Not only did Ma land an official partnership with Beijing’s CDC, the agency later invited him to the 2012 conference where he unexpectedly connected with Li and told the political leader to his face that he ran a website for gay people. Li, widely seen as one of the more liberal members of China’s ruling elite, reacted positively. That single political endorsement helped Blued convince investors that the app wasn’t at risk of being shut down, Liu said.
The Empire Strikes Back
What makes dancing on China’s Great Firewall so difficult is that the ground below is inherently unstable: Content permitted today can suddenly be banned tomorrow.
We broke the news in November that Blued, as well as another gay dating app controlled by the same company, had been removed from all mobile app stores in China based on a request from the country’s cyberspace administrator. Months later, they still haven’t come back. What many people initially hoped was a temporary isolated decision is now looking more in line with a broader crackdown on queer spaces in China. And the longer the platform remains unavailable, the less likely it is that Blued will ever return in a form recognizable to its users.
Blued’s fate reflects that of many tech companies in China. In her book, Liu reported that Ma Baoli’s number one entrepreneur idol was Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. Liu even shadowed Ma Baoli when he attended Hupan University, the highly-selective two-year entrepreneur training camp that Jack Ma hosted from 2015 to 2021. At the time, Ma Baoli probably could have never anticipated that his idol would soon become the target of one of the most sweeping regulatory crackdowns in recent Chinese history. No matter how rich or powerful you are, in China you need to learn to dance gracefully. One misstep could cost you everything.
But for skillful dancers like Jack and Baoli, failure is only a temporary setback. Jack Ma is now reportedly back to managing Alibaba’s daily affairs as it navigates the highly consequential AI era. Ma Baoli, who was asked to resign from Blued’s parent company after its disappointing stock market performance and subsequent acquisition, is working on a new social media startup. According to the company’s public WeChat account, it has already completed two rounds of fundraising.
The Other Dancers
Liu’s book profiles several other dancers, including a former social media content moderator who quit after he could no longer bear the moral weight of conducting censorship; a feminist activist terrified of returning to China after watching her peers get arrested one by one; a former Google employee disillusioned with the tech industry who became a sci-fi novelist; and a rapper who kept making music that was political, even though it meant turning down opportunities to become a mainstream star.
For the majority of the people in this group, it has become harder to keep dancing in recent years. Beijing has long swung between tightly controlling the internet and permitting relative freedom. But in recent years, there’s no doubt that the country has been going through a tightening period. As a result, some of Liu’s dancers have left China, while others have retreated from the spotlight.
