On a cold Valentine’s Day in 2012, three women walked down a Beijing shopping street in white wedding dresses smeared with red to look like blood. (It was lipstick.) They had bruises on their faces, as if they’d been beaten. (It was dark-blue eye shadow.) They chanted, “Yes to love, no to violence.” Photos of the protest spread instantly across the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo.

The “bloody brides” were the invention of Lü Pin, founder of Feminist Voices, a digital magazine that had grown into a viral Weibo hub for young women unwilling to stay quiet. Activists called 2012 “Year One of the Chinese feminist movement.” Women shaved their heads to protest higher-education quotas that favored men, rode the subway with placards denouncing gropers, and Li Maizi’s “Occupy the Men’s Bathroom,” demanding more women’s stalls, trended on Weibo.

These actions produced real legal and policy shifts. The Ministry of Education discontinued discriminatory college quotas, and a Beijing court for the first time issued a domestic violence protection order, ruling in favor of a U.S. citizen who sued her Chinese husband, a millionaire celebrity English teacher. China passed its first national anti–domestic violence law, and new buildings were required to add more women’s bathrooms.

What made this surge of activism possible was Weibo. Launched in 2009, it quickly became the nervous system of China’s civic sphere. Before Weibo, feminist organizers could hand out newsletters or hold a small meeting but never get on state TV; afterward, they could turn a street protest into a nationwide conversation. A clever slogan or striking image could trend for weeks.

Weibo marked the moment when young Chinese women discovered that even the most heavily restricted internet in the world contained a crack large enough to push a movement through. In May 2009, a spa worker was cornered by two local cadres demanding “special services.” One slapped her with a wad of cash and shoved her onto a sofa, where she stabbed him in the neck, killing him. Police detained her on suspicion of murder, but the case exploded on social media, and prosecutors had to drop the murder charge, conceding she had acted in self-defense. In October 2010, a drunk driver who had killed a student tried to flee from the police as he shouted, “My father is Li Gang!”—a local security official. The phrase went viral at the start of what came to be known as the “Weibo Spring,” when “Big V” accounts—bloggers with a large following who were “verified”—turned scandals like these into national dramas.

This rise of the mobile web in China in the 2010s produced a flowering of digital creativity even as suppression intensified—a tension at the heart of Yi-Ling Liu’s eye-opening book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Writing as someone who grew up alongside this digital universe, Liu reveals how censorship does not simply extinguish voices, but reshapes them—training a generation to speak sideways, turning repression into a culture of coded speech, creative improvisation, and stubborn survival.

It might be hard to build a book around online life, but Liu—who grew up in Hong Kong, lived in Beijing, and even interned at the state-run China Daily (as I once did) before writing for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—follows a group of effervescent netizens (Lü Pin, Li Maizi, and others, including herself) who more than carry it. Take the episode of Li’s “Occupy the Men’s Bathroom” protest: The day after, two police officers picked her up. But to her astonishment, they didn’t arrest her. Instead, they treated her to a feast at a fancy restaurant, though they did tell her to stop protesting and posting on Weibo. The incident perfectly captures the odd, shifting political culture of the era, and in tracing such encounters Liu shows how social media became the space for her generation to work out the politics and passions of their everyday lives. To understand the Chinese people, understand what they’re doing online, she proposes. What emerges is a portrait of nonconformists who, by feeling out the walls the regime has built, turn that maneuvering into a kind of limited freedom. They do not escape the system; they improvise within it. They dance.

Western observers have long swung between two caricatures of China—booming economic miracle or iron police state—and then demanded to know which is “real.” Cultural historian Ian Buruma tried to look past that binary. In his 2001 book, Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels From Los Angeles to Beijing, he traveled through the Chinese-speaking world to portray a scattered cohort of mavericks pushed to the margins yet still feeling out the system’s blurred edges: disillusioned activists, political prisoners-turned-businesspeople, human rights lawyers, Christian sect leaders and followers, and online critics. By tracing this unruly mix, Buruma punctured the myths of Chinese sameness and pointed to a messy underground current.

An early online dissenter was Liu Xiaobo, who had been released from a labor camp two years earlier, in 1999. He recognized quickly........

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