. Just because I profile him in my book, I highly

recommend Chen Tzu-O-Fan or Stanley Chen, who's written many novels and short stories that are very different from the three-body problem and very good. And so, yeah, I would start with that anthology. That's a wonderful recommendation. I will check it out. And I can't thank you. enough for coming on the show. It's been really wonderful talking to you. It's been wonderful talking to you too. Thanks so much. Thank you.

Well, thank you again to Ye Ling Lu for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of our fantastic new book, The Wall Dancers, head to our special bookshop at factuallypod.com. Just a reminder, every book you buy their supports, not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you'd like to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conno for five bucks a month. gets you every episode of the show ad-free for $15 a month.

I'll read your damn name in the credits. This week I want to thank Christina Quaranta, Sarar, Troy Stifler, Fakriton, Ibrahimov, Uri Lohenthal, Adam P, Aros Harmon, and Kalan. Thank you so much to all you for supporting the show. If you want to join them, once again, that URL, patreon.com, slash Adam Kanover. I want to thank my producer, Sam Radman and Tony Wilson, my engineer, Sam Rogic, everybody here in a headgun for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening.

We'll see you next time on Faction. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown. And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast, That Was Us, now on HeadGum. Each episode, we're going to go into a deep dive from our show, This Is Us. That's right.

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