By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

When Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party established the People's Republic of China in 1949, they imposed a political unity on a fragmented reality. The new PRC stretched from borders with the Soviet Union in the north and Korea in the east to Vietnam and Burma in the south. Its citizens spoke innumerable languages and practiced a plethora of religions. Members of some ethnic-minority groups clustered in their homelands along the country's borders, but many others lived alongside the majority Han Chinese in communities throughout the interior. Creating a coherent national identity among more than 500 million people was an early challenge for the new regime.

The CCP met this challenge by erecting a big tent. Mandarin was the official language, but local dialects persisted; official ethnic-minority status was given to 55 distinct groups. The state created "autonomous regions" for five of those minorities; a fictive autonomy, to be sure -- leaders in Beijing retained governing authority -- but a recognition of their special status nonetheless. Intent on securing its rule over the country, the party-state permitted a fairly capacious understanding of what it meant to be Chinese in the People's Republic.

Often regarded by outsiders as a land of homogeneity, China thus displays a surprising degree of diversity once someone gets to know the country better. Emily Feng, an international correspondent for NPR, found this unexpected diversity to be one of China's most intriguing aspects when she arrived in 2016. Reporting in China, Ms. Feng says, offered her "the ability to briefly be allowed entry into the lives of people in one nation-state who ate, thought, spoke, and behaved entirely differently from one another." Traveling the nation on assignment, she sought out stories that celebrated "a resilience that kept these people true to themselves even in the face of enormous intimidation and pressure to conform."

Pressure can come from many sides -- family, friends, colleagues -- but the ultimate, overwhelming source is the Communist party-state, led since 2012 by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Convinced that the Soviet Union fell when it failed to suppress dissent, Mr. Xi has enforced heightened state control over all spheres of the economy and society, especially in places with large ethnic-minority populations. Under Mr. Xi, the definition of what makes a person "Chinese" has become increasingly narrow: someone who exclusively speaks Mandarin, marries Chinese and has two or three children, respects the leadership of the CCP, accepts censorship and surveillance, and recalibrates in accordance with each new political campaign that comes along. Those who live, think or act differently may find it impossible to remain in Mr. Xi's China. Reporting on the narrowing space for individual expressions of identity proved perilous, too, as Ms. Feng found out when the Chinese government refused to renew her journalist credentials in 2022, forcing her to leave the country.

Ms. Feng explores the party-led shift in the parameters of Chineseness in "Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China." Traveling from mainland China to Hong Kong to Taiwan to the U.S., Ms. Feng profiles individuals who grapple with what it means to belong in, and to, the PRC. Journalistic accounts of contemporary China often focus on dissidents -- those who deliberately oppose and provoke the party-state -- leading to an overrepresentation of such figures in the minds of foreign readers. "Red Flowers" features several subjects who followed the rules, supported the government and thought they were doing everything right. But as those rules changed under Mr. Xi, these rule-abiding citizens still found themselves on the other side of a redrawn red line.

Yang Bin, an attorney who spent decades as a state prosecutor, exemplifies the changes in fortune one can unexpectedly suffer under Mr. Xi. Ms. Yang became a lawyer in the 1990s, when the Chinese government sought to build a legal system with "fair courts and transparent laws" to reassure foreign businesses the PRC was a safe place to invest in. She and her colleagues were encouraged to learn from other countries and exchange ideas on legal reform. Ms. Yang flourished in this environment, blending her commitment to justice with an equal dedication to respecting the humanity of those she prosecuted. The party-state rewarded Ms. Yang with a commendation as a top justice official.

After Mr. Xi ascended to office, however, Ms. Yang's approach fell out of favor. Ms. Yang had not changed, but she was no longer able to work within the system. In 2015 she quit her job and became a human-rights lawyer, "staying true to her original mission of using the law to shape a better, kinder society." Her reinvention was short-lived: In 2019 the state that once lauded her revoked her law license.

Reporting in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, Ms. Feng sees how the party-state has also taken a hard line against previously allowed expressions of ethnic and religious identity. Fearful that Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang will split away from China and form an independent country, Mr. Xi and the CCP have created a police state in this supposedly autonomous region. Streets are blanketed by surveillance technologies, Uyghurs cannot travel freely and more than a million people have spent time detained in political re-education camps.

As the constraints on Uyghurs grew, Abdullatif Kucar -- a businessman born in Xinjiang but now a Turkish citizen -- repeatedly urged his wife, Meryem, to bring their children and join him abroad. Meryem refused. "China," Ms. Feng writes, "was where her family was and her home." But the Chinese government did not know her loyalty. One night, a knock came at the door; Meryem called Mr. Abdullatif in Turkey and kept the line open as she was arrested.

Their children first went to live with relatives, but the relatives, too, soon vanished into the detention camps, and the children were sent to state schools. The government uses these institutions to separate Xinjiang's youths from their Uyghur identity: Days start with a flag-raising ceremony and patriotic songs about "Grandfather" Xi Jinping, followed by intensive instruction in Mandarin. When Mr. Abdullatif finally reunites with his son and daughter, Ms. Feng writes, "the sounds coming out of their mouths were unintelligible to him." The children had lost their native Uyghur language fluency.

Language is also at the center of conflicts between citizens and the government in Inner Mongolia. Adiya, an information-technology worker whose parents encouraged him to learn Mandarin in the 1990s, sees it as the more practical choice for his education and career prospects. Many other parents also opted to send their children to Mandarin-language schools, and by 2017 only 30% of ethnic Mongolian youth were studying in the language of their ancestors. Still, protests broke out in 2020 when the government attempted to reduce Mongolian-language instruction even further.

After decades of making pragmatic choices and following government guidance, Adiya and others in his community realized they "were not being asked to assimilate into one big, diverse melting pot while still retaining their ethnic identities. They were being asked to shed their Mongolian identity completely in favor of one, homogeneous national identity as defined by the Party." In Tibet, Hong Kong and even overseas, the Communist Party is unwilling to let its citizens maintain their own identity alongside a broader Chinese one.

In 1956 Mao launched a political campaign with the slogan "let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend." It was an invitation to citizens to critique the Communist Party. When criticism soon spun out of control, Mao struck back against those who had voiced dissent. Yuhe, a Muslim exporter and publisher from Xinjiang who now lives in Kuala Lumpur, sees an echo of that campaign in Mr. Xi's crackdown on China's diversity. "The state only wants its garden to have one type of flower," he tells Ms. Feng. "Green, blue, or white flowers: if they are not red, they will be cut down."

--Ms. Cunningham is a historian and writer in Ann Arbor, Mich.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 21, 2025 10:13 ET (14:13 GMT)

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