A Muslim convert. A scooter thief. And more than a few risk-taking online posters. Those are just some of the people you meet in the new book “Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China.” The book is drawn from a decade of reporting in Asia by NPR’s Emily Feng, who eventually herself ran afoul of the government in China. In a review, the “Washington Post” calls the book “enormously informative.”
I do have a lot of questions about your experience. But have you been tracking the reaction to your book back in China? Has there been any?
Well, the book is not published in China.
I guess that makes sense.
And it's in English, right, which most people don't read in China. It will be translated into traditional Chinese. So that's the script that's used in Hong Kong and Taiwan in about a year or so. But it's not distributed in China.
So let's go back to the start of your time reporting there. You were so young when you started reporting in China. How did you figure out how to do that work and how to chase down stories in such a challenging place?
It really felt like it was my calling. So maybe I partially just got super lucky, and it was one of those sink or swim situations where it was complete trial by fire. I mean, you just kind of jump in and figure out how to do things. When I first started reporting in China, I had the luck of working in a slightly bigger bureau, so I didn't start out in radio. Apologies. I was a print reporter, and I was working at the Financial Times, which is a broadsheet from the United Kingdom, and so I was with other people, and I could learn from them. And it was a paper that was much more focused on business and policy, so like the nuts and bolts of politics and economics in China, and just had to learn really, really quickly.
And the amazing thing about China is it's complicated, it's big, it's chaotic. Things don't happen uniformly. So something that works on the east coast is not necessarily working on the other side of the country, but it's really easy to get around. There's amazing public infrastructure. It's really physically safe for women to report there. I mean, the downside is, of course, state surveillance. Authorities don't want foreign reporters mucking around, but it was just, like, such an adventure. And I think it was one of those environments where I felt emboldened, not emboldened, maybe, but encouraged to take risks and push the envelope and see what worked, and if it didn't, you went right back to the drawing board and tried it again.
As you say, it's obviously a huge country, and you felt it was really important to stay on the road. How come?
Because things look different depending on where you sit. This is what I tried to get across in the book: China is many, many, many different versions of China. You know, within China, there are literally hundreds of different languages that are spoken. There are different ethnic groups and cultures. The landscapes are different depending on where you go. The way that local governments, from city to city, region to region, run themselves, are incredibly path-dependent on the history these places have taken. Go back 1,000 years, these were literally different kingdoms that created different families of languages, and now it's part of one country. You know, over the last 70-plus years or so, we've seen the People's Republic of China become an economic superpower in the world, but that's a modern day nation state that's been grafted on top of what's been this kind of sprawling empire collection of societies over the last few millennia. And so there's just beautiful diversity, organic diversity, that you find in China of all sorts. And I wanted to capture that for readers in a way that I felt like I could do for radio, for NPR. That's the beauty of audio, as you know, is you can bring people to a place that they might not get to go to themselves, but to really, like, dive into the lived experiences of some of these characters who really stayed with me over the years, so that people understand China is not a monolith, and its people are also not a monolith. They don't think the same thing. They don't want the same things.
It's clear that many of them obviously made an impression on you. I was thinking while reading your book, you know, here in the U.S., sometimes, you know, people just don't want to talk to reporters for whatever reason. Were folks receptive to you in your travels, once they learned you're a foreign correspondent? How hard was it to get people to open up?
One thing that I'm always so surprised by in the best way possible, is when I come back home to the US, and now I live here, I moved here about back to the US about three months ago. Is no matter what the politics of the country are at the time, no matter how anxious people feel, it is so easy to talk to people in the US, and people are really good at speaking about their feelings and telling their own stories in a narrative fashion, not just what happened, but how they felt about things as they were happening. That was one of my biggest challenges in China, is people don't want to talk. There isn't as much of an oral expression, a culture of oral expression, people are not open about their emotions. And then on top of that, you have decades of political campaigns and repressive policies that have made people very distrustful of each other in China, not to mention with U.S.-China tensions now ratcheting up again, really suspicious of foreigners, specifically American journalists. So I had a mixed experience. My parents are Chinese. I look Chinese. I speak Mandarin quite well. Sometimes that made it easier to talk to people. Sometimes that made people more suspicious, because they felt like if I looked and sounded the way I did, then I was actually Chinese, and maybe I wasn't someone to be trusted, because I would somehow rat them out. On the other hand, I was always surprised, if you were genuinely curious, and you know, maybe nine out of 10 people would refuse to talk to you, but you'd still find that one person you know, 10% of people, you might try 30 people, get three people on the record, you'd still find people who wanted to share their stories.
