As one of the world’s most robust and comprehensive content regulation and censorship regimes, Chinese cyberspace has come to develop its own suite of digital amenities. Cordoned off by the Chinese Communist Party from the global internet codified by Google, Meta, and Amazon, the Chinese public relies on the superapp WeChat, the microblogging platform Weibo, the consumer encyclopedia RedNote, and the social networking site Douban—the bedrock of contemporary Chinese social life that serves more than twice as many users as there are people in the United States. Despite the administration’s ubiquitous controls on freedom of speech and limited visible forms of civic participation, the wildcat nature of the internet has provided a forum where coded speech could evade censors, segmented content like science fiction, livestreaming, and dating apps could bloom into multibillion-dollar industries, and marginalized causes could find affinities with strangers—a public. Those who managed to optimize such social infrastructures or find tactics to survive within an arbitrary system found their way to either market success, political hope, or both.