Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in XI Jinping's China
Gripping and scrupulously reported ... An important work of reporting that need boast no further virtues to merit readers’ attention, but it has the additional benefit of revealing what the inhabitants of a country on the cusp of authoritarianism—a country like our own—may be in for ... Enormously informative, but more important, it manages to humanize history that all too easily shades into abstraction.
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Important ... Crafting a comprehensive volume on Chinese identity is a daunting endeavor, but I was pleasantly surprised by the range of issues Feng was able to tackle within these pages. The book is cleverly structured to cover a breadth of Chinese identities through several core themes—politics, ethnicity, and diaspora—and the author moves smoothly between analyses of state policies and narratives and efforts to push back against the state’s identity-making project ... We witness this tumultuous expansion and contraction of rights through a cast of characters and stories that Feng vividly brings to life ... A fascinating portrayal of people on the margins of Chinese society ... Provides illuminating historical and political context ... Feng provides a holistic depiction of the current landscape of resistance ... Complicates mainstream media narratives on ethnic divides in China by incorporating testimonies from minorities who have been co-opted by the state ... The book’s final chapters—covering Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora—are engagingly written and effectively encapsulate the messiness of Chinese identity politics in the peripheries of the People’s Republic ... Yet the book falls short of critically examining the factors that lead citizens to become (and choose to remain) loyal to the state. These final sections could have been a good place to dive more deeply into the seductiveness of the party’s nationalist, racist, and sexist propaganda.
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With [Feng's] 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 ... 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 ... Feng’s many subjects are all memorably characterised ... The book has an eye for luminous detail ... Chronicles not only a crackdown, but also the resourceful resilience of those caught up in it.
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