Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

I have a new review at The Wall Street Journal, discussing a wonderful and very engaging book by journalist Yi-Ling Liu, The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. I’ve written a lot over the years about the Chinese Party-state’s imposition of internet controls, so it was a refreshing change to talk about a book that explores the internet as a place of liberation rather than restriction:

Ma Baoli found himself on the internet. It started one night, in 1998, when the young policeman from north China seated himself at a computer in a newly opened web cafe and searched for the word that was buzzing through his mind: “tongxinglian.” Homosexual.

Mr. Ma scrolled through the search results, clicked into a discussion forum called “Chinese Men’s and Boy’s Paradise,” and finally saw that he wasn’t alone in his feelings for other men. The experience, Yi-Ling Liu writes, was “a revelation” for Mr. Ma, “knowing that there were people who shared his secret.” Within two years, Mr. Ma would start his own website, “a sanctuary for gay men to share their hopes and dreams.” In his daily life, he kept his sexuality hidden; online, he built a community where he and others could freely express themselves.

Mr. Ma is one of five people Ms. Liu, a freelance journalist, profiles in “The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet.” 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. READ MORE (gift link)

If you’d like to see more about The Wall Dancers, check out an excerpt at Equator and Afra Wang’s interview with Yi-Ling Liu.

Thanks for joining me this week.

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Andrew Higgins and Joy Dong, “Two Chinese Journalists Are Detained for Reporting on Corruption”

Li Yuan, “‘I’m Free’: A Muslim Official Who Lost Faith in China Gains a Voice”

Nora Zhou, “In Transition: Is Radio in China Tuning Out or Just Reinventing Itself?”

Wanderings Around the World

Anuj Behal, “‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI”

Bill Chappell, “The CIA World Factbook is dead. Here’s how I came to love it”

Ruth Marcus, “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post”

Jennifer Schuessler, “How Trump Brought the Fight Over American History to Philadelphia”

Standout Stories

Since the conflict last summer ended in a stalemate, my friends have been waiting for what they called “chapter two” of the war with Israel. But nobody expected that the next war would emerge from within – exploding with an unexpected ferocity from the discontent that has long simmered beneath the surface of daily life, before being crushed with an even greater ferocity by the state. Two weeks later, the sheer scale of that repression is undeniable, and the future of the Islamic Republic has never looked more uncertain. — Salar Abdoh, “The War Within”

In 1958, when my grandmother moved into her apartment as an 18-year-old newlywed, she and her husband paid 14 Egyptian pounds in rent. Sixty-seven years later, in 2025, she was still paying 14 pounds, currently about 29 cents, for the same apartment: two bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen, a dining room and two living rooms located in the neighborhood of Dokki in the heart of Greater Cairo. — Hannah El-Hitami, “The End of Rent Controls Promises Disruption in Cairo”

Featured photo: My review of The Wall Dancers in the February 7, 2026 print edition of The Wall Street Journal.