AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In 2022, journalist Emily Feng was told by the Chinese government that she was no longer allowed back in China. This after she had lived in Beijing and covered the country for seven years. Feng was born and raised in the U.S. to Chinese parents, and she says Chinese officials told her that they considered her inherently Chinese. But she was later labeled as a race traitor by Chinese state media for her work. What does it even mean to be Chinese in President Xi Jinping's China? Well, that is a question that Emily takes on in her new book, "Let Only Red Flowers Bloom." My NPR colleague and friend Emily Feng joins us now. Hi, Emily.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Thanks so much for reading my book, Ailsa.
CHANG: (Laughter) You're so welcome. I loved it. Can you just start with, like, why has controlling Chinese identity become so central to Xi Jinping's idea of a powerful China?
FENG: I think it's part and parcel of how China thinks of itself, and it starts with your citizens. It starts with trying to make them functional, productive members of your society. And in the China that I increasingly covered in my later years in Beijing, it was a Chinese person who was Mandarin-speaking, who was heterosexual, who was loyal to the Communist Party, which basically rules China even though there are other political parties. And there was less and less room for other diverse ways of being...
CHANG: Right.
FENG: ...Whether that was political or ethnic or cultural. And...
CHANG: And ethnically speaking, the ideal Chinese citizen, according to Xi Jinping, is Han, right?
FENG: Or culturally Han, which is...
CHANG: Culturally Han.
FENG: ...The majority ethnic group in China. There's 55 other ethnic groups, but Han far and away is the most populous. And I'm Han Chinese.
CHANG: And so am I (laughter).
FENG: Yes. And all the stories that I loved covering the most for NPR in China were about identity in some way or another. And so I was looking for a way to delve more deeply into that theme because I came to see how it influenced domestic policy, national security policy and, increasingly, how China perceived its relations with other countries.
CHANG: Yeah. I mean, your book raises so many examples, so many stories of individuals who don't fit into Xi's ideal of what is Chinese. And for me, one of the most fascinating stories was about the Hui minority group. Like, physically, you point out they're pretty much indistinguishable from the majority ethnic group, Han Chinese. But Hui people are predominantly Muslim. So to Xi Jinping, that means they're not really truly Chinese, right? Can you talk about, like, what does the story of Yusuf tell us about how the Chinese government connects religion with ethnicity?
FENG: So Yusuf is one of my main characters. He's actually one of the people who gives the book its title, and he's a Hui Muslim man. He becomes a kind of born-again Muslim. And like many of the characters in this book, I only use his first name because a lot of them were still living in China when I was writing this book, and I wanted to make sure they didn't experience any retribution for being in my book. For those who don't know about the Hui in China, they're one of the biggest Muslim groups in the country, and they've always had this in-between state because they present as very Han Chinese. They're very, very much in the mainstream. They're very active in trading circles, in translation and academia in China, and yet they're in this in-between space because they're known for being Muslim. That's basically their only identifying characteristic that binds them together as an ethnic group. And as Yusuf explores his Muslim identity, he starts to encounter the constraints of - well, are you Chinese or are you Muslim? And he spends his entire life trying to make the two compatible, only to - not to give too many plot spoilers - realize that he can't thread that needle.
CHANG: Yeah. It was so interesting, too, because you point out Hui and Uyghur people in China. They see so many differences between themselves, even though both groups are primarily Muslim and, therefore, in the Chinese government's eyes, similarly suspicious, right?
FENG: Right. So I start telling the story of Uyghurs who have undergone terrible, terrible crackdowns and detention campaigns in the last decade in China. But at the start of this crackdown on the Uyghurs, a lot of the Hui people who I was interviewing or in touch with about things like religious freedom and diversity saw their issue as completely separate from Uyghurs. And so this kind of divide and conquer thing was very interesting, how people saw their own identities within the melting pot that is China, and then starting to realize, actually, all of our issues in some way are connected.
CHANG: Yeah. Well, I want to now turn this to you, Emily, and talk about how identity politics personally impacted you because when you were covering China as a journalist, living in China, you were labeled by Chinese state media as a, quote, "race traitor," someone who aligned with a, quote-unquote, "hostile foreign force," meaning the United States. And you were also called - I didn't know this until I read your book. I think this one is so funny. The state media called you a banana, meaning yellow on the outside, white on the inside. What did it feel like to be accused by the Chinese state of not being Chinese enough?
FENG: So I tried so hard not to make this book personal. And of course, eventually...
CHANG: (Laughter) It was fascinating when you made it personal.
FENG: ...I realized through writing this that one of the reasons I was interested in the topic of identity is it is a personal subject to me.
CHANG: Yeah.
FENG: And so I started writing about more of my own experience. And on the one hand, I am proudly culturally Chinese, but I definitely bristled against being expected to perform a certain way because I was an ethnically Chinese, Mandarin fluent-speaking reporter based in China for an American outlet. But it put me in this, again, weird limbo space where I think different parties expected different things of me, and it was impossible to fulfill the expectations of any side. And then U.S.-China relations became very, very tense...
CHANG: Right.
FENG: ...Basically as soon as I started the job in Beijing, and that added a very real personal risk as well, a lot of pressure in reporting on the ground in China.
CHANG: So when the Chinese state media was denigrating you for not being Chinese enough, did that in any way change the way you covered China as a journalist, knowing that the government questioned your very intentions, your very authenticity as a Chinese person?
FENG: It definitely lit a fire underneath me. It made me feel like I had limited time there, that the time I had in China mattered a lot and the stories that I was doing were important because I didn't know if I'd get to do them again. If I didn't do them, would other people get to report on these issues?
CHANG: Yeah.
FENG: So it made my time there extremely meaningful. And I still hope to go back to China one day as a journalist. It's a country that I still find fascinating and whose people I very much care about.
CHANG: Well, how much did being a journalist in China, in a place with such abundant diversity in the face of intimidation by the government - how much has that shaped you and the way you see yourself as a Chinese woman? Has it? Has it shaped your own identity?
FENG: It's made me much more proud and self-aware that I was born to parents who are Chinese. It's a language that I've worked really, really hard to master, and it's a world that will never leave me. That's also part of the point of this book, is that being Chinese is not confined to the boundaries of the People's Republic of China. There are so many Chinese diaspora creating new cultural products in the Chinese language, outside of China, even outside of Taiwan, and that connection and those people and that world will always be accessible whether or not I am in China.
CHANG: Emily Feng's new book is called "Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity And Belonging In Xi Jinping's China." Thank you so much, Emily. I so enjoyed this.
FENG: Thank you so much, Ailsa.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAMIROQUAI SONG, "SPACE COWBOY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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