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.’”
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.
I asked Liu whether she views “dancers” moving away from China’s centers of power, like Beijing and Shanghai, as a form of retreat. “I don’t see retreat and dancing as mutually exclusive,” she said. The Chinese state has always glorified working long hours and doing whatever it takes to make it in the country’s competitive education system. Taking yourself out of that environment, she explained, can itself be seen as an act of protest. “I see it as a form of voting with your feet,” Liu told me. “If you can’t vote, at least you can vote with your feet. And it’s not nihilistic. It’s a kind of passive resistance.”
This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
The post The Rise and Fall of the World’s Largest Gay Dating App appeared first on Wired.
