#288:  RED FLOWERS.   Emily Feng’s book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China (Crown, 2025) is a brisk and sobering read, written with a journalist’s sharp eye for the individual story that opens up whole levels of sociological comment.  In reaction to the breakup of the Communist Party in Russia, Xi Jinping began to fear that the increasing freedoms in China, themselves in reaction against the severity of the Cultural Revolution, were a possible threat to Party domination, and began a still-ongoing process of crackdown on dissidents and critics, as well as increased repression of ethnic minorities and their religious practices, a rejection of area dialects and an insistence on Mandarin as the sole acceptable language, a newly aggressive stance toward Hong Kong, a tightening of wayward (i.e. non-government controlled) financial and business practices, and of course a notching up of the usual Party rhetoric and slogans.  Xi, whose own family were victims of the Cultural Revolution, and who in his youth faced a long path back to social acceptance and Party membership, might seem an odd person to have put these increased repressions in place, but he’s in the driver’s seat of the political Big Boy Bus now, and these things seem to happen.  Lord Acton’s dictum, anyone?

       Feng follows the stories of several people who have run afoul of these crumbling freedoms: a young woman lawyer, a dissident publisher, people from religious communities trying to manage their relationships with the government’s committees on faith practices, the many who discover the long arm of China’s control in Hong Kong and Taiwan—it’s all very Orwell, very thought police.  In some ways it’s the usual story of authoritarianism, with Chinese names and locales. There is, however, something new, something very up-to-date in the tools of repression: the internet, with its efficiency of information gathering and its extension of any government’s ability to keep tabs on people.  Phones are like capital-letter announcements of where you are and where (physically and intellectually) you have gone. The online pockets of resistance—the internet resources for information the government doesn’t want you to have--are often helpful but terribly temporary and discoverable.  Big Brother’s eyes now go not just further but deeper than they used to.

       Feng’s reporting is itself sharp-eyed for all the small shivers of change, the way old freedoms are being disappeared.  For me, one of the most piercing details was in the story of Abdullatif, a Uyghur in Xinjiang who has been living in exile in Turkey; after a long absence he was allowed briefly to return to China to be reunited with his children, only to find on meeting with them that they, as wards of the state, had been schooled in Mandarin and had forgotten the Uyghur language.  Stories of this kind of familial and cultural disruption abound—reasonless and abrupt arrest and imprisonment, separations from family, attempts not only to escape from China but to avoid extradition.  In the period of relaxed control after the Cultural Revolution the suggested state motto was “Let the hundred flowers bloom”; but the new severity of Party strictures have given Feng’s book the bitter revision in its title.   And of course here in America we view these stories from a particular and apprehensive angle.  The hostility to ethnic minorities, the abandonment of media freedoms, shrinking of women’s rights, the self-righteous rhetoric of authoritarianism, the control of information are the lowering realities of life in China right now.  Any of this sound familiar?