Covering a 30-year span from the 1990s to the present, The Wall Dancers employs the stories of Ms. Liu’s interviewees to show how 'dancing in shackles' is both possible and ever-changing ... However small their online spaces may have to be, they will continue to use the internet to change lives.
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.
