Zeyi Yang starts with “two truths and a lie” about a Chinese gay dating app, but he’s lying. All three statements are true (Wired, February 5, 2026):
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.
The app is Blued, its creator is Ma Baoli (shown above), and he is “featured prominently…in Ling Liu’s new book The Wall Dancers, which explores the eternal tension between control and freedom on the Chinese internet.”
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….
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….
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.
The forbearance lasted quite a while. In 2021, Ma was telling Time magazine that “Today, gay people live in a much better social environment—there’s a dramatic change. A lot of the young generation are quite happy with where they are and comfortable with their identity.”
Time, comfortable deploying such a grotesque adjective as “cis-gendered,” seemed to think that one of the worst aspects of the Chinese government’s conflicted views and actions with respect to homosexuality was its stress on “nuclear family values.”
Unstable ground
But by November 2025, Wired was reporting in a piece coauthored by Zeyi Yang that Apple had pulled Blued and Finka, China’s top gay dating apps, in obedience to a government order. (Apple seems to always obey the Chinese government’s censorship orders, explaining that “We comply with local laws” or something.)
“What makes dancing on China’s Great Firewall so difficult is that the ground below is inherently unstable,” says Yang. “Content permitted today can suddenly be banned tomorrow.”
Also see:
China Daily Africa: “Forum for gays just a click away” (December 1, 2013)
