Let's play a game of two truths and a lie. Of the three following statements, which one would you guess is made up?
China was once home to the world's largest gay dating app with more users than Grindr, and it later went public on Nasdaq.
The app's founder was a Chinese police officer who didn't come out at work until after he had been running an online forum for gay men for a decade.
The founder shook hands with Li Keqiang four months before he became China's Premier. During the public photo op, Li thanked the founder for his work.
OK, I cheated a little. If you guessed all of them are true, then you were correct. The app in question is Blued, and the founder is Ma Baoli. The entrepreneur's story is so astonishing and multifaceted that it's hard to fit it into any simplified theory about how the Chinese internet works. But that's also part of what makes it so great to tell.
Ma is featured prominently in veteran journalist Yi-Ling Liu's new book The Wall Dancers, which explores the eternal tension between control and freedom on the Chinese internet. I spoke with Liu earlier this week at an event in New York City's Chinatown. The cozy Asian-American bookstore hosting us was stuffed to the brim, and there wasn't even standing room left.
Liu's book, she explained to me, is about people who have constantly had to navigate the shifting boundaries of what's allowed and not allowed on the Chinese internet. “It meant living in a society where a gay dating app could go viral one year and then get shut down the next, or hip hop music could become super popular one month and then get shut down the next,” she said. The title of the book comes from the idiom “to dance with shackles,” which Chinese journalists have long used to express how they try to preserve their journalistic integrity under stringent censorship. It's shorthand for the intricate game Chinese people are forced to play in order to understand, and ultimately figure out how to resist, government control of the online world.
Handshake With the Premier
Ma Baoli and Blued are the perfect example of this delicate dance. In China, where homosexuality wasn't decriminalized until 1997, a gay dating app born out of an even longer-surviving gay online forum sounds like something that would have been censored immediately. But because he spent years working within the government system himself, Ma was able to become one of China's most skillful “dancers,” zeroing in on the thin overlap between what the state wanted and what his user base wanted.
Liu and I talked in depth about one famous anecdote about Ma. In 2012, when Li Keqiang was China's executive vice premier, he met with Ma and the pair took photos smiling and shaking hands. Ma repeatedly pointed to the meeting as evidence that Blued was not a platform for social outcasts, but one that deserved political recognition and financial investment.
Blued's story began with Ma's efforts to establish legitimacy in a society where LGBTQ+ issues remain politically sensitive. “He literally called up the Center of Disease Control when he arrived in Beijing,” Liu explained. “He was like: ‘Look, I've got connections to the largest queer community of men who have sex with men; you're trying to reach out to this community to raise awareness. Let's have a collaboration and a partnership.'”