This wasn't the case for everybody you profiled, obviously, but some people really were taking a risk by speaking to you candidly or saying something that might be counter to the prevailing state attitude. So how did you weigh getting their viewpoints and their stories out versus what it might mean for them to say something to you?
It's always up to them if they want to do the interview. Sometimes the stories can take quite literally years, because people are considering their options and whether it will help or hurt them. One example is there's a chapter in the book about a Uyghur family who have split nationalities. Some members of the family are Turkish. They have Turkish passports, even though they were born in China, because they moved there when they were children to Turkey. And this Turkish man who is ethnically Uyghur, which is a Turkic minority that is present in China, he has children who also have Turkish passports, but his wife has a Chinese passport, and they find themselves caught up in this security crackdown in a western region of China, Xinjiang, where a lot of other ethnic Uyghurs have also been detained or imprisoned. And he's forcibly separated from his children, and he's trying to get them back. And I first met this man who was trying to find his children who had been taken from him by the government in 2020 and he didn't know if talking to a journalist was going to help or hurt his case. It could raise attention. It could also anger China, who he was in diplomatic negotiations with. And so it took about two years of conversations with him, where he always had the option of backing out, not having the interviews published, and eventually, about two years in, he decided, you know, I've got nothing left to lose. I'm going to take this interview and, you know, we did a story for NPR. It became a longer podcast, and it also became, as I follow the family, even after the NPR reporting was done, a part of the book. But it's a constant negotiation. It can be a lot of emotional work and time. And you might notice in the book there are some characters whose real names are not used because they wanted to tell their story. But they also, even if they themselves didn't feel like they would be personally threatened, they still have family who are in China and felt they could be in danger. And so in that case, I either used their English name, if they had one, like a nickname of sorts, or in one case, in one case, someone's Arabic pen name.
What do you wish that Western listeners knew about everyday life in China that doesn't always get equal coverage to Xi and his speeches and that kind of thing?
In some ways, China is a threat, and some ways, as you mentioned, China and the U.S. are intertwined, and they depend and help each other in certain aspects, and it's important for us to be able to disentangle what's beneficial and what's harmful. But the point of the book was to kind of separate the whole story from geopolitics and talk about the people in China and show that there is a huge range of opinion among people who consider themselves Chinese, and actually the whole concept of what is Chinese. Why is the ruling Communist Party there so obsessed with issues of identity and defining what it means to be Chinese? How does that interplay with their more aggressive foreign policy and their growing obsession, to be honest, with national security? It really comes down to, I felt, issues of identity, but then I wanted to not talk about it from a policy perspective that's kind of dry, and I think that's done better through news, but through people's lived experiences and through their stories, which are in this book: bring people in, bring readers in who might not ever go to China, who don't follow news about China specifically, and help them realize people in China have opinions about their own government. Sometimes that might not accord with our stereotypes about China. And they are all sorts of different people. You know, they have different political values. Political values. They might not even speak Mandarin Chinese, the standardized language that they teach in schools, but many other different languages. There are so many different ethnicities in China. The whole project of creating China as like a modern nation state is one that is still ongoing, and we might find parallels actually, with our ongoing conversations about what it means to be American. What are American values? What do Americans have in common when, by definition, we're a melting pot of so many different types of people and children, communities of previous immigrants who have moved here to this land, and to kind of show there are differences, but there's also similarities between the people of China and people around the world. You know, people are people.
So how did it come to pass that you were ultimately more or less banned from reporting there?
