April 17, 2025 • 34 mins
When it comes to China, most Americans are mostly in the dark. Don't believe me? Just quiz your friends. Ask them to name the five largest cities in China. Or to tell you the difference between people in Fujian and Sichuan, or Beijing and Guangzhou? Or how many cars China exported last year. Is China's economy booming on the back of record exports or reeling from a property meltdown and tanking consumer confidence? How many of us can say we know for sure. How many of us are in regular communication with people in China? Here to fill the void is Emily Feng, author of a tremendous new book called Let Only Red Flowers Bloom. Ms Feng brings to life the joys and sorrows, advances and setbacks of ordinary people in China. And she explains why, under Xi Jinping, people are encouraged to bloom red.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
As a long time foreign correspondent, I've worked in lots
of places, but nowhere is important to the world as China.
I'm Jane Perlaz, former Beijing bureau chief for The New
York Times. On Face Off The US versus China will
explore what's critical to this important global relationship, Trump and Sijian,
ping Ai, TikTok, and even Hollywood. New episodes of Face
(00:26):
Off are available now wherever you get your podcasts. As
a long time foreign correspondent, I've worked in lots of places,
but nowhere is important to the world as China. I'm
Jane Perlz, former Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times.
(00:46):
On Face Off the US versus China will explore what's
critical to this important global relationship, Trump and Sijian, Ping Ai, TikTok,
and even Hollywood. New episodes Off are available now wherever
you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Where top executives and crazy entrepreneurs gathered to talk about
the future of electric vehicles. This is the Driving with
Done podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Hello and welcome to the Driving with doone podcast. I
am your host, Michael Dunn. So when it comes to
knowing China and Chinese people, Americans these days are pretty
much in the dark. Yes, last year, some two million
Americans did visit China. That might sound like a lot
until you learn that Americans accounted for less than three
(01:43):
percent of total foreign visitors to the PRC. As a result,
there's a vacuum of knowledge, and that vacuum is patched
over with two completely contrasting narratives. In this corner, our
group seems to be in total awe of China, this
massive industrial machine that supplies the world with every kind
(02:05):
of product, that ran up a trillion dollar trades her
plus in twenty twenty four low, and that utterly dominates industries,
including things like electric vehicles and batteries. Then at the
other end of the spectrum you have another our group
with a different narrative. China's economy is actually weak. It
has serious demographic problems, The property sector is in the gutter,
(02:29):
and consumer confidence is the lowest in years. Hey, we're
guessing what's their reality on the ground in China. How
do ordinary people think, what do they care about? How
do they act today? In twenty twenty five, enter Emily Feng,
author of a tremendous new book called Let Only Red
(02:50):
flowers Bloom. Emily is a veteran reporter for MPR and
other publications. She speaks Chinese fluently. She knows China like
few people on the planet, and in her book, she
brings to life the joys and sorrows, the triumphs and
setbacks of ordinary people across China, from the southeast to
(03:15):
the northwest to the center of the country, including hotspots
like Sinjiang and Taiwan. Emily, I've been following her for years.
She's very impressive and I know you're going to enjoy
this conversation. Here we go, Emily Fang, author, Let only
red Flowers Bloom. Hey wait a second, what does that
(03:38):
mean red flowers bloom? Let's go find out right now,
I'm the Driving with Don podcast Emily Fang, Welcome to
the Driving with Done podcast.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
Thanks so much for having me. Is this kind of
like car talk? Like do we talk?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Oh? Yeah? Got it? Also life as I mean, come on,
so let's do dot cars. Let's talk. You traveled every
corner of China in all kinds of circumstances. You must
have had a favorite car to ride in or did you.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
I've certainly had favorite car trips. Uh huh, one big
grog gret Is. I never drove in China, I never
got my license, but I did a lot of ride hailing.
My favorite ride haling experience was getting an electric home
Sy like one of those red flag vehicles. They looked
like Cadillacs. They're only a couple hundred of them. Used
to be produced every year in China for mostly like
(04:36):
upper level Communist Party officials in China, but in order
to revive their finances, they came out with an EV
model and then they launched a ride hailing platform. I
think it was in Shanghai a couple of years ago,
and I used it and it was fabulous. I mean
it was a really really comfortable car. So that was
memorable because I was.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
What made it different? Or is it was it a
case of your expecting X and you got ten X
or what made it special?
Speaker 4 (05:00):
It was the contrast. It was like the historical weight
of the home Sea and knowing this is the car
that ferries like Trim and Mao and chi Jin pain
and I mean they're a failing state on enterprise, so
they were trying to modernize and they'd come out with
this really flashy like Tesla meets home Shi vehicle totally
wildly overpriced, but of course they were trying to subsidize
(05:22):
it and get it out and put it on a
ride hailing platform. So it was just really fun to
ride in that. Unlike the Bund in Shanghai.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
You you were the royalty.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
It makes you feel like royalty.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
How would you for our listeners, how would you describe
or compare and contrast as a rider all over China
the driving culture or the riding culture in China. Traffic
China versus US, what's the biggest difference.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
There's a much lower density of cars in China simply
because not as many. There are a lot of people drive,
but I think the number of the proportion of people
who drive is still lower than in the US. And
basically all of their highways, as you know, were built
in the last fifteen years. So you've got these eight
lien highways that are completely empty with people who kind
of don't really know how to drive yet, but they're
(06:09):
zooming along at like ninety miles an hour, so there's
a lot more space. But also like there's an obsession
with cars, but people also don't drive as much as
you know.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
You mentioned the wide open spaces. Yeah, that's something that
probably most Americans wouldn't think of. They've got these fabulous
auto bond like super highways connecting cities all over the world,
arguably the best highways in the world, and many of
them are empty, depending on the time of day and
where you're going. So that's an eye opener. Your title
of the book is let only red flowers Bloom? How
(06:41):
did that title come about as an author? Did you
have a short list? And then secondly, what does it mean?
