Being the 'wrong' kind of Chinese

Diversity still survives Xi, but it’s getting tougher

After reporting from China for seven years, in 2022 American journalist Emily Feng found that her luck had run out. She would not be allowed back in. For years officials had been telling her why she, in particular, should “tell the China story well”. Because she was inherently Chinese. Never mind that she had been born and raised elsewhere. She shouldn’t be hanjian , or race traitor.

How this conception of Chineseness tyrannises its subjects both inside the mainland and across the diaspora, is what her book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping ’s China is about.

In the 1950s, a sweeping Soviet-inspired project sorted China’s population into 56 officially recognised ethnic groups. Deng reforms loosened the iron grip of this classification on what job you did and where. Then came Xi, fearful that social splintering would end the Chinese communist project like it ended USSR. His antidote: Recasting a diverse nation into uniformity.

Feng tells the stories of 12 very different individuals to drive home how tormenting it can be when your country allows “absolutely no opportunity or outlets for incorrect thinking or viewpoints to spread”.

The Chained Woman | In 2022 a TikTok video went viral showing a woman shivering in an earthen shed, a metal chain tethering her neck to a wall. One official version said she was the mother of eight children, aged 23 to 2.

A book of photos also came to light. It documented villages outside Guangzhou, where buying and chaining women, while forcing them to bear multiple children, even reselling them, is common. It suggests, there are chained women all over China.
Both the initial video and this book were ‘quieted’ by the authorities. But many families still keep searching for the chained woman. She might be the person they themselves lost years ago, to traffickers who make hay out of draconian reproductive policies.

The Model Minority | Growing up in Inner Mongolia, Adiya saw few Han Chinese. The sinification of subsequent decades he compares to the feeling of a frog slowly boiled alive. By middle school, all-Mongolian PTMs would be in heavily accented Mandarin. He found it surreal: Who were they all playacting for? When he ditches his Beijing job to return and teach Mongolian language, it was only time before they came after him, finding him to be an agent of “hostile foreign forces”. He had some luck, though, and now lives in Canada.

The Diaspora | Chen Weiming got out of China, with a mission to push democracy at home. As he set up his sculpture park in California, a wealthy American patron, Matthew, helped him. Its centrepiece was CCP Virus , about Party culpability in the global pandemic. When this was burned down, FBI revealed that Matthew was actually a former Florida prison guard and part of a bungled, Chinese state scheme to arrest Chen’s work. Matthew had been paid $100,000 and his Long Island based Chinese handler $3mn.

The book ends with Chen’s triumphant opening ceremony for CCP Virus 2.0 – in the presence of Feng and motley others. They had all taken different paths to get to that dusty Mojave Desert far from China. Yet each of them that day was thinking of China, the one they had known and the one about which they still dreamed.