An indelible, deeply reported human narrative of contemporary China in which the country’s carefully controlled internet offers a lens into the broader national tension between freedom and control

In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power of the internet as a space of unprecedented connection and opportunity, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship that became known as the Great Firewall. The online world that sprouted up behind the firewall was no less vibrant for being controlled, and in the years that followed China incubated a booming tech culture and a digital public square.

But today, as the country’s leadership has tightened the reins on public discourse and western headlines reduce the Chinese populace to a faceless monolith, journalist Yi-Ling Liu argues, China’s singular online ecosystem may well be the most direct lens we have into the on-the-ground reality of life there. In tracing the evolution of the Chinese internet—from its lexicon to its memes to the precise nature of its censorship—Liu equips listeners with a critical tool to assess the past, present, and future of a global power.

Far-reaching in its scope and meticulously reported, Dancing in Shackles spans the last three decades in China, a period that encapsulates the country’s transformation into both the world’s largest online userbase and one of its most dominant authoritarian states—from 1995, when ordinary Chinese people first logged onto the internet, swept up by its emancipatory promise, to the present day, as China polices its physical and virtual borders with unprecedented intensity. Drawing on years of intimate reporting, Liu weaves together the stories of individual citizens striving for freedom and community within state boundaries. As Liu’s subjects experience firsthand the internet’s power as a tool of both state control and individual liberation, they grapple with universal questions of success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith and survival.

Dancing in Shackles is at once an unforgettable work of human storytelling and a vital window into a global power that we simplify and misunderstand at our peril.