“We’re All Chinese, Aren’t We?”
Originally published at Los Angeles Review of Books on Apr. 21, 2025.
YESHE (NOT HER real name) was one of my first friends in Beijing. We met on campus eight summers ago; I was a new student wandering the expanse of tall brick buildings and winding pathways lined with green trees, slowly getting lost, when I saw a slender girl with a short bob and kind eyes coming down a flight of stairs towards me. I stopped to ask for directions; she perked up at the sound of accented Mandarin. “Where are you from? Taiwan?” she asked, brows furrowing. “No, I’m a Hong Konger,” I replied.
It was as if a switch had flipped—her face lit up, and she eagerly told me that she, too, was from a border region: Tibet. Before I knew it, we were swapping stories about our home cities—both politically disputed areas that are culturally and linguistically distinct from mainland China—as well as our experiences as outsiders in the Chinese capital.
For both Yeshe and I, the concept of Chinese identity and our place within it has been a source of contention since childhood. I learned that, like me, she stopped being schooled in her mother tongue when she was less than 10 years old, and spent her formative years assimilating into an educational system that culturally wasn’t her own (she was sent to a Mandarin-speaking school in a city inhabited by China’s Han ethnic majority; I went to an English-speaking British international school in Hong Kong, followed by an American boarding school).
As we got to know each other throughout the semester—messaging over WeChat and slurping soup noodles together in quiet corners of the school’s bustling canteen—we spoke the most about our journeys traversing the boundaries of Chinese identity. Despite our drastically different backgrounds, we saw something mirrored in one another: a need to grapple with our Chineseness and a yearning for acceptance in a country that, while rich in diversity, is under the control of a party that is actively restricting the expression of identities that do not conform to its ideals.
This conflict is the subject of an important new book by journalist Emily Feng, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China, that analyzes how the Chinese Communist Party has sought to control expressions of identity both inside and outside its borders—as well as the repercussions of these efforts on ordinary Chinese citizens. In recent years, the Chinese government has been increasingly preoccupied with fostering national unity through controlling and engineering the identities of its citizens. Feng, an international correspondent for NPR who was based in Beijing before relocating to Taiwan, attributes this preoccupation to the party’s fear that the country’s communist trajectory will follow that of the Soviet Union’s: a long period of internal division and social fracturing, followed by a sudden collapse.
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.
Feng begins by introducing readers to Yang Bin, a tenacious human rights lawyer who started her career in the 1990s, a time of massive economic growth and liberalization. The country was rapidly urbanizing due to a series of reforms and opening-up policies introduced a decade prior that paved the way to a reinvention of China’s legal and political systems.
Yang was born in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval in the 1960s that killed an estimated half a million people or more, and came of age during the reform era. Rather than following in her parents’ footsteps and taking a job in a state-owned factory, she moved to the coastal province of Guangdong, where she worked in a privately owned pesticide factory before scoring a role as a copywriter in the county’s prosecutor’s office—eventually working her way up to becoming a provincial prosecutor and then a human rights lawyer.
Feng uses her story as a springboard into discussing the country’s blossoming “Weiquan” or “rights defense” movement. Led by idealistic scholars and lawyers like Yang who are passionate about pursuing accountability and democratic reform through the law, the movement briefly flourished before authorities began punishing those who took part. After a nationwide crackdown in 2015 that saw many detained and sentenced on serious charges like subverting state power, much of this resistance vanished or went underground. Now, authorities continue to systematically target human rights defenders and those who express ideas that challenge the official state narrative.
We witness this tumultuous expansion and contraction of rights through a cast of characters and stories that Feng vividly brings to life: an impoverished migrant worker who drowned her daughter, a businessman who became a trial case for a statewide anti-corruption campaign, a scooter-thief-turned-influencer, a citizen journalist blogging about COVID-19, a chained woman who galvanized the country’s feminist movement, and a collection of rights defenders who have fought back against various systems of injustice. It’s a fascinating portrayal of people on the margins of Chinese society struggling to survive in a country where the tides could shift at any moment, and where authorities are becoming increasingly adept at stifling dissent, both online and offline.
In a passage reflecting on the party’s shake-up of the private sector—a crackdown that resulted in the downfall of billionaires and entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma, who had soared to the upper echelons of global business before running afoul of the state—Feng aptly describes this feeling of constant upheaval: “This was the cycle of creation and disruption under Party rule; a hundred flowers could bloom, the choice ones picked—but even that was no guarantee that a few of the most beautiful buds were to be trampled on later when tastes changed.”
The casualties of this cycle are perhaps most tragically portrayed in the chapters detailing the state’s attempts to control ethnic minorities, which make up the book’s strongest section. The first narrative centers around the story of Abdullatif, a Uyghur man desperately searching for his wife and two children who disappeared into the state’s all-encompassing detention system in Xinjiang. Although Abdullatif had Turkish citizenship, his wife Meryem refused to naturalize, saying that “China” was her home.
In 2017, when the state began launching detention camps aimed at “re-educating” ethnic minorities, travel restrictions in the region tightened and the family’s passports were confiscated. Then, Abdullatif was deported to Turkey, where he learned that his wife was subsequently arrested and his children were placed into state care. After tirelessly petitioning Turkish diplomats and authorities in Xinjiang to allow him to reunite with his family there, he was able to bring his children back to Turkey. His wife, however, remains in detention to this day.
