Emily Feng recounts her time in time in Xi Jinpings China in a new book

The NPR foreign correspondent Emily Feng has come out with a new book that tells of her experiences reporting on China at the time of Xi Jinping.

In “Let Only Red Flowers Blown”, Feng explores what it means to be Chinese while the country is looking for its own identity. She joined the NHPRS, everything that considered the host Julia Furukawa to talk about the new book.

Transcription

Emily, we, as journalists, talk to countless people, and you have been a foreign correspondent for years now. Each chapter of this book focuses mainly on one person. How did you decided what stories to share and reduce them?

There was no scientific method. These are people who attracted me for any reason. About a third of the characters are people I met originally because I brought in new NPRs, and I stayed in touch with them and their stories have evolved, and I did not stop being involved because I was interested. And the other two thirds were people I met or were, you know, peripherals to stories that I was pursuing for the news or that I had read and had put my journalist hat and who just wrote a cold email without shame. And while I kept pointing out the stories, in fact, some of the characters started to ride their lines. So, you know, people I met in continental China would then appear in Hong Kong, then people I had met thanks to my reports to Hong Kong moved to Taiwan. And then people I met in Taiwan ended up connecting me with diaspora groups with which I was in contact in North America.

So, over the years, the stories have continued to evolve and the characters end up meeting in a way, which, I think, reflects the fact that China is a world story. You know, what we care, what I am is not limited to the borders of the People's Republic of China. But also these identity issues, and China's soft power and, you know, cultural products produced in the language of Mandarin, this does not only happen in China these days. But each person who is in the book, I think, represents in one way or another his life story, his lived experiences, a more important aspect of Chinese politics, a societal change that I wanted to illustrate, but at a much more granular level.

Let's touch one of the stories in your book. The one who stood out was that of Yusuf, who converted to Islam and promoted religion in his community in China. What does Yusef's story say about the diversity of Chinese, religious or other experience?

So yes, Yusuf is one of the tens of millions of Muslims in China. There are even more Christians, there are Taoists, there are Buddhists. You know, there is a huge plethora of organized and folk religions in China. So Yusuf is interesting for me because he writes so much and also prolificly as a Muslim researcher, and he has this religious epiphany at his adolescence when China opens, and he has a kind of moment born for Islam. And he spends the rest of his life to date by trying to show how to be Muslim is also intrinsically a Chinese exercise, and that the principles of Islam are perfectly compatible, if not derived from the traditional Chinese philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism and things like that. His views are actually quite controversial, even in China. But he works explicitly with these identity ideas and finds a little space in China in the 90s and in the early 2000s to publish and write newspapers and start his own schools with his ideas. But as this space ends, he and his family and his relatives undergo a broader repression of religion and ethnic minorities. And some of his relatives live in this Western region of Xinjiang, where the Chinese authorities have suppressed another ethnic group called Uighurs. And although he is not Uighur, he finds himself affected by the same policies. He now lives outside China, and this is also one of the reasons why I use his Arabic name and not his name of Chinese pen in the book.

Emily, you detail fairly extreme cases of abuse against women in this book. There is milking. You share stories of medical mistreatment that women have been endured as part of the Chinese Chinese policy. What was it like to report to you and then write about these abuses as a woman yourself?

So I think that one of the things I do is detach when I work, and it helps a lot. But I wanted to write this particular story about someone who is now known as a woman chained in China, because I detached myself from this news at the time, but I noticed that it affected so many of my Chinese friends at the time. So what is the story of the chained woman? It was this Tiktok video that surfaced during the Beijing Winter Olympic Games about three years ago, where an unnamed woman was found chained by her neck in a hangar in the middle of winter, and she triggered this national research: who was she? How did she find in these conditions? To date, and I detail the kind of obstruction that the local authorities have set up, we still do not know exactly who it is and how it has been there. But people have reacted so strongly because there is still such a problem with the trafficking of human beings and the thorny problems of reproductive rights in China, not in the context that we know them, perhaps in the United States, but because there had been so many controls under single politics when families could only have one child, and which was often violently applied in China. Now the limit is up to three. But that means that in various times, the state has tried to control the number of children that women have, and now they have overturned and try to encourage women to have as many children as possible when social mores have changed. People now want smaller families, and in fact, there is a lot of evidence that they even wanted smaller families when the only child's policy began. Thus, through this story of the chained woman, I wanted to explore how gender is again more and more defined by the policies of the pro-natalist state. It is defined in terms of reproduction. While at the China credit in the past there was in fact a lot of progress made on gender equality under the Communists.

You cover serious offenses to the freedom of the press in this book, local journalists being silenced, banished, to your confiscated and excavated equipment. How does being a journalist in China differs from what your colleagues here in the United States confronted?

There is so much gray space in China. So you know, the rules are one thing. The way they are implemented is another. This means that even sometimes, when there are a lot of controls in place and digital surveillance, which has become so omnipresent in the past two years that I pointed out in China, there is still a lot of flexibility if you are a little daring and ingenious. And, you know, many people will tell you no, but there will always be one person who wants to take your interview. He is actually really physical security for journalists to work in China. So, even if you and your sources could be in line, I was never in danger of physical assault or something like that. So I was just on the road all the time and I tried to talk to as many people as possible and I get a lot. But I think that many of what I learned in China, the precautions that I have taken with digital censorship and secure communications, I mean, in general, just a kind of paranoia on the safety of communications and the protection of sources, to attend mass demonstrations and events like this, it was incredibly useful to postpone China and I think more or more Applicable in China that I see my necklaces now.