Let Only Red Flowers Bloom

"There are a lot of things I like about this book. It makes broad points through profiles of individuals, which is very compelling. It’s Emily Feng’s first book, but I was familiar with her reporting for National Public Radio. Let Only Red Flowers Bloom is about how this period of rule by the Chinese Communist Party is one that is increasingly intolerant of diversity of cultural forms and of language uses. Xi is trying to get everybody onto the same page in a way that you could argue we haven’t seen since the final decades of Mao’s rule. She talks about Hui Muslims in China, and how it was possible not that long ago for them to feel fully Chinese but also Muslim, and now it becomes problematic for them to combine these identities. She uses stories about Hong Kong and Mongolia as well, the efforts to push the former to be more in step with the mainland, and about use of the Mongolian language being suddenly seen by the state as a challenging thing. People casually following the news about China might think of what’s been happening with Tibet and with Xinjiang , the effort in those two places to crush difference, and in some ways they remain extreme cases of the push to homogenisation. But Feng charts the way in which, even just in the time that she was reporting in China from the mid-2010s onward, spaces for easy expression of difference shrank. She notes the tighter control of artistic expression. She also weaves in her changing sense of her own identity as somebody of Chinese descent, and her excitement about being in China initially and a dulling of that excitement as she saw some of the things that were still possible when she arrived becoming less and less possible."