Speaker 4 (06:47):
I heard that in an interview that I was doing
late at night in the back of a car actually
with one of the people who ended up becoming one
of the main characters in this book. And he said
in Chinese at the end of this quite long interview
to conclude, you know, now China only wants to let
only red flowers bloom. There used to be yellow flowers
and blue flowers and green flow, but now they only
(07:08):
want red flowers. And this was a metaphor for the diversity,
the intellectual diversity that he was describing, that it disappeared
from his youth, and I thought that captured the thesis
of the book so well, and the feeling. And it's
also a reference to Chairman Mao's exhortation to let one
hundred flowers bloom back when he wanted more diverse intellectual
thought and then changed his mind halfway through and imprisoned
(07:30):
a lot of the people who spoke out. So there's
that historical reference and that reference to party slogans. But
also it was said very genuinely in this emotional moment
with a man who is one of the characters in
the book, and I just thought, when I heard it
at that time, this is a phrase I'm going to remember.
And when I started writing the book, it came up
again and it was honestly the only title that I considered.
(07:51):
It stuck with me from the direction of the book
to when it was published. I thought maybe I might
change it, and I never did.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
What does a red flower look like?
Speaker 4 (08:00):
That I talk about this in the beginning of the book.
It's this conception of what the ideal Chinese citizen should be.
Obviously not every citizen is like this, but it's someone
who looks or at least acts Han Chinese, who speaks
in standard Mandarin Chinese, who is loyal to the party,
follows party dictates, is ideally heterosexual. If you're a woman
(08:21):
willing to have more children for the country. And so
just in general, like I wanted to get at this
observation I had made over several years, my last few
years reporting on the ground in China, that so many
of the policies were affecting the day to day lives
of ordinary citizens, and in some way directly or indirectly,
they somehow touched upon some aspect of identity, whether it
(08:43):
was family life or gender, or language and education, political
values of course, ethnicity. And so that flower metaphor ended
up kind of sweeping up all these different aspects of identity.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
So you have the party up top wanting in their
vision for everyone to sort of be that red flower.
Then underneath the hood, so to speak, using the car terminology,
you've got this sort of pressure cooker of all kinds
of different people, different walks of life, with their own
personal aspirations. And that's where the tension comes into play.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
Yes, personal aspirations and the fact that China has always
been a diverse collection of people and languages and geographies.
I mean, in general, this idea of a cohesive nation
state is relatively new around the world, and especially in China,
which likes to look at things in terms of civilizations
and migrations of people. So the borders of the POC
(09:36):
objectively are relatively new in the encompassed people who always
had very different visions for what they wanted in terms
of governance or as a political entity. Certainly reguistically. I mean,
you know that people speak hundreds and hundred dialects over there,
So I wanted to get at that tension and the
fact that China has always been a very very diverse place.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
So how does it play out? You know, from the
outside looking in For those who have not been to
China before, you hear, well, the Communist Party sets the
rules and everyone more or less gets in line or else.
And then you live there and you find, you know,
dialects different, but people eat or different, their values are
different across east to west, north to south. So you've
(10:20):
got this sort of powerful party on the one hand
driving things in one direction. Then you have reality on
the ground in another direction. How does it play out?
Speaker 4 (10:30):
It's undeniable. There's more and more social and political control
from party or party related organs now in China. But
you and I have both found and I think this
is why I enjoyed living there for as long as
I did. That There's an incredible amount of grade space,
and people are very resilient everywhere you go, especially in China,
and so they find ways to do what they want
to do, and they find ways to express themselves and
(10:53):
to beat themselves, even if that runs counter to what
the official policy or where the political winds are blowing.
It used to be a little bit more chaotic in China.
Of course, now it's getting more and more ordered. But
I also wanted to give people a feeling of that
like texture and rhythm of living in China, encountering that
grade space all the time.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
What's the expression? I think in Chinese the mountains are
high and the empire is far away.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Especially as you got out of Beijing or you got
outside the Fifth Ring, I think you encountered a lot
of examples of people just doing what they do because
that's what they want.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Let's go back to a moment in time twenty nineteen
when you first were first got the inspiration to write
this book. You recounted being detained at the if I
remember correctly, at the Beijing airport. Can you take us
into this scene? What was happening what does detainment look like,
and in particular, what's that interaction with the people who
(11:48):
are holding you.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
This was kind of a rude question that became very
routine every time I tried to routine and enter mainland China.
The tensions a strong word, you know. They just me
and immigration for several hours and ask about my work
and look at my devices. And it was sparked in
part because of the twenty nineteen anti extradition protests in
(12:09):
Hong Kong. I was traveling there every single weekend to
cover the protests basically, and they were really sensitive to
people bringing back into mainland China videos of protests, and
they were also very sensitive about journalists who were based
in the mainland that were going to Hong Kong to
cover these protests. So that's what precipitated the questioning. And
it would just it would happen. It would happen every
(12:31):
single time I traveled, even when I was leaving mainland
China for vacation. This particular night that I detail on
the book was just really really it was especially long.
I think I got held there for about three hours.
It was late at night, so not no one the
people questioning me or me. Were very happy.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
And so you're in a room. Are you by yourself?
Are there others there? Is it spartan? Is it comfortable?
Is it cold? Dark? Brightly lit? What does it feel
like in that seat.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
That fluorescently lit? It's a room right next to where
like the automatic gates for passport control are. And so
what would happen is I would scan my passport. It
would let me through the first gate, but then it
would block me at the end. The second gate wouldn't open.
They'd have to call over an officer and they would,
you know, see something on their screen and go, oh okay,
follow me please and just take you to passport control.
