The paramount leader of Chinas Xi Jinping faces a multitude of immediate challenges: an slowing economy in the midst of a real estate market crisis and American prices; an aging population; Social stress is unleashed in acts of random violence; Controversial borderlands alienated by the upward and bottom repression.
And yet, the president always finds time and energy to be exposed, at length, on great abstractions on identity. He announced, in dozens of speeches, his definition of a Chinese nation and the civilization that existed, unchanged, over thousands of years. XI, it seems, considers its fundamental task as a freezing freezing and asserting control of the Communist Party, which is to be Chinese.
In Let only the red flowers bloomEmily Feng fortunately gives a certain contrast to the XIS promulgation of a homogeneity which denies the existence of a conflict or a pluralism. With her book of portraits of multiple and multiple well -organized and multiple lawyers, financial, Uïghours, Mongols, Slackers, women and demonstrators victims of trafficking, she provides an essential and opportune recall of the vast Chinese, a disputed and intidating diversity.
Ten years of XI have eroded a large part of the most plural society that emerged between the 1980s and 2000s. A series of post-Mao deng Xiaoping leaders, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao firmly believed in the leadership of the Party of the Party of the Party of the Party, but withdrew from the anterior microgestion of Maos of social, cultural and economic life. Instead, there was flowering in the arts; reluctantly tolerance of civil society, in particular non -state lawyers and journalists ready to challenge the domination of the parties of public life; A degree of linguistic autonomy on the ethnically diversified borders of Chinas; Above all, an explosion of private entrepreneurship.
Traveling through China as a correspondent for the NPR between 2016 and 2023, Feng encountered the end of the tail of the post-staff thaw. She met writers, activists, entrepreneurs, minors, believers; She listened to the many different languages spoken across the country. She savor the pragmatic pluralism of Chinese society with first hand, but simultaneously perceived that the diversity I cherished was considered a responsibility under Xi Jinping.
She starts with theWeiquan The rights defending lawyers whose existence had been rendered post-staff liberalization, until state draggnets from 2015 arrested them by hundreds. We meet Yang Bin, a government prosecutor who reinvented himself as a lawyer for human rights; In the early 2020s, harassment and stress had led him in semi-retirement on an island off the coast of southern China.
We are entering the world of collapse of the banking shadow, via the history of Wang Yongming, a long -distance truck driver who became an investor, who was arrested in 2016 for alleged underground connections. In the 1990s and 2000s, private financiers at risk such as Wang made it possible a national manufacturing and a real estate boom. At the time of Xi Jinping, their wealth and their dynamism seemed a direct threat to the power of the party.
Some of the most desperate stories come from borders: families torn apart by the suppression of ethnic minorities. The wife of Abdullatif (a Uighur Import Manner) was sentenced to 20 years in prison simply to have a photograph of the Turkish president, supposed to be proof of his involvement in the dissident diaspora abroad.
Fengs many subjects are all characterized in a memorable way. She presents Adiya, a computer that took the fight for Mongolian cultural self -determination; The Uighurs have co -opted in the security system which imposed a punitive monitoring cage on the Xinjiang; Kenny, the Hong Kong civil engineer radicalized in dissent, testifying to police brutality.
The book has an eye for light details. While describing the fragility of the economic miracle of Chinas, Feng takes us to a booming city which had become rich, at dizzying speed, on bauxite deposits, and in the offices of a mining scion arrested during the United States shakedown. The walls huddled inward because the tunnels of other nearby mining companies had collapsed the ground under us.
It is in many ways a depressing story: ordinary people and workers derailed and sometimes crushed by a paranoid and unpredictable state. As a foreign journalist for the heritage of East Asia, while in China, Feng was often harassed. The social media and social media attacked him as a racial traitor to strive to account for the complexities, difficulties and sometimes tragedies of life in Xis China. But its energy, its curiosity and its sympathy prevent the book from shirking discouragement.Let only the red flowers bloom Chronicles not only a repression, but also the ingenious resilience of those taken there.
Let only the red flowers flourish: identity and belonging to Xi Jinpings China By Emily Feng Random house 24 / Crown $ 29, 304 pages
Julia Lovell is the author of Maoism: A Global History
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