In this section, Feng provides illuminating historical and political context for the state’s dehumanizing detention drive, as well as the shift in official policy from supporting a regional ethnic model—which was supposed to grant nominal autonomy to some non-Han peoples—to advancing an assimilationist agenda centered on Han ethnic culture and language. Now, an estimated one in 26 Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been imprisoned, and official statistics show that the region had more than 578,000 criminal convictions between 2017 and 2022, according to research released last year by the advocacy group Uyghur Human Rights Project. In February, the US-based Human Rights Watch also reported that the government has increasingly imposed arbitrary restrictions on travel that advocates say disproportionately affect ethnic minorities. The state bureaucracy frequently delays or denies applications and requires citizens from “sensitive” areas to provide extensive documentation in support of passport applications.
By the time Yeshe and I met, she had already been denied a visa several times, and she often spoke bitterly about this double standard. “We’re treated as second-class citizens most of the time. We can’t apply for visas to travel abroad; we can’t even go to Hong Kong. Why? We’re all Chinese, aren’t we?” she asked me one afternoon, as we sat on a park bench in between classes. “It makes me so sad. Even other minorities, besides those of us from Tibet and Xinjiang, can do these things.”
In a quiet voice, Yeshe went on to describe the intense surveillance she and other Tibetans endured back in her hometown, and how her Han Chinese colleagues and classmates often dismiss her as a diversity hire—someone who is only present due to the state’s affirmative action policies for minorities (some of which are also eroding). I listened silently as she expressed her frustrations. While we connected over our shared identity crisis, my privileges far outweighed hers. Just by being born in Hong Kong and having British citizenship, I was relatively free to come and go as I pleased, to pursue whatever career or topics I wished. Meanwhile, Yeshe had given up trying to conduct research on Chinese identity because she was afraid that it was “too sensitive.” Her family was counting on her to succeed back in Tibet, and she had to bite her tongue lest she be deemed a threat to national security.
When I asked her what she thought of the Tibetan independence movement, lowering my voice so as not to be overheard by passersby, she gave a big sigh. “We’ve given up on independence. We’re really not that scary. Now, all we want is more cultural autonomy, to protect our culture and traditions. We don’t want to leave China,” she said, with a hint of defiance. Now, almost a decade later, I wonder if she still feels the same way.
In addition to evocatively outlining the oppression of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians in China’s border regions, Feng also highlights the plight of ethnic minorities in Han-dominated regions of China, a relatively underreported topic in international media. One chapter is dedicated to Hui Muslims: a group that typically speaks Mandarin as their first language and is less visibly distinct from the Han majority than Uyghurs are. We learn the story of Yusuf, a Hui Muslim who was born in Central China to parents who had embraced the communist revolution, casting religion aside during that politically turbulent period of Chinese history.
Despite his nonreligious upbringing, the more open 1990s created more space for religious activities, and Yusuf began learning more about Islam—eventually converting and studying the history of Islamic thought in China at university. His quest for understanding took him across China and abroad to Pakistan, where he became convinced that Islam was not just compatible with Chinese identity but in fact a deep-rooted part of Chinese culture. Upon his return, Yusuf decided to make his life’s work persuading others that this was the case, through writing books and running an Islamic education center.
By 2017, the crackdown in Xinjiang was intensifying, and it wasn’t long before the state turned its attention towards Hui Muslims. In 2018, the state’s previous agency overseeing religious affairs was absorbed by the party’s opaque United Front Work Department (UFWD), which had expansive powers and was subject to fewer checks and balances, Feng explains. The UFWD swiftly enacted a campaign to remove Middle Eastern–style domes from the country’s mosques, and security officials planted informants in communities to further sectarian divisions. Soon, dozens of Yusuf’s readers were detained, his collaborator was imprisoned, and his community collapsed. Two years later, Yusuf finally decided to leave China for good and moved to Malaysia. He still felt deeply Chinese but resigned himself to the fact that his religious identity would be decreasingly tolerated in the country he once called home.
Through comparing and contrasting the trajectories of various minority groups as they fight against state oppression, Feng provides a holistic depiction of the current landscape of resistance that captures the complexities of ethnic identification among those forced to navigate this treacherous terrain. The book complicates mainstream media narratives on ethnic divides in China by incorporating testimonies from minorities who have been co-opted by the state—such as a Uyghur policeman who justified the job as a way to support his family—and Han Chinese allies like Sasha, a sympathetic graduate student researcher who was dealt a 15-year prison sentence for separatism.
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 and beyond. One key aspect of identity negotiation that could have benefited from further analysis is the way the state conditions Han Chinese citizens to internalize and enforce its vision of national identity. Feng touches on this through the perspectives of disillusioned Han Chinese individuals who were once aligned with the state’s ideological agenda, like a woman who identified as a “little pink”—a term used to describe young Chinese nationalists—before her family was swept up in an anti-corruption drive. Others include Taiwan’s China-friendly former president Ma Ying-jeou, as well as a patriotic villager in Hong Kong who chose to ally with the Chinese government over prodemocracy protesters. 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, which circulates not just among citizens in the PRC but also within influential Chinese communities outside the country’s borders.
At the end of the volume, Feng leaves us with a final thought—that those who reflect on China often think about two versions of the country: the one they had known and the one they still dreamed of. Shortly after I left Beijing, Yeshe and I lost contact. While a part of me wishes we had stayed in touch, I know that it’s probably for the best that we haven’t. Perhaps one day, we can meet again, in a China where we can both be accepted.