(13:22):
No one was there because it was like one am
or something. I do remember. They were looking for an
African man who had apparently evaded passport control because he
didn't have the right PISA to enter the PRC and
had just like hid himself in the airport and so
he was on the run and they were looking for
him to but it was just me and this officer
(13:44):
in the room, and they went through the usual questions,
you know, what do you do, what do you cover?
When did you move here? Who do you write for?
What were you doing in Hong Kong. What's on your computer?
Can you show me your pictures? And yeah, And I
got a little testy. It was just the same question
they asked me every single time, and eventually they said, listen,
if you don't cooperate, we're going to have to deport you.
(14:08):
And there had been there had been mounting pressure on
me and our reporting already in mainland China, and it
got worse as the years went on, especially during the
COVID pandemic. And so although this was not the first
time I had been stopped at the Beijing Capital Airport,
I really started thinking for the first time that night,
the trends are not looking good. If this continues, and
(14:30):
if it escalates as I think it will, there might
be a day where I actually can't return to China.
So what will I do then? What would be my
purpose then? Because in China my work was really important
to me. It was a huge sense of mission and identity,
and I wanted a way to continue that even if
I weren't in China.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
When you talk about identity, in fact, you write this
in the book. This book is about identity and how
it shapes the way we see the world. So we're
going to go a little bit deeper with you as
a Chinese. How does one say that as a Chinese person?
You're a Chinese person who grew up in the United States.
(15:11):
Going back to China, I have so many Chinese friends
who wrestle with this question of identity. Am I Chinese first?
Am I China national? Chinese first? Where am I loyalty?
Where are my allegiances? Where's my heart? So can you
talk a little bit about that. What's special about being
Chinese and how does that shaped your own life and
(15:34):
your own identity.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
I think that Chinese is one of those cultures that
is more of an umbrella. It encompasses a lot of
different overlapping and non exclusive cultures and languages and histories,
and a lot of them are concentrated in the borders
of the PRAC but they don't necessarily have to exist there,
nor have they always existed there. And as someone who
(15:57):
feels culturally Chinese, you know, my parents born in mainland China.
They emigrated at a very young age to the US
and have spent most of their lives in the US,
but they've maintained this cultural connection to the place of
their birth and they passed that on to me, and
I learned to love the language. You know, I didn't
really speak it or ever really learn to write it.
Growing up. I was in one of those classic households
(16:19):
where my parents spoke Mandarin to me and then I
responded in English. But I loved languages. I studied Spanish,
and so finally, when I went to university, I started
learning Mandarin seriously for the first time. And then, you know,
I lived in a Mandarin speaking world for about ten years,
first in China, then in Taiwan, and so it became
(16:40):
really important to me to think about identity not as
an exclusive thing where I had to rank it by hierarchy.
Am I Chinese first or American first? Or if I
do identify with one, does that necessarily preclude loyalty to another?
But just simply existing in multiple identities, just like the
Chinese identity, I think has multiple aspects and can be
(17:00):
flexible and encompass many, many different values or outlooks.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
When you were with these, I was fascinated reading about
during these detained these times of being detained, you were
sort of encouraged because you're Chinese to tell the China story. Well,
what did you understand that to mean.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
This was more in conversations with officials in routine meetings,
not when I was detained, I see, but they would constantly,
and they would say this to non ethnically Chinese reporters too,
But I felt like they brought it up quite a
lot with me, and they would look at me as
if I would understand, you.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Should understand you're Chinese. I am a Chinese story, well please,
And I.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
Think what they meant by the Chinese story is a
standardized positive, what I might call positive energy story to
lift a theme from my own book about the country.
And it's not that that story isn't true. There are many,
many great things that China has done. It's developed in
some ways an amazing ways at an amazing pace. But
(18:03):
that's not the full story there. There is so much
more to what's happening on the ground there, and taken together,
it's not all good and it's not all bad. And
I wanted to capture that that diversity. I keep coming
back to that word, and that was somehow seen as
like an inherently negative thing.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Don't go too far away from the narrative that we'd
like to present to the world. Let's not depart, let's
not go off too far away from that? Is that?
Is that that message?
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Right?
Speaker 3 (18:31):
They?
Speaker 4 (18:31):
They?
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, your book reminds me a lot of wild swans.
Do you happen to know that book? It's uh by
it of course? Yeah. Three three what is it called
wild Son's Three Daughters of China, right?
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Yes? Three generations of women in China.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Yeah, because it's sort of like there's this headline China
and then there's this. Well. In my years in China,
if used to think of it as kind of a
pressure cookers. So on the one hand, you have all
these rules and expectations and officials, and there's cameras everywhere
and surveillance everywhere. At the same time, my Chinese friends
(19:11):
would always feel like it'd be like hide and go seek.
We know those surveillers are there, but we also like
to do our own thing and carve out our own
little freedoms here. So people who haven't been this gets
complex for people who haven't been to China, Like, wait
a second, which is the correct narrative. Is it a
surveillance state, you know, the book by Josh Chin and
(19:33):
Liza Lin, or is it sort of a little bit
wild West, that's being more or less controlled or guided
by the party. For your friend from North Carolina approaches
you this weekends that I'm going to China, what do
you tell her to expect in terms of that country
big picture?
Speaker 4 (19:52):
It depends, right, It depends on where you go and
who you talk to. You can find every variation of
opinion or landscape or political situation there. So if you
were in Beijing and you were meeting with certain people,
you might feel a very very much stricter side of China.
But if you went to Dolli and you engaged in
(20:12):
some questionable behavior in some village and then you know,
are they really going to care? No, you might find
that there's actually like an incredible flexibility and looseness in
the way that people implement rules and regulations. And so
I think that you can find a little bit of
everything in China, which is what makes it such a
fascinating country that you can spend I mean literally for
(20:33):
some people decades there. And I always say it depends.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
There's many China's yes.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
And I think I end on that note, is that
everyone is kind of dreaming of a different China. They
all know a different side of China and that informs
what they think the future of China is. But ultimately
they're all living in these different microcosms of China.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
You had that interview with the former President of Taiwan,
mister ma Ying TiO is it several years ago where
he said, you know, China today is different from China
thirty years ago. He was optimistic, hopeful. At the same time,
we have this man named Tijinping who's taking power since
twenty twelve, and China feels heavier today than it did.
(21:16):
Then if we project to the next ten years, where
do you see China.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
Heady and see it kind of in stasis? And that's
the sad part is there's I think so much momentum
and resources and human capital that could bring it in
different directions. But I think the political energy right now
is to kind of maintain maintain stability, maintain the status quo,
and if they're are breakthroughs, kind of throw all the
(21:42):
energy and resources into basically cutting edge technology, you know,
semiconductor's AI civil military, dual application technology and looking for
disruptive technologies that way. But in terms of like big
changes at the social level culturally, in terms of political
looks expression or even like yeah, I don't see that
(22:03):
changing that much. And I think for people who are
currently reporting in China, who have just left, still working there,
who I talk to, it seems like there is a
little bit of lethargy settling in. It's not so bad,
but that energy that you could feel that was tangible
if you went to a first your city isn't really there.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
That's a good too philosophical. But throughout Chinese history isn't
there this thing called lant or chaos? And there's this
fear of chaos, and it seems to be there through
the centuries and through the dynasties to what extent is
the Chinese Communist Party just the most modern dynasty, and
you have the emperor in charge, and you're trying to
(22:42):
preside over this billion and a half people more or
less continent sized country, and you're just like, oh, if
we let go, it's going to be chaos. It's our
responsibility to cap this chaos. Is that an accurate description
of how you talk how Chinese identity, how Chinese leaders
see reality? Yes?
Speaker 4 (23:04):
Absolutely, And I think that's the narrative that they sell
that out there are these great oceans of chaos. Everything
tends towards disorder, and we need this dynastic kind of bureaucracy,
this incredibly elaborate scientific system of governance we've built up
through practice to keep that at bay, to regulate this
(23:26):
country with so many people in it.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
All the characters in the book, which one made the
biggest impression on you?
Speaker 4 (23:33):
And why all these people made an impression on me?
Which is why I wrote about them rather than the
dozens of other people I could have written about. The
story that I spent the most time reporting was the
one about a leager family who find themselves separated between
Turkey and China. Part of that time was because it
took them a while to feel safe to share their story,
and another was the COVID pandemic. I got in touch
(23:54):
with them in twenty nineteen and was hoping to go
visit them in the Father and Turkey, and found myself
unable to travel as borders closed and China closed its borders,
and so it took a really long time, basically until
twenty twenty two that I could finally visit them and
finish that reporting. So we stayed in touch with them
after the initial stories came out and have tracked their progress.
(24:16):
And yeah, so that's one that I think stayed with
me because just the scale of what they've gone through
has been so almost comedically tragic. I mean, just like
the worst luck family. And you know, recently I learned
that the father, Abdulahtif who I profiled the story, passed away.
He had been suffering from gall bladder cancer for the
(24:37):
last two years that I knew him and couldn't beat it.
So just kind of like they can't really catch a break.
And yeah, that stayed with me.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
Emily questioned for you, for people outside of China thinking
about seeing John Province up there in the Northwest, what's
the best way to understand it. Should it be tard
of China or should it actually be independent?
Speaker 4 (25:00):
I mean, how did Wigers feel about their political status?
How did I see it?
Speaker 3 (25:04):
How did you see it?
Speaker 4 (25:04):
I think there's room in the Chinese project, in the
umbrella of Chinese identity, to have space for everyone. And
initially that was what the promise was. That was for
weaker people, for Tibetans, for anyone living in an autonomous
region of the PRC. In practice that has not happened,
(25:26):
and so most of the Wigers I talked to had
no political ambitions of trying to set up a political
state at this point separate from the PRC. They were
hoping to get the right safe and promised in their
constitution in the PRC. And the family that I profiled
is weager family whose children are taken away from them.
Were part of this moderate, very wealthy, quite well educated
(25:49):
level of entrepreneurs and leager civil society that came up
during Opening and Reform and thought, hey, maybe there actually
is an opportunity for us to put down roots and
build a community, build some thing lasting for the weaker
people within China, within the Chinese project. Abd La chief
and his brother end up becoming very wealthy businessmen because
they're in China, and it's only until they're really kind
(26:13):
of forced with their back against the wall metaphorically that
they start pushing back.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Now, let's move from the northwest to way the other
end of the country, the southeast, and that island called Taiwan.
From Beijing's perspective, the people in charge of People's Republic
of China, what should be Taiwan's destiny.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
So in China, I think there's a very clear stance
which is that this is an unfinished, open ended wound
in some ways that hasn't healed yet, and one has
always been part of China and their eyes, and it's
just temporarily been this issue where they've been able to
set their own government and basically function like their own country,
mostly because of meddling from the US support from the
(26:57):
US in Taiwan. The viewpoints are always shifting. There is
more and more of a shift towards we don't really
need to have anything to do with China. That kind
of began under the mind Yale period when trade and
people exchanges were at their height, and then Mind Joe
tried to force through this crosstrates trade packed essentially, and
(27:19):
people objected legislatively to the way you pushed that through
the parliament and also to where that might lead Taiwan
maybe being too economically enmeshed with the PRC, and so
there were huge protests. It was called the Sunflower movement.
And since then I think you see much more of
a public, mainstream conversation in Taiwan about not necessarily we
(27:41):
have to be independent, but just what are the ways
in which we should be interacting with the PRC and
what are ways where we should disentangle ourselves and look
towards Southeast Asia, for example, and more and more because
China has rebuffed working with the DPP kind of from
the outset of chai Wan's first term, rejected working with
(28:04):
her and mounted more military exercises and patrols around Taiwan
that you've seen, also more public support for serious military reforms,
and more spending on the defense budget, extending the reservist
training period from four months to one year, to buying
(28:26):
different kinds of weapons and doing civil defense trainings among civilians.
So yeah, I see people thinking and worrying more about
China these days in Taiwan than before.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
If we look into the crystal ball five ten years out,
does China does Taiwan just become part of China?
Speaker 4 (28:47):
It depends. I think there's so many movies.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
So you lived there, you felt that you lived on
both sides. You see both perspectives. You're saying, it's not
a foregone conclusion one way or another could go in
any direction.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
You could go in any direction. And I think even
people in China are very nervous about this too, especially
people who live along the East coast in Fujian and Judzian,
where there's a lot of military bases that would be
directly facing Taiwan in the event of war or invasion,
and they don't want to put their lives on the
line for a place that feels really far away, even
(29:23):
if it's not that far away. So I think that
ordinary people, of course don't want war at all. And
I think it's really a matter of political leadership more
than anything.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
You lived in China, you lived in Taiwan. How strong
is the sentiment would you say that Taiwan will eventually
become part of mainland China?
Speaker 4 (29:41):
Uh? Not very strong anyway, strong, fascinating think among as
a slightly older cohort of people, still very strong, okay.
And it's emotional and it's political, and it's also about
family histories and trauma. If they have someone who came
over from the mainland and was never able to go
back and still have family there. But that's kind of
(30:01):
dying out, and I think those emotions fade with time.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I take away from your book and from our conversation
today is that when we're at the next cocktail party
or happy hour and people go China, you go, Oh,
it's very complicated. There's no single narrative. There's a lot
of narratives woven together, and it's yeah, unclear.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
What you've got it. I'll do that annoying academic thing
which if someone tries to ask you a straightforward question,
instead of saying yes, now, you say, well, it's complicated.
But in this case in China, it really is.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Emily, you speak fluent Chinese. What is the fundamental difference
between Chinese and any other language.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
I do think that there is a more roundabout way
of expressing oneself and culturally than in English or a
romance language, or I don't speak this language, but it
seems Arabic, where I think people are me at self
expression and self narrativizing their own stories. And in China
there is a reluctance to speak about individual opinions and feelings.
(31:07):
Especially you're never going to be so straightforward suspicious of
someone who's that straightforward.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yes, they're suspicious as someone who's that direct. Can you
give us an example of what that might look like,
that in directness or that subtlety.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
So, for example, if someone had gone through the most
amazing transformative experience or the worst day of their lives,
these are usually the two experiences that journalists gravitate towards
and are interviewing people about. You would expect people to
have all these reflections about how they feel, how this
has changed their lives, how terrible or great it is,
and go on and on and on. But in China
(31:45):
would often get monosyllabic like yes or no, answers to things,
or just shrugs like this is the way it is,
what can we do about it? And so getting like
getting someone to actually teasing, teasing out how they felt
and getting a before, middle, and end to any story
could be really, really difficult.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Fantastic Emily Fang, author Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, tremendous book.
Go get it? How do we get it? Where should
we look for it?
Speaker 4 (32:12):
You can go to bookshop dot org and you can
order it from your local bookstore. You can I think
it's in libraries already. You can go to Amazon, of
course for the e book version. I did an audible
audio book, so it's my voice. I recorded my own book.
You can listen to that if you don't want to read. Yeah,
it's basically it's everywhere where you would normally get it
(32:33):
online or offline.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Emily you've written a phenomenal book. I know you're just
stepping out right now as we speak to do a
book talk and signing. No doubt in my mind that
you will absolutely crush it. When you think about it,
(32:56):
it's actually not a surprise that China is complicated. We're
talking about as civilization's been around for thousands of years
that occupies a continent and has a massive population, and
within that population you have enormous diversity when it comes
to those individual values, aspirations, and behavior. Chinese rulers for
(33:19):
thousands of years have felt that it's their job to
keep this sort of potential chaos from erupting in society,
whether it was the tong or the song, or the
ming or the ching. The CCP in twenty twenty five
is no different. Thus the three hundred million cameras, thus
(33:40):
the monitoring and tight management of the Internet. As a result,
we have tensions from below that create a lot of confusion.
The question comes down to this, is China or surveillance
state or is it home to a lot of individual
personalities bursting with energy and ambitions. The answer, of course
(34:01):
is yes both of those. Hey, I hope you enjoyed
this conversation with Emily Fang I certainly did. Thank you
so much for joining This is the Driving with Done podcast.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Where you meet the experts creating the technologies that will
power tomorrow's cars electric autonomous software. To find this is
a Driving with Done podcast. Thank you for joining this
episode of the Driving with Done podcast. To connect with
Michael Donn, visit doneinsights dot com or find Michael on
(34:35):
x or LinkedIn This is the Driving with Done Podcast
As a long time foreign correspondent, I've worked in lots
of places, but nowhere is important to the world as China.
I'm Jane Perlaz, former Beijing bureau chief for The New
York Times. On Face Off The US versus China will
explore what's critical to this important global relationship, Trump and Sijian,
ping Ai, TikTok, and even Hollywood. New episodes of Face
(00:26):
Off are available now wherever you get your podcasts. As
a long time foreign correspondent, I've worked in lots of places,
but nowhere is important to the world as China. I'm
Jane Perlz, former Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times.
(00:46):
On Face Off the US versus China will explore what's
critical to this important global relationship, Trump and Sijian, Ping Ai, TikTok,
and even Hollywood. New episodes Off are available now wherever
you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Where top executives and crazy entrepreneurs gathered to talk about
the future of electric vehicles. This is the Driving with
Done podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Hello and welcome to the Driving with doone podcast. I
am your host, Michael Dunn. So when it comes to
knowing China and Chinese people, Americans these days are pretty
much in the dark. Yes, last year, some two million
Americans did visit China. That might sound like a lot
until you learn that Americans accounted for less than three
(01:43):
percent of total foreign visitors to the PRC. As a result,
there's a vacuum of knowledge, and that vacuum is patched
over with two completely contrasting narratives. In this corner, our
group seems to be in total awe of China, this
massive industrial machine that supplies the world with every kind
(02:05):
of product, that ran up a trillion dollar trades her
plus in twenty twenty four low, and that utterly dominates industries,
including things like electric vehicles and batteries. Then at the
other end of the spectrum you have another our group
with a different narrative. China's economy is actually weak. It
has serious demographic problems, The property sector is in the gutter,
(02:29):
and consumer confidence is the lowest in years. Hey, we're
guessing what's their reality on the ground in China. How
do ordinary people think, what do they care about? How
do they act today? In twenty twenty five, enter Emily Feng,
author of a tremendous new book called Let Only Red
(02:50):
flowers Bloom. Emily is a veteran reporter for MPR and
other publications. She speaks Chinese fluently. She knows China like
few people on the planet, and in her book, she
brings to life the joys and sorrows, the triumphs and
setbacks of ordinary people across China, from the southeast to
(03:15):
the northwest to the center of the country, including hotspots
like Sinjiang and Taiwan. Emily, I've been following her for years.
She's very impressive and I know you're going to enjoy
this conversation. Here we go, Emily Fang, author, Let only
red Flowers Bloom. Hey wait a second, what does that
(03:38):
mean red flowers bloom? Let's go find out right now,
I'm the Driving with Don podcast Emily Fang, Welcome to
the Driving with Done podcast.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
Thanks so much for having me. Is this kind of
like car talk? Like do we talk?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Oh? Yeah? Got it? Also life as I mean, come on,
so let's do dot cars. Let's talk. You traveled every
corner of China in all kinds of circumstances. You must
have had a favorite car to ride in or did you.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
I've certainly had favorite car trips. Uh huh, one big
grog gret Is. I never drove in China, I never
got my license, but I did a lot of ride hailing.
My favorite ride haling experience was getting an electric home
Sy like one of those red flag vehicles. They looked
like Cadillacs. They're only a couple hundred of them. Used
to be produced every year in China for mostly like
(04:36):
upper level Communist Party officials in China, but in order
to revive their finances, they came out with an EV
model and then they launched a ride hailing platform. I
think it was in Shanghai a couple of years ago,
and I used it and it was fabulous. I mean
it was a really really comfortable car. So that was
memorable because I was.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
What made it different? Or is it was it a
case of your expecting X and you got ten X
or what made it special?
Speaker 4 (05:00):
It was the contrast. It was like the historical weight
of the home Sea and knowing this is the car
that ferries like Trim and Mao and chi Jin pain
and I mean they're a failing state on enterprise, so
they were trying to modernize and they'd come out with
this really flashy like Tesla meets home Shi vehicle totally
wildly overpriced, but of course they were trying to subsidize
(05:22):
it and get it out and put it on a
ride hailing platform. So it was just really fun to
ride in that. Unlike the Bund in Shanghai.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
You you were the royalty.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
It makes you feel like royalty.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
How would you for our listeners, how would you describe
or compare and contrast as a rider all over China
the driving culture or the riding culture in China. Traffic
China versus US, what's the biggest difference.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
There's a much lower density of cars in China simply
because not as many. There are a lot of people drive,
but I think the number of the proportion of people
who drive is still lower than in the US. And
basically all of their highways, as you know, were built
in the last fifteen years. So you've got these eight
lien highways that are completely empty with people who kind
of don't really know how to drive yet, but they're
(06:09):
zooming along at like ninety miles an hour, so there's
a lot more space. But also like there's an obsession
with cars, but people also don't drive as much as
you know.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
You mentioned the wide open spaces. Yeah, that's something that
probably most Americans wouldn't think of. They've got these fabulous
auto bond like super highways connecting cities all over the world,
arguably the best highways in the world, and many of
them are empty, depending on the time of day and
where you're going. So that's an eye opener. Your title
of the book is let only red flowers Bloom? How
(06:41):
did that title come about as an author? Did you
have a short list? And then secondly, what does it mean?
Speaker 4 (06:47):
I heard that in an interview that I was doing
late at night in the back of a car actually
with one of the people who ended up becoming one
of the main characters in this book. And he said
in Chinese at the end of this quite long interview
to conclude, you know, now China only wants to let
only red flowers bloom. There used to be yellow flowers
and blue flowers and green flow, but now they only
(07:08):
want red flowers. And this was a metaphor for the diversity,
the intellectual diversity that he was describing, that it disappeared
from his youth, and I thought that captured the thesis
of the book so well, and the feeling. And it's
also a reference to Chairman Mao's exhortation to let one
hundred flowers bloom back when he wanted more diverse intellectual
thought and then changed his mind halfway through and imprisoned
(07:30):
a lot of the people who spoke out. So there's
that historical reference and that reference to party slogans. But
also it was said very genuinely in this emotional moment
with a man who is one of the characters in
the book, and I just thought, when I heard it
at that time, this is a phrase I'm going to remember.
And when I started writing the book, it came up
again and it was honestly the only title that I considered.
(07:51):
It stuck with me from the direction of the book
to when it was published. I thought maybe I might
change it, and I never did.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
What does a red flower look like?
Speaker 4 (08:00):
That I talk about this in the beginning of the book.
It's this conception of what the ideal Chinese citizen should be.
Obviously not every citizen is like this, but it's someone
who looks or at least acts Han Chinese, who speaks
in standard Mandarin Chinese, who is loyal to the party,
follows party dictates, is ideally heterosexual. If you're a woman
(08:21):
willing to have more children for the country. And so
just in general, like I wanted to get at this
observation I had made over several years, my last few
years reporting on the ground in China, that so many
of the policies were affecting the day to day lives
of ordinary citizens, and in some way directly or indirectly,
they somehow touched upon some aspect of identity, whether it
(08:43):
was family life or gender, or language and education, political
values of course, ethnicity. And so that flower metaphor ended
up kind of sweeping up all these different aspects of identity.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
So you have the party up top wanting in their
vision for everyone to sort of be that red flower.
Then underneath the hood, so to speak, using the car terminology,
you've got this sort of pressure cooker of all kinds
of different people, different walks of life, with their own
personal aspirations. And that's where the tension comes into play.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
Yes, personal aspirations and the fact that China has always
been a diverse collection of people and languages and geographies.
I mean, in general, this idea of a cohesive nation
state is relatively new around the world, and especially in China,
which likes to look at things in terms of civilizations
and migrations of people. So the borders of the POC
(09:36):
objectively are relatively new in the encompassed people who always
had very different visions for what they wanted in terms
of governance or as a political entity. Certainly reguistically. I mean,
you know that people speak hundreds and hundred dialects over there,
So I wanted to get at that tension and the
fact that China has always been a very very diverse place.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
So how does it play out? You know, from the
outside looking in For those who have not been to
China before, you hear, well, the Communist Party sets the
rules and everyone more or less gets in line or else.
And then you live there and you find, you know,
dialects different, but people eat or different, their values are
different across east to west, north to south. So you've
(10:20):
got this sort of powerful party on the one hand
driving things in one direction. Then you have reality on
the ground in another direction. How does it play out?
Speaker 4 (10:30):
It's undeniable. There's more and more social and political control
from party or party related organs now in China. But
you and I have both found and I think this
is why I enjoyed living there for as long as
I did. That There's an incredible amount of grade space,
and people are very resilient everywhere you go, especially in China,
and so they find ways to do what they want
to do, and they find ways to express themselves and
(10:53):
to beat themselves, even if that runs counter to what
the official policy or where the political winds are blowing.
It used to be a little bit more chaotic in China.
Of course, now it's getting more and more ordered. But
I also wanted to give people a feeling of that
like texture and rhythm of living in China, encountering that
grade space all the time.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
What's the expression? I think in Chinese the mountains are
high and the empire is far away.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Especially as you got out of Beijing or you got
outside the Fifth Ring, I think you encountered a lot
of examples of people just doing what they do because
that's what they want.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Let's go back to a moment in time twenty nineteen
when you first were first got the inspiration to write
this book. You recounted being detained at the if I
remember correctly, at the Beijing airport. Can you take us
into this scene? What was happening what does detainment look like,
and in particular, what's that interaction with the people who
(11:48):
are holding you.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
This was kind of a rude question that became very
routine every time I tried to routine and enter mainland China.
The tensions a strong word, you know. They just me
and immigration for several hours and ask about my work
and look at my devices. And it was sparked in
part because of the twenty nineteen anti extradition protests in
(12:09):
Hong Kong. I was traveling there every single weekend to
cover the protests basically, and they were really sensitive to
people bringing back into mainland China videos of protests, and
they were also very sensitive about journalists who were based
in the mainland that were going to Hong Kong to
cover these protests. So that's what precipitated the questioning. And
it would just it would happen. It would happen every
(12:31):
single time I traveled, even when I was leaving mainland
China for vacation. This particular night that I detail on
the book was just really really it was especially long.
I think I got held there for about three hours.
It was late at night, so not no one the
people questioning me or me. Were very happy.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
And so you're in a room. Are you by yourself?
Are there others there? Is it spartan? Is it comfortable?
Is it cold? Dark? Brightly lit? What does it feel
like in that seat.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
That fluorescently lit? It's a room right next to where
like the automatic gates for passport control are. And so
what would happen is I would scan my passport. It
would let me through the first gate, but then it
would block me at the end. The second gate wouldn't open.
They'd have to call over an officer and they would,
you know, see something on their screen and go, oh okay,
follow me please and just take you to passport control.
(13:22):
No one was there because it was like one am
or something. I do remember. They were looking for an
African man who had apparently evaded passport control because he
didn't have the right PISA to enter the PRC and
had just like hid himself in the airport and so
he was on the run and they were looking for
him to but it was just me and this officer
(13:44):
in the room, and they went through the usual questions,
you know, what do you do, what do you cover?
When did you move here? Who do you write for?
What were you doing in Hong Kong. What's on your computer?
Can you show me your pictures? And yeah, And I
got a little testy. It was just the same question
they asked me every single time, and eventually they said, listen,
if you don't cooperate, we're going to have to deport you.
(14:08):
And there had been there had been mounting pressure on
me and our reporting already in mainland China, and it
got worse as the years went on, especially during the
COVID pandemic. And so although this was not the first
time I had been stopped at the Beijing Capital Airport,
I really started thinking for the first time that night,
the trends are not looking good. If this continues, and
(14:30):
if it escalates as I think it will, there might
be a day where I actually can't return to China.
So what will I do then? What would be my
purpose then? Because in China my work was really important
to me. It was a huge sense of mission and identity,
and I wanted a way to continue that even if
I weren't in China.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
When you talk about identity, in fact, you write this
in the book. This book is about identity and how
it shapes the way we see the world. So we're
going to go a little bit deeper with you as
a Chinese. How does one say that as a Chinese person?
You're a Chinese person who grew up in the United States.
(15:11):
Going back to China, I have so many Chinese friends
who wrestle with this question of identity. Am I Chinese first?
Am I China national? Chinese first? Where am I loyalty?
Where are my allegiances? Where's my heart? So can you
talk a little bit about that. What's special about being
Chinese and how does that shaped your own life and
(15:34):
your own identity.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
I think that Chinese is one of those cultures that
is more of an umbrella. It encompasses a lot of
different overlapping and non exclusive cultures and languages and histories,
and a lot of them are concentrated in the borders
of the PRAC but they don't necessarily have to exist there,
nor have they always existed there. And as someone who
(15:57):
feels culturally Chinese, you know, my parents born in mainland China.
They emigrated at a very young age to the US
and have spent most of their lives in the US,
but they've maintained this cultural connection to the place of
their birth and they passed that on to me, and
I learned to love the language. You know, I didn't
really speak it or ever really learn to write it.
Growing up. I was in one of those classic households
(16:19):
where my parents spoke Mandarin to me and then I
responded in English. But I loved languages. I studied Spanish,
and so finally, when I went to university, I started
learning Mandarin seriously for the first time. And then, you know,
I lived in a Mandarin speaking world for about ten years,
first in China, then in Taiwan, and so it became
(16:40):
really important to me to think about identity not as
an exclusive thing where I had to rank it by hierarchy.
Am I Chinese first or American first? Or if I
do identify with one, does that necessarily preclude loyalty to another?
But just simply existing in multiple identities, just like the
Chinese identity, I think has multiple aspects and can be
(17:00):
flexible and encompass many, many different values or outlooks.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
When you were with these, I was fascinated reading about
during these detained these times of being detained, you were
sort of encouraged because you're Chinese to tell the China story. Well,
what did you understand that to mean.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
This was more in conversations with officials in routine meetings,
not when I was detained, I see, but they would constantly,
and they would say this to non ethnically Chinese reporters too,
But I felt like they brought it up quite a
lot with me, and they would look at me as
if I would understand, you.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Should understand you're Chinese. I am a Chinese story, well please,
And I.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
Think what they meant by the Chinese story is a
standardized positive, what I might call positive energy story to
lift a theme from my own book about the country.
And it's not that that story isn't true. There are many,
many great things that China has done. It's developed in
some ways an amazing ways at an amazing pace. But
(18:03):
that's not the full story there. There is so much
more to what's happening on the ground there, and taken together,
it's not all good and it's not all bad. And
I wanted to capture that that diversity. I keep coming
back to that word, and that was somehow seen as
like an inherently negative thing.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Don't go too far away from the narrative that we'd
like to present to the world. Let's not depart, let's
not go off too far away from that? Is that?
Is that that message?
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Right?
Speaker 3 (18:31):
They?
Speaker 4 (18:31):
They?
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, your book reminds me a lot of wild swans.
Do you happen to know that book? It's uh by
it of course? Yeah. Three three what is it called
wild Son's Three Daughters of China, right?
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Yes? Three generations of women in China.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Yeah, because it's sort of like there's this headline China
and then there's this. Well. In my years in China,
if used to think of it as kind of a
pressure cookers. So on the one hand, you have all
these rules and expectations and officials, and there's cameras everywhere
and surveillance everywhere. At the same time, my Chinese friends
(19:11):
would always feel like it'd be like hide and go seek.
We know those surveillers are there, but we also like
to do our own thing and carve out our own
little freedoms here. So people who haven't been this gets
complex for people who haven't been to China, Like, wait
a second, which is the correct narrative. Is it a
surveillance state, you know, the book by Josh Chin and
(19:33):
Liza Lin, or is it sort of a little bit
wild West, that's being more or less controlled or guided
by the party. For your friend from North Carolina approaches
you this weekends that I'm going to China, what do
you tell her to expect in terms of that country
big picture?
Speaker 4 (19:52):
It depends, right, It depends on where you go and
who you talk to. You can find every variation of
opinion or landscape or political situation there. So if you
were in Beijing and you were meeting with certain people,
you might feel a very very much stricter side of China.
But if you went to Dolli and you engaged in
(20:12):
some questionable behavior in some village and then you know,
are they really going to care? No, you might find
that there's actually like an incredible flexibility and looseness in
the way that people implement rules and regulations. And so
I think that you can find a little bit of
everything in China, which is what makes it such a
fascinating country that you can spend I mean literally for
(20:33):
some people decades there. And I always say it depends.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
There's many China's yes.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
And I think I end on that note, is that
everyone is kind of dreaming of a different China. They
all know a different side of China and that informs
what they think the future of China is. But ultimately
they're all living in these different microcosms of China.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
You had that interview with the former President of Taiwan,
mister ma Ying TiO is it several years ago where
he said, you know, China today is different from China
thirty years ago. He was optimistic, hopeful. At the same time,
we have this man named Tijinping who's taking power since
twenty twelve, and China feels heavier today than it did.
(21:16):
Then if we project to the next ten years, where
do you see China.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
Heady and see it kind of in stasis? And that's
the sad part is there's I think so much momentum
and resources and human capital that could bring it in
different directions. But I think the political energy right now
is to kind of maintain maintain stability, maintain the status quo,
and if they're are breakthroughs, kind of throw all the
(21:42):
energy and resources into basically cutting edge technology, you know,
semiconductor's AI civil military, dual application technology and looking for
disruptive technologies that way. But in terms of like big
changes at the social level culturally, in terms of political
looks expression or even like yeah, I don't see that
(22:03):
changing that much. And I think for people who are
currently reporting in China, who have just left, still working there,
who I