Eye-opening ... 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.
Liu excels at the magazine-style profile, engagingly dramatizing the experiences and interior lives of her subjects ... While packaging the book in chapters that alternate between individuals, the resulting narrative is more than a sum of its parts.
The Wall Dancers is more than just a series of biographies. Liu weaves these personal narratives into the broader background of intensifying authoritarianism and censorship, demonstrating the impact of seemingly abstract political shifts on real individuals’ lives ... Such compelling reading because it provides deeply intimate portrayals of this universal yearning and the creativity of the human spirit in the face of repression.
This incisive, empathetic debut study from journalist Liu examines three decades of the internet’s evolution in China ... It amounts to a vital and subversive window into a cloistered but sprawling online world.
