The Economist.
A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through my social feed when something jumped out at me.
I was seeing post after post about Heated Rivalry.
If you missed it, Heated Rivalry is a hit HBO drama
that blew up at the start of this year.
Its storyline, which follows the growing romance between two male hockey players, had female fans in particular gripped.
So I wasn't surprised to see people talking about it.
I was surprised at where I was seeing it though, because I was scrolling through Xiaohongshu, China's Instagram.
That this show had made it onto the Chinese side of the internet
despite the content and despite the fact that HBO doesn't have an official presence in China
as China's vast system of internet censorship is known,
is more porous than many outside observers might assume.
My own online life is proof of that.
Every day I slip back and forth between what feels like two universes,
so that I can talk to my colleagues and friends abroad and read the news more freely,
and then turning it off again so that I can load all the apps I need
to schedule appointments or get a sense of what people in China are talking about.
But for many in the West, the Chinese internet remains walled off.
So today we're going to take you behind the Great Firewall
with the help of Yiling Liu, a journalist and author of The Walled Dancers,