So the facts of the case are, it was just getting really difficult as an American reporter to continue reporting in China. China gives out journalist visas so that foreign reporters like myself can live and work there as journalists. Normally, these permits are 12 to 18 months. Mine kept getting shortened, and it eventually was three months long. And when COVID hit, China closed down its borders so I could not leave the country and come back. And I knew that if I couldn't go back to China, NPR would also lose its bureau in China. I was the only reporter for them at the time in the country, and therefore also their legal representative. So I just stayed. And then finally, there was a bit of a diplomatic detente, after the two leaders of the U.S. and China had a video chat in 2021 and finally, I was told, OK, if you leave China for a vacation and come back, we'll give you a special entry document, and you just present that. And despite the fact that you only have a three-month residence permit and there are all these restrictions on you, it's fine, you'll be able to come back. So a couple of American reporters and I left in 2022 after a long while stuck in China, and they got entry permits, and I didn't.
And so we just went through months and months of negotiations with Chinese diplomats, with American diplomats, who are trying to help through their political channels in China, through some senior Chinese officials in Beijing. And ultimately, they were pretty clear on the Chinese side that this was intentional. They did not want me to move back to China. So the question is, why? I mean, certainly, I think they were really unhappy overall with my coverage. And I want to say, I mean, I did my best to write both what they might consider positive stories, stories that I just find genuinely interesting about the people, the culture, the economics of the place, and also a lot of stories that they might consider “critical.” So investigative stories, stories about, for example, Xinjiang, where there have been mass detention campaigns against different communities of people.
I would say I was doing my job, kind of covering everything in an objective manner. So yeah, they weren't happy with the coverage. Didn't help that I was American. Doesn't help that NPR as an American organization, as U.S.-China tensions were already getting worse around that time. And then add to that, this is something I didn't think about until I couldn't go back to China, is I am Chinese-American. And there are still a lot of foreign reporters in China who do excellent, hard-hitting work. They do great coverage. But a lot of it is disliked by China. Why didn't they get the same treatment that I did? And I think it comes down to a lot of the attacks that I got from Chinese State Press when I was there in Beijing, from online trolls, to be honest, were about the fact that, in their eyes I was a race traitor. That I was fundamentally Chinese, and then I wasn't living up to being a good Chinese citizen, because I was writing critical reports about China for an American organization. And to be clear, you know, I've never been a Chinese citizen. I was born and raised in the U.S. My parents are U.S. citizens, but the issues of identity, which I had tried so long to separate from my coverage, I had my work and then my personal life became completely merged. And as I was writing this book, I realized the reason why I was so interested and drawn to people's stories about how they saw their identity and how politics and identity were so intertwined in China was, of course, because my identity is complicated, and was whether I liked it or not, part of how people saw my coverage in China.
Do you have any desire to go back as a reporter?
Definitely, I wouldn't move there immediately now, only because it's changed so much from the China that I moved to 10 years ago, and there are a lot of interesting stories in the rest of the world, but it's a country that I still very much love and feel a connection to, because I spent so much time trying to understand it and to learn its language. And I would love to go back in 10, 20 years, whenever, as a journalist, and live there again, report there again, and see what has changed.
You know, this is an obvious question, but you're back reporting in the U.S. now, and obviously we're in a time where there are growing warnings about the erosion of civil liberties and the Trump administration's authoritarian desires, I guess. Do you see a lot of connections from your time reporting on China with what's happening in the U.S. right now?
I'll answer it this way. I actually went and interviewed other China watchers who have decades more experience studying Chinese politics than I do. They do this for a living. They're political scientists and history professors at American universities, and they have told me that they are increasingly looking at American politics through the lens of how they study China, in that they see a lot of similarities in, for example, how Chinese leader Xi Jinping has concentrated power under himself over the last 12 years and events that are happening in the U.S. And what's interesting is, if you look at how Chinese citizens talk about American politics, they explicitly draw connections between their own history and their politics and American politics, and with the tariffs going on, U.S tariffs on China, I think you see a lot of Chinese rhetoric. You know, this is Chinese people talking to them amongst themselves, talking once again, about how very much so they see American policy and politics as benefiting China.
I have to end on an up note. Is there a favorite meal or a meal you think about that you had while living there that you can't get in the U.S.?
I love this question. One of my favorite lunch places to go was a restaurant that served food from the province of Hunan. So Hunan food, you can't really find it in the U.S. We can find Sichuan food here now and Cantonese food, but I haven't found Hunan food. It's known for having a lot of smoked ingredients like smoked ham and cured fish and preserved egg and pickles, and also a love of frying and stir-frying things in hot oil and red hot chili peppers, and it's delicious.
