Not only did Ma establish an official partnership with the CDC in Beijing, but the agency later invited him to a conference in 2012, where he unexpectedly connected with Li and told the political leader to his face that he ran a website for gays. Li, widely seen as one of the more liberal members of China’s ruling elite, responded positively. That single political endorsement helped Blued convince investors that the app was not at risk of being shut down, Liu said.
The Empire Strikes Back
What makes dancing on the Great Firewall of China so arduous is that the ground beneath it is inherently unstable: content allowed today could suddenly be banned tomorrow.
In November, we broke the news that Blued, as well as another gay dating app controlled by the same company, had been removed from all mobile app stores in China at the request of the country’s cyberspace administrator. Several months have passed and they still haven’t returned. What many people initially hoped was a fleeting, isolated decision now looks more like a broader attack on queer spaces in China. And the longer the platform is unavailable, the less likely it is that Blued will ever return in a form recognizable to its users.
Blued’s fate mirrors that of many technology companies in China. In her book, Liu reported that entrepreneur Ma Baoli’s biggest idol was Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. Liu even shadowed Ma Baoli while attending Hupan University, a highly selective two-year entrepreneurial training camp that Jack Ma hosted from 2015-2021. At the time, Ma Baoli probably couldn’t have predicted that his idol would soon become the target of one of the most widespread regulatory attacks in China’s recent history. No matter how opulent and powerful you are, in China you must learn to dance gracefully. One mistake can cost you everything.
But for skillful dancers like Jack and Baoli, failure is only a fleeting setback. Jack Ma is here now apparently he’s back to manage Alibaba’s day-to-day affairs as it faces the all-important era of artificial intelligence. Ma Baoli, who was asked to resign from parent company Blued following its disappointing stock market performance and subsequent takeover, is working on a modern social media startup. According to the company’s public WeChat account, the company has already completed two rounds of fundraising.
Other dancers
Liu’s book profiles several other dancers, including a former social media content moderator who left when he could no longer bear the moral burden of censorship; a feminist activist is afraid of returning to China after seeing her peers being arrested one by one; a former Google employee disillusioned with the tech industry who became a science fiction writer; and a rapper who continued to make politically charged music even though it meant giving up the opportunity to become a mainstream star.
Most people in this group have found it increasingly arduous to dance in recent years. Beijing has long vacillated between tightly controlling the Internet and allowing relative freedom. However, in recent years there is no doubt that the country is going through a period of tightening economic policy. As a result, some of Liu’s dancers left China and others withdrew from the spotlight.