China’s Outlaw Minorities: Journalist Emily Feng Documents The High Cost Of Non-Conformity
(REVIEW) In April 2018, the Chinese Communist Party launched plans to make Arabic-style domed mosques to look more like Confucian temples. Dome removals took place after midnight to evade any opportunity to protest or videotape demolitions. In Henan Province, one imam organized his flock to build scaffolding around the dome of their mosque to hide it from view until the campaign passed.
“The Hui people have been through one storm after another, and this is yet another storm that will pass,” he told journalist Emily Feng.
“Let Only Red Flowers Bloom” is Feng’s vivid account of the lives of ordinary Chinese people who are trapped in President Xi Jinping’s dystopian plan to stamp out minority identities. Xi Jinping is obsessed with the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, and he has concluded that the Soviets failed because they did not crush non-conformist voices.
Xi has devoted his 12 years in office to stamping out even trivial signs of minority identity. When Feng began reporting from Beijing, she relished China’s ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. She spent seven years traveling throughout China to tell the story of “a resilience that kept people true to themselves even in the face of enormous intimidation and pressure to conform.”
In 2022, the CCP denied Feng a visa to continue reporting from China. Feng’s title is an adaptation of a Mao Zedong-era campaign, “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom (百花齊放).”
This campaign promised a loosening of Chinese Communist Party control. This relaxation lasted for only a few months. Mao shortly decided that he had heard enough criticism, and plunged China into the murderous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
A Muslim publisher that Feng interviewed said that Xi Jinping’s China “only wants its garden to have one type of flower: red ones. … If they are not red, they must be cut down.” Xi’s red flower is an ethnically Han Mandarin speaker who is married and has two or three children. A red flower is loyal to the Communist Party, and he constantly adjusts his worldview to mirror the vicissitudes of Communist Party propaganda.
The most fully developed character in Feng’s book is Yusuf, who grew up in a Hui Muslim family in central China. Yusuf’s public school education taught him that life ends with death. At his grandfather’s funeral, Yusuf “could not imagine what it would be like for his own body to slowly rot, alone, in the confines of a dark tomb.”
The morning after the funeral, Yusuf heard melodious chanting emanating from a mosque. He “was suddenly overcome with a feeling of awe.” Four days later, Yusuf formally converted to Islam. He began wearing a white small cap, and he taught himself the Arabic alphabet. Yusuf took up a semi-nomadic existence, wandering around China’s northwest to seek out imams who would give him new insights into Islam. Yusuf obtained a coveted spot on a state-sponsored hajj to Mecca.
In Mecca, Yusuf joined “a seething mass of humanity orbiting the Kaaba. … Yusuf felt the edges of his individual being blurring as he joined the thousands of other pilgrims circling the Kaaba.”
Yusuf made a name for himself by writing short, vivid books about everyday Muslim life in China. A publishing house in Hong Kong printed his books and distributed them in the mainland. Yusuf opened an Islamic education center which aspired to adapt Islam to modern China. By 2019, Yusuf’s dream of fusing his Islamic and Chinese identities had been shattered by Beijing’s aggressive hostility to Muslims. Yusuf felt that everyone he touched soon encountered trouble from the police. Dozens of people were arrested because they possessed books he authored. To protect the safety of his relatives, he cut off all his relationships with them. Yusuf now lives in exile in Malaysia.
One of the most colorful characters in Feng’s book is Zhou Liqi. Zhou grew up in a crumbling home in southern Guangxi province. His family could not regularly afford groceries or clothes, and Zhou dropped out of school in third grade. Zhou ran away from home and began making money by stealing electric scooters. In 2016, a video of his arrest in Guangxi province went viral.
“It is very nice to come to the detention center,” Zhou told a reporter. “It feels like coming home. I love it here.” With his wispy goatee and long black hair, Zhou looked like an Asian Che Guerava, and images of Zhou wearing a Che-style beret flooded the Chinese internet. Videos of Zhou scored 300 million hits.
In a country where organized social dissent is a crime, Zhou’s rejection of honest labor offered an alternative, more passive type of protest, which has come to be known as the tang ping (躺平) or “lying flat” movement. When Zhou was released from prison in 2020, the Communist Party condemned Zhou as a negative influencer. Social media sites shut down Zhou’s accounts and threatened to blacklist talent agents that sought to hire Zhou. A reformed and chastened Zhou has co-founded a local electric scooter company with an anti-theft security system designed and tested by Zhou himself.
Yang Bing is a Christian who became a lawyer in the 1990s, when China’s weiquan (維權)“rights defense movement” was in its infancy. The Weiquan movement sought to use the legal system to help marginalized groups in China receive the protections guaranteed in China’s constitution. Yang flourished in this environment, blending her commitment to justice with an equal dedication to Chritian principles of redemption and forgiveness. In 2011, the Chinese government honored Yang as one of China’s top justice officials.
All this changed on July 9, 2015, when the infamous 709 Crackdown wiped out the weiquan movement. Feng describes the terror that spread through China’s legal community as hundreds of lawyers were arrested in China. The brief window in which these courageous civil rights activists could hold China’s government accountable to its own constitution was over. “The fragile tolerance for people like Yang Bing had run out,” Feng writes.
Today, it is common for Americans to dismiss China as a “perfect dictatorship” that has silenced all dissent. Feng’s irrepressible subjects challenge this impression. Feng shows us a China of exuberant artistic, religious and linguistic diversity that exists beyond the reach of 24-hour surveillance, cultural genocide campaigns and militant nationalism.
The strength of her book is that, for the most part, she does not feature dissidents who consciously oppose the government. Instead, she focuses on ordinary, law-abiding people who consider themselves to be loyal Chinese citizens but who unwittingly cross the CCP’s constantly changing redlines.
Nonetheless, the people Feng features find ways to live with dignity and integrity in the crucible of China’s dictatorship. The indomitable spirit of Feng’s subjects are testimony that the CCP will not have the final word in China. Not even the long arm of the CCP can extinguish the flickering sparks of light that Feng celebrates in her book.
Dr. Robert Carle has contributed to the Religion Unplugged, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, the American Interest, Society, Human Rights Review, the Public Discourse, Society, Academic Questions and Reason.