Let only red flowers bloom : identity and belonging in Xi Jinping's China

Let only red flowers bloom Identity and belonging in Xi Jinping's China

Emily Feng

Book - 2025

"In the hot summer months of 2021, China celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. Authorities held propaganda and education campaigns across the country defining the ideal Chinese citizen: ethnically Han Chinese, Mandarin speaking, solidly atheist, and devoted to the socialist project of strengthening China against western powers. No one can understand modern China-including its response to the pandemic-without understanding who actually lives there, and the ways that the Chinese State tries to control its people. Let Only Red Flowers Bloom collects the stories of more than two dozen people who together represent a more holistic picture of Chinese identity. The Uyghurs who have seen millions of their fel...low citizens detained in camps; mainland human rights lawyer Ren Quanniu, who lost his law license in a bureaucratic dispute after representing a Hong Kong activist; a teacher from Inner Mongolia, forced to escape persecution because of his support of his mother tongue. These are just a few narratives that journalist Emily Feng reports on, revealing human stories about resistance against a hegemonic state and introducing readers to the people who know about Chinese identity the best. Illuminating a country that has for too long been secretive of the real lives its citizens are living, Feng reveals what it's really like to be anything other than party-supporting Han Chinese in China, and the myriad ways they're trying to survive in the face of an oppressive regime"--

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Subjects
Xi, Jinping.
National characteristics, Chinese.
Chinese > Ethnic identity.
Chinois.
Chinois > Identité ethnique.
China > Ethnic relations.
China > Social conditions > 2000-
China > Politics and government > 2002-
Chine > Conditions sociales > 2000-
Published
New York : Crown [2025]
Language
English
Main Author
Emily Feng (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
pages cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9780593594223
  • The prosecutor
  • The businessman
  • The scooter thief
  • The chained woman
  • The detained
  • The believer
  • The model minority
  • The bookseller
  • The protestor
  • The fugitive
  • The asylum seeker
  • The diaspora.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An inside look at Xi Jinping's China through the eyes of its discontents and dissidents. American journalist Feng traveled widely through China until being expelled in 2022; she now works from Taiwan. As she writes at the opening, "This is a book about identity, how the state controls expressions of identity, and who gets to be considered Chinese." Whereas Mao Zedong sought a big-tent sort of nation, officially recognizing 55 ethnic groups, Feng writes that current leader Xi Jinping considers only Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese to be real Chinese--and heterosexual ones, too, and loyal to his version of the Communist Party. One pointed example from her travels is a member of the Hui minority, who, notes Feng, are "visually indistinguishable from Han Chinese" and speak Mandarin; the difference is that many Hui are Muslim, and Xi considers Muslims to be enemies of the state, a view reinforced by a loyalist social scientist who champions fighting against "religious fundamentalism eroding Chinese secular mainstream culture." Treated even worse are visibly non-Chinese minorities such as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs, who live under "grid policing," a system of intense law enforcement scrutiny backed by numerous neighborhood informants. In this closely observed book, Feng profiles a civil rights attorney who has braved imprisonment for "subverting state power," entrepreneurs once encouraged by the Chinese government to grow wealthy in a booming economy but now targeted as antithetical to the state's ideology, and members of the Chinese diaspora in communities around the world, including the U.S., where Chinese students, fearful of government reprisal, actively censor critics of Xi and his policies. Those policies, Feng fears, are intended to produce a monolithic authoritarian state, a direction, many fear, that the U.S. will also take. Essential reading for anyone interested in geopolitics--or the world of the near future. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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