文章以1997年6月1日《Wired》报道与1997年香港回归的时间节点为起点：当时中国上网人数约60万（原文600,000），而“Great Firewall of China”逐渐成为对党国治理的代称。Yi-Ling Liu在《The Wall Dancers》（2026年2月3日出版）中将中国互联网描绘为国家控制与社会能动性之间的“推拉”过程：审查者与被审查者在试探、规避与顺从中共同塑造边界，而边界并非由一套明示手册界定，而是通过反复试错被内化。
这种张力在Ma Baoli的轨迹中呈现得最为数字化：1998年他在网吧检索*tongxinglian*后开始建立面向同性恋男性的交友产品；到2016年，Blued拥有约2700万用户（原文27 million）与200名员工（原文200），并在2020年上市。随后监管持续收紧，2021年8月Xi Jinping以“common prosperity”为名整肃科技行业，Jack Ma淡出公共视野；伴随民族主义与保守性别规范强化，Ma Baoli被迫退出公司，Liu所记录的线上线下公共空间亦在其北京与香港经历中显著收缩。
文章将这一历史经验外推至AI竞赛：2025年1月DeepSeek发布R1模型，以成本的一小部分实现与美国领先模型相当的性能，并使用更不先进的芯片，引发市场约1万亿美元冲击（原文$1 trillion）与科技估值“数十亿美元”级回撤。面对芯片出口管制，中国更倾向以开源策略加速扩散并以短期利润换取全球采用，但“开源而受控”的约束同样可见：2023年据报Hugging Face在中国被屏蔽；2月Stanford University与Princeton University论文指向审查导致的政治偏差；2026年3月走红的开源代理OpenClaw又因数据安全在国企与政府机构受限，提示开放的可持续性仍取决于国家优先序。
The article anchors China’s online evolution in the late 1990s: on June 1, 1997, Wired described a rapidly changing China, and around the Hong Kong handover the phrase “Great Firewall of China” began to outlast the story itself. At that time only about 600,000 people in China were online. In Yi-Ling Liu’s book The Wall Dancers (Feb. 3, 2026), the internet is neither fully free nor fully subdued, but a “push and pull” in which red lines are learned through trial and error rather than a fixed list.
That push and pull is quantified in Ma Baoli’s arc. After a 1998 internet-cafe search for tongxinglian, he built a gay-dating service; by 2016 his app Blued had 27 million users and 200 employees, and in 2020 he took the company public. As controls tightened, Xi Jinping’s August 2021 “common prosperity” campaign signaled a broader tech crackdown, with Jack Ma disappearing from view, and ideological pressure including conservative gender norms. Ma Baoli was forced out, while Liu documents a wider contraction of civic space online and offline.
The article argues AI is the new proving ground for how long openness can persist before authority pulls it back. In January 2025, DeepSeek released its R1 model, delivering performance comparable to leading US systems at a fraction of the cost and with less advanced chips, triggering a roughly $1 trillion market reckoning and billions erased from valuations. China’s AI trajectory is unusually open-source, partly to offset chip export controls and to trade short-term profits for global adoption, yet constraints remain visible: China reportedly blocked Hugging Face in 2023; a February paper from Stanford and Princeton linked censorship to political bias; and in March 2026 Beijing restricted the open-source agent OpenClaw at state entities over data-security concerns.