In 2023, Emily Feng was one of a slew of reporters expelled from China, as the ruling Communist Party thinned the international press corps in retribution for coverage it deemed unflattering. Feng had started out in China in 2015 at age 22 as a researcher for the New York Times, then went on to write for the Financial Times before becoming an international correspondent for America’s National Public Radio (NPR). Once blacklisted by Beijing, she, like many others, including the New York Times’ Chris Buckley, relocated to Taipei. For me and other Taiwan long-timers, the influx carried a certain frisson — the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club more than doubled its membership within a year.
After two more years reporting from Taiwan, Feng departed the region a little over two months ago, first to the Middle East to report on Syria’s historic regime change, and then to Washington DC, where she is currently based.
In Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jingping’s China, published earlier this month, Feng collects her decade of reporting on China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in a series of powerfully told, personal stories that chronicle a deterioration in China’s civil liberties and human rights. Were it rebranded as a horror story, it could easily be retitled “The Sinicization.”
XI JINPING THOUGHT
These stories — all anchored in the stories of real individuals — begin from around 2015. As they progress, Feng shows how a diversity of Chinese identities collapse like dominos under a stifling vision of Chinese identity imposed by Xi Jinping (習近平). For Xi, to be Chinese is to be ethnically Han, speak Mandarin Chinese, heterosexual and loyal to the Chinese Communist Party.
“What struck me during my time reporting in China,” Feng writes, “was the overwhelming preoccupation with identity beyond broad political values, a preoccupation that drilled down into the minutiae of daily life.”
This near Orwellian thought system aims to control not only public criticisms of the Party (anywhere in the world and in any language) but also private issues like religious practices and person-to-person chats on messaging apps (which are actively censored).
Feng subscribes to the theory that the urge for control is driven by Xi’s fear of a USSR style collapse that resulted, he believes, from “a lack of Soviet backbone to suppress dissenting voices.”
DISSENTING VOICES
Each of the book’s dozen chapters presents one dissenting voice and one falling domino. First come China’s rights defense lawyers. Then a new entrepreneurial class is ravaged by an anti-corruption campaign (affecting even billionaires like Ali Baba’s Jack Ma, 馬雲). Next come crackdowns on social media, women’s rights, Uighurs, Inner Mongolians, Hui Muslims, Hong Kong booksellers and Hong Kong democracy activists. Finally, China’s long tentacles reach out to stifle dissent among overseas Chinese critics, who are attacked surreptitiously through lawsuits funded by the Communist Party and hired private security firms.
On the whole, the trend goes from bleak to bleaker. One of the scariest moments is when a Hui Muslim scholar, a native of Western China, in 2019 suddenly realizes, “The oppression I saw inflicted on Tibetans twenty years ago and the Uighurs 10 years ago has finally reached my people.”
If there is any optimism to be had (Feng doesn’t include any in the book, nor does she make any predictions), it’s that this was precisely Taiwan’s story circa 1985, after which martial law fell, diverse identities rebounded and the island exploded with liberalization. Political change in Taiwan was also unforeseeable at the time.
It’s also worth noting that while today Xi’s China may be one of oppressive ethnonationalism, this was not always a path China was destined to follow. In the early 2000s, China sent dozens of mid-level Communist Party cadres to top US universities to study constitutional law. China’s leaders then believed that a robust legal framework was necessary for economic growth. Tolerance for social and personal expression also greatly expanded.
This buoyant atmosphere gave rise to the rights defense movement, which set aside big picture calls for democracy — still a red line for China’s government — and instead concerned itself with protecting civil liberties. These ranged from bald-faced crimes like school administrators systematically raping female students and human trafficking of ethnic minority women to more general protections of women and ethnic or religious groups. Feng describes the vision of this new breed of lawyers as “one that did not negate Party rule but asked the Party to follow its own constitution and tolerate alternative viewpoints and identities.”
This liberal vision however evaporated after Xi took power in 2012. A 2015 crackdown ended the rights defense movement and saw its lawyers detained, disbarred or impelled to flee into exile.
During Feng’s years reporting in China, these kinds of dissenting voices became a major thread of her coverage, and seeking them out came with a certain amount of intimidation and risk.
As a Chinese-American woman, Feng was sometimes able to blend and keep a low profile. She managed to travel to Xinjiang before it was closed to journalists, snuck past police checkpoints and witnessed the teargas canisters lobbed in Hong Kong’s riots of 2019 and 2020.
But she could not always rely on stealth or luck. A driver on one reporting trip, a random hire via an app, was beaten by authorities. Other sources were detained just for talking to her. Feng herself was publicly shamed in state media as a “race traitor,” a “banana” and an agent of a “hostile foreign force” before she was finally expelled.
Two of the book’s later chapters take place in Taiwan. While Feng at various moments offers outtakes of an interview with former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) — I was really hoping for a bigger take on his version of “Chinese identity” — she devotes most of this section to the “Hong Kong Five,” a group of 20-something Hong Kong protesters who, faced with arrest by local authorities, smuggled themselves to Kaohsiung on a fishing boat in 2021.
Though Taiwan’s former president Tsai Ying-wen (蔡英文) expressed her hope that Hong Kong’s democracy activists “would know they are not alone in their pursuit of further democracy and freedom,” Taiwan completely balked on the issue of political asylum and was generally frosty to Hong Kong’s would-be emigres.
SEEKING ASYLUM
Taiwan has no asylum law but can grant asylum on a case by case basis. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government was however so paranoid of being overrun by Chinese immigrants, even including Hong Kong democracy activists, that it took its preferred route of passing the buck — in this case using back channels to arrange asylum for the five in the US.
This pattern of playing hot potato with Chinese dissidents has been going on for at least two decades. It’s a disgraceful and petty hypocrisy for a government that claims to be a bastion of democracy in the face of China.
A slew of China experts have already come out with strong praises for Red Flowers, and they are not wrong. But while Feng’s book is a gripping read and wonderfully researched, at times the writing felt a bit too much like textbook journalism. The characters often exist as Platonic ideals — the teacher striving to keep the Mongolian language alive, or the exiled artist who makes sculptures of Xi with coronavirus spikes coming out of his head. They are driven by singular motivations and, with personal quirks or contradictions ironed out of them by newsroom-style editing, they can feel a little flat. Too often, their characterization is supported by long passages of contextualization, some of it the boilerplate that you might read in any newspaper.
Feng also doesn’t tell us much about her ethical decisions in interviewing people who risked punishment or even their freedom by simply talking to her — decisions that at times must have been gut wrenching. In these few ways, I sometimes found this highly persuasive record sometimes wanting for a more human or personal spark.
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