China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping faces a host of immediate challenges: an economy slowing amid a property market slump and US tariffs; an ageing population; social stresses spiralling into acts of random violence; contentious borderlands alienated by top-down state repression.
And yet the president still finds time and energy to expound, at length, on grand abstractions about identity. He has annunciated, in dozens of speeches, his definition of a Chinese nation and civilisation that has existed, unchanged, across thousands of years. Xi, it seems, sees his fundamental task as freeze-framing, and asserting Communist party control over, what it is to be Chinese.
In Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, Emily Feng thankfully provides some contrast to Xi’s promulgation of a homogeneity that denies the existence of conflict or pluralism. With her book of deftly curated, memorably manifold portraits of lawyers, financiers, Uyghurs, Mongolians, slackers, trafficked women and protesters, she provides an essential, timely reminder of China’s vast, restless, contentious diversity.
Ten years of Xi have eroded much of the more plural society that emerged between the 1980s and 2000s. A series of post-Mao leaders — Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao — believed staunchly in party leadership of the political system, but pulled back from Mao’s earlier micromanagement of social, cultural and economic life. Instead there was a florescence in the arts; a grudging tolerance of civil society, including of non-state lawyers and journalists willing to challenge party domination of public life; a degree of linguistic autonomy on China’s ethnically diverse frontiers; above all, an explosion of private entrepreneurship.
Travelling across China as a correspondent for NPR between 2016 and 2023, Feng encountered the tail-end of the post-Mao thaw. She met writers, activists, entrepreneurs, miners, believers; she listened to the many different languages spoken across the country. She relished first-hand the pragmatic pluralism of Chinese society, but simultaneously perceived that “the diversity I cherished was seen as a liability under Xi Jinping”. Her resulting story is both a swansong for a vanishing world, and a moving account of the pressures and persecutions faced by those whom Xi has identified as threats to his unitary vision for China.
She begins with the weiquan — “rights defending” — lawyers whose existence had been enabled by post-Mao liberalisation, until state dragnets starting in 2015 arrested them in their hundreds. We meet Yang Bin, a government prosecutor who reinvented herself as a human rights lawyer; by the early 2020s, harassment and stress had driven her into semi-retirement on an island off the south China coast.
We enter the collapsing world of “shadow banking”, via the story of Wang Yongming, a long-distance lorry-driver turned investor, who was arrested in 2016 for alleged underworld connections. Through the 1990s and 2000s, risk-taking private financiers such as Wang made possible a countrywide manufacturing and real estate boom. During the era of Xi Jinping, their wealth and dynamism came to seem a direct menace to party power.
Some of the most desperate stories come from the frontiers: from families torn apart by the state’s suppression of ethnic minorities. The wife of Abdullatif (a Uyghur import-export businessman) was condemned to 20 years in prison merely for possessing a photograph of the Turkish president — supposedly proof of her involvement with the overseas dissident diaspora.
Feng’s many subjects are all memorably characterised. She introduces Adiya, an IT whizz who took up the fight for Mongolian cultural self-determination; Uyghurs co-opted into the security system that has imposed a punitive cage of surveillance over Xinjiang; Kenny, the Hong Kong civil engineer radicalised into dissidence by witnessing police brutality.
The book has an eye for luminous detail. While describing the fragility of China’s economic miracle, Feng takes us to a boomtown that had grown rich, at vertiginous speed, on bauxite deposits, and into the offices of a mining scion arrested during the state’s shakedown of entrepreneurs. The walls were “buckling inward because tunnelling from other mining companies nearby had collapsed the ground underneath us”.
This is in many ways a depressing story: of ordinary, hardworking people derailed and sometimes crushed by a paranoid, unpredictable state. As a foreign journalist of east Asian heritage, while in China Feng was herself often harassed. State and social media attacked her as a “race traitor” for striving to report on the complexities, hardships and sometimes tragedies of life in Xi’s China. But her energy, curiosity and sympathy prevent the book from lapsing into despondency. Let Only Red Flowers Bloom chronicles not only a crackdown, but also the resourceful resilience of those caught up in it.
Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China by Emily Feng Random House £24/Crown $29, 304 pages
Julia Lovell is the author of ‘Maoism: A Global History’
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