NPR’s Emily Feng speaks with KPRG's Naina Rao about her new book, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China, and how China's internal identity battles reveal deeper complexities beyond geopolitics.
TRANSCRIPT
HOST/JEFFERSON CRONIN:
NAINA RAO: Emily, what's the story behind the title of this book? Let only red flowers bloom.
EMILY FENG: So the short answer to that is, it was something one of the characters in the book said to me years ago, and the context was this man had been a publisher. He'd published a lot of books, sometimes kind of semi-legally out of Hong Kong, about Islam and theology. And he said, you know, in years past, when China had been going through one of its more open periods, the state wanted all different kinds of flowers, and now they only want to let red flowers bloom, red being the color of the ruling Communist Party in China. And he was riffing off of a 1950s slogan that was popularized by Chairman Mao at the time, where Mao said, I want to let 100 Flowers bloom. Let 100 schools of thought contend, he wanted to hear diverse ideas across Chinese society, and then decided, you know, he didn't want to hear all these dissenting ideas, changed his mind and imprisoned a lot of the people who express themselves. But this phrase, when I heard it, just stuck in my mind. It was the working title of the book. I never ended up changing it. But it highlights both the natural diversity of viewpoints of cultures in China, but also the fact that Chinese society is constantly in this like accordion of opening up and then and then and then, we're now in a period of closing down again.
RAO: So many of our listeners in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands perceive China primarily through its military power and regional influence. Why should they consider reading your book to gain a broader understanding of China?
FENG: So I tried to write these stories outside the framework of the news of specific policies or geopolitical tensions, though, I think that the stories are very much related to the political events that underpin these policies. But it's about people. It's about how these big social and political shifts affect their lives, change the trajectory of the people that they love and the challenges they have to go through, because all of a sudden they find themselves disenfranchised because simply of who they are, the language they speak, what they stand for, etc. You know the Northern Mariana Islands. There you are, right in the middle of this big geopolitical contest over the Asia Pacific. And this doesn't give any answers about, you know, who's going to win or what's going to happen, but I think that, I hope that these stories resonate on just a human level, and also make people realize China is not a monolith. China, even as a country its borders, what the word China means has changed so much over time, and a lot of people, even to this day in China, are contesting have different perspectives about what it means to be Chinese. What should China stand for? How should the country govern itself? Not everyone agrees, of course, with what the Communist Party is doing, and the Communist Party is is putting forth its own idea of what China should be, one that is often much more flat and shallow.
RAO: Yeah. Now, having returned to the US and observed the current political climate, do you notice any parallels with the PRC in terms of identity politics or state control,
FENG: I think that identity politics not so not so much. But you know, a lot of people have been asking me, Are there parallels and with China watchers, who are Americans, who have far more years than I do watching Chinese politics, and they have pointed out what they would call striking parallels, as one person put it, echoes in modern Chinese history and political events they see happening in the US in the last couple of months. And you know, I begin my book talking about how I moved to China in July, 2015 looking back, I now know I moved there exactly a week after something called the 705 lawyers crackdown, named after the date on which it happened, July 5, 2015 that was when China rounded up more than 300 human rights lawyers, basically really influential legal reformers who'd been pushing through real wins in terms of civil liberties in China, and then later disbarred a lot of them and arrested, imprisoned some of them as well, and it killed this legal reform movement. And there is a parallel I found in moving back to the U.S. seeing these attacks on courts, on disregarding court orders, on big corporate law firms under huge pressure to offer pro bono services to the Trump administration. That has been striking to me to see, and I think this underscores the fact that the U.S. and China are two big superpowers, and they often have a lot of similarities in addition to their differences.
RAO: Your book features stories of individuals resisting state-imposed identities. Could you share one that particularly resonated with you?
FENG: This kind of begs the question, well, what is the state-defined identity of being Chinese? And the answer to that is, one that is loyal to the Communist Party is very much molded around its socialist core values, which are kind of artificial and not very substantial. One that is Han ethnic centric. So Han is the dominant ethnic group in in China, or at least someone who behaves like Han, one that's Mandarin speaking, despite the fact that there are dozens of ethnic groups in China and hundreds of other languages, one that is increasingly heteronormative. You know, there was a period where things like gay marriage had a lot of social support in China, but now that you've seen the return of state pro natalist policies to all of a sudden, have as many children as possible, I think gender and family relations are being defined in terms of biological sex once again, and also a China that's increasingly ethno nationalist, or just nationalist period, one that defines itself in terms of its national interests, in contrast to those of other countries, Most notably the United States. So maybe one story that really stuck with me. You know, I'm always interested in people who fall in the middle of these identities. So one student I profile is this young Chinese student who goes to Taiwan, and he makes a video criticizing Xi Jinping, and he expects that Taiwan is going to welcome him with open arms and give him political asylum. But instead, Taiwan is going through a particular period where it's trying to reject any ties with China. It sees itself as functionally independent from China. This is one of the core tensions between China and Taiwan, and they find this student suspicious. He's too Chinese for them. So he's he's too he's too much of a dissident to be in China, but he's too Chinese to be welcomed in Taiwan. And through his quite tortured personal experience, I tell the story about relations between China and Taiwan and the current identity evolution that Taiwan is going through today.
RAO: Thank you so much, Emily, for speaking with me. I really appreciate it.
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