Dancing in Shackles | Los Angeles Review of Books

I REMEMBER THE DAY Facebook was blocked in China. I had been living there for nearly a year when, one morning in the summer of 2009, I received an error message. It was not entirely surprising; censorship of foreign websites had been slowly increasing over the past year. But it felt particularly dispiriting. Facebook was the primary way I kept in touch with my family and friends back in the United States and connected with a variety of communities around the world. It also made me fearful. Drawing on narratives that had long shadowed the way I understood my surroundings, the blocking of Facebook confirmed a foundational belief I held in 2009: that there was a fundamentally free internet where information and communication flowed with few constraints and an unfree internet that served as a tool of state oppression. The sense of China as one of these “unfree” spaces became palpable as, a few weeks later, I crossed the border into Hong Kong and, aboard the Kowloon–Canton Railway (now the East Rail Line), loaded Facebook once again. It felt as though I had crossed a digital as well as a physical border, from the unfree to the free.

Today, such a view seems at best naive. It is now common knowledge that what those of us living with the so-called “free” internet see online is carefully curated by large corporations—entities that seek control in less visible but similarly profound ways. Meanwhile, the capacity of corporations and states alike to surveil our every swipe and keystroke seems as complete in “free” spaces as it is in those deemed unfree. Certainly, some nations guarantee more individual privacy protections and broader access to information than others. But the contrast today feels less like a black-and-white dichotomy than like a range of shades of gray. As more has been revealed about the ways that our internet, and by extension ourselves, is controlled by powerful institutions, public discourse has taken on a dark cynicism: the digital spaces where we found connection, expression, and the possibility of subversion are not nearly as free as we once imagined, if they ever were that free at all.

As we grapple with this reality, many of us who study places long characterized as unfree have begun to see resonances between the internet in those spaces and the internet where we live. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and it became increasingly clear it would no longer be a space where critics of right-wing politics could easily or safely connect, tweets from social media users in China—now inaccessible—offered an empathetic, if not dismal, message: from those of us in China accustomed to the rapid disappearance of digital communities because a handful of powerful people made the decision to destroy them, we understand your pain.

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Two recently published books on China and North Korea both support the hollowness of the free/unfree dichotomy. While people like me often focus on the more oppressive parallels, these authors instead emphasize that the so-called “unfree” internet has, like its freer counterpart, also always had space for grassroots community building, innovation, and subversive self-expression. The first book, an ethnography written by Suk-Young Kim, an interdisciplinary scholar of Korean cultural history, traces the evolving relationship North Korean millennials have with cell phones and other visual media technologies. The second, written by journalist Yi-Ling Liu, looks at how the ever-changing Chinese censorship apparatus has impacted the lives of young Chinese people who have found both freedom and constraint on the web.

To be clear, neither book seeks to sanitize. Both are frank about the mechanisms of state control that constrain expression and support state violence. But the fact remains that even as potential levers of control become more sophisticated, and even as the state’s desire to control becomes more absolute, the web is still a tool for expression and connection. As a result, these books do not simply shine a light on the creativity unfolding in spaces where popular Anglophone discourse has assumed such creativity is impossible; they also ask us to stop bluntly measuring levels of purported freedom and instead consider the complex dance between new methods of control and new techniques of resistance.

In The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet (2026), Liu adapts the title of a Chinese indie rock song into a powerful metaphor to describe what this kind of expression looks like: “dancing in shackles.” Her book traces five remarkable “dancers” behind China’s Great Firewall: a formerly closeted police officer turned openly gay tech mogul, a journalist turned feminist activist, an increasingly disillusioned internet censor, a science fiction writer, and a hip-hop artist. Each one is a creator, and for all of them, it was the internet that made their work possible. Yet each pursued this work while navigating a tumultuous and shifting landscape of state control, evolving along with it. “To live in China is to participate in a dance,” Liu writes. “Censor and censored tango to an erratic rhythm of subversion and acquiescence.”

It is easy to presume that this tango is driven by technological innovation—that as new technologies allow people to bypass censorship, the government responds with tools of its own. But by weaving personal stories of people coming into their own identities with broader national stories about internet governance, these books show us that the true loci of change are governments turning increasingly intolerant of diverse modes of expression and bolder in their desire to control them. There was no technological innovation that preceded the decision to crack down on the Feminist Voices social media account, no new app that compelled the sudden requirement that participants on the competition show The Rap of China (2017– ) include patriotic themes in their lyrics. These were sociopolitical choices that reflected a growing authoritarian desire to homogenize and control self-expression. And while local and global grassroots protest movements proved how social media could support mass unrest, the Chinese government’s response to these global and domestic movements was nonetheless a bureaucratic, not technological, development: the creation of a centralized Cyberspace Administration of China, which fundamentally reshaped the capabilities of the Chinese government’s control over social media hubs, among other sites.

As Liu traces these choices, another convergence emerges: tactics to control expression on the internet in the supposed unfree spaces are becoming common in supposed free places. She discusses the tactic of “flooding”—the drowning-out of unwanted topics by a fire hose of other content—noting that it is also a popular strategy of the Donald Trump administration. President Trump’s agents use flooding to bury news they would rather not have capture public attention. Liu also discusses the “speech tax,” or a requirement of literal lip service to the powerful in order to be heard; the discussion immediately evokes recent performances of people and institutions showering praise on Trump for the privilege of simply continuing their work. And these convergences are not limited to political leaders. Liu compares the subtle and overt ways that censorship impacted her job while working at the People’s Daily—a state newspaper where top-down censorship is expected—to the pressures she felt working at the Associated Press, where censorship takes the form of an amorphous demand to tell stories about China that accord with perceptions of the country held by foreign audiences. These parallels between China and the United States are so numerous that people in China are starting to take notice. As Liu writes, hip-hop artist Kafe Hu, a PRC critic who once saw the United States as the “pinnacle of freedom and individuality,” began to reconsider his admiration after the election of Trump. “When Americans criticize China, I don’t trust what they say anymore. I’m, like, your government is pretty shit, too.”

While Liu’s book celebrates her wall dancers, her narrative trajectory is nonetheless one of increased tightening, control, and oppression. There was no single unified moment that she could point to where her informants all suddenly felt cut off. It was, rather, a story of death by a thousand cuts. A new executive order on gender expression. A new NGO law. A train crash in 2011 that sparked a wave of online outrage and threatened to mobilize civil society. Slowly but surely, each dancer found their space to dance narrowing. Yet what remained unchanged was that they danced on. It is an inclination that she sees not only in her subjects but also in herself, a teller of stories about people in China: “I’d rather dance in shackles than not dance at all.”

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North Korea seems, at least in Kim’s book, Millennial North Korea: Forbidden Media and Living Creatively with Surveillance (2024), to offer less evidence of the convergence between the free and unfree than China does in Liu’s. This is, in part, because North Korea controls not merely the internet but access to cell phones too. Smartphones, which became widespread in 2016, are sold only with a few apps, and everything users do is monitored through the phone itself. Even the tardiness with which smartphones were introduced shows a level of control unseen elsewhere. North Korea’s late adoption of cellular phones was the result of a jarring story in which phones were broadly confiscated from ordinary users following a thwarted attempt on Kim Jong-il’s life in 2004, a ban that was lifted four years later.

This level of control, of course, does not mean North Koreans limit their phone activities to state-approved uses. Acts of circumvention are common, and it is these acts that sit at the center of Kim’s ethnographic analysis. After the book’s first half offers a wide view of technological and cultural change in 21st-century North Korea, its second half examines the kinds of forbidden media North Koreans consume, how they consume it, and how it helps them create meaning. Her exploration shows glimpses of astounding creativity. Importers find ways to hide media on SD cards and USBs in tires they float across the water. Wedding videographers write layered dramatic scripts for their films that move beyond the clichéd tropes common to the genre. And North Korean viewers of popular South Korean films like Parasite (2019) and dramas such as Crash Landing on You (2019–20) use these stories to situate their lived experience within a more global cultural framework. The result, Kim shows, is that forbidden media has become central to how young North Koreans craft their own images of themselves and their country.

Throughout Kim’s book, she consistently challenges her audience to rethink common presumptions about freedom and suppression. Typically, access to technology and its ostensible related freedoms is nodal, with the center having more connectivity and freedom than the periphery. But in North Korea, the phones offering the largest array of content are the ones that can connect to Chinese cell towers, which only exist in Chinese border towns. Not only does this challenge the idea of center and periphery—being closer to the center (Pyongyang in this instance) actually limits connectivity and, relatedly, freedom—it also shows that all freedom is relative and that in North Korea, China represents a kind of freedom to connect, learn, and communicate that is unavailable domestically.

Kim offers another challenge to those who may be quick to equate consumption of foreign content with freedom. While it is certainly true that North Koreans actively seek out South Korean dramas, the result of consuming this media is not solely subversion of the state in pursuit of lofty ideals. Instead, South Korean media acts as a kind of currency that can both subvert and reinforce existing hierarchies. Some of this is purely financial. It takes capital, connections, and luck to access smartphones at all, let alone censored media, all of which creates a black market that runs on money. Then there are the less tangible currencies. Young people who can access foreign media often speak to one another using references to those shows or movies, making those references into what Kim calls an “anti-language” or cryptolect, an “ever-changing code that dodges any standardized meaning.” Such a cryptolect can be a source of creative circumvention of the North Korean censorship regime—not unlike the use of sly homophones or references used in China to evade censors—but it also marks its users as part of an in-group, a microsociety whose value lies in its exclusivity. Once access becomes tied to money and connections, the entire conceit of freedom becomes significantly more complicated.

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I write this review about technology and power amid an AI revolution. The speed at which large language models (LLMs) have been woven into our everyday lives is head-spinning. Early, cautious optimism about the technology’s possibilities has, at least in higher education, quickly soured into feelings of powerlessness. We watch as the skills and talents we hold dear are being automated, spitting out nothing more than a hollow shell of what we took such care in creating.

In her recent book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (2025), Karen Hao compares the rise of these AI-powered LLMs to early 20th-century imperialism. Like Western colonists, AI companies have “seized and extracted resources that were not their own,” “exploited the labor of the people they subjugated,” and “projected racist, dehumanizing ideas of their own superiority and modernity to justify—and even entice the conquered into accepting—the invasion of sovereignty, the theft, and the subjugation.” In Hao’s account, the distinction between free and unfree spaces is drawn not so much along national borders as according to levels of imperial encroachment. In her view, the root of digital transformation today is tech empires’ exploitation of natural resources, human capital, and consumers: it is to those realities that we should look to understand the internet’s possible futures.

Hao’s book is a warning, but not against technological advancement as such. It instead warns of what happens when a few powerful people create harm and the rest of us acquiesce. Technology doesn’t control or enslave us; it creates new conditions for choice. Hao’s book is thus not a cry of despair but a call to arms—we arrived here through human choices, and we can alter this trajectory through different ones.

Both Liu’s and Kim’s books were published before either could grapple with how the emerging empire of AI might reshape the trajectories they trace. Yet just as Hao makes appeals to human agency, both Liu and Kim offer messages of hope and empowerment. The futures intimated in their books are not necessarily those in which the people entirely vanquish the shackles that keep them from a global web of connection and expression. Nonetheless, as both authors trace the dialectical relationship between state and people, surveillance and freedom, bottom-up and top-down control, they stress that sometimes, temporarily and unevenly, that balance can tilt toward people.

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Featured image: Cover art from Millennial North Korea: Forbidden Media and Living Creatively with Surveillance, 2024: Success at Work by Hong Geun Chan and Kang Yong Min, Koryo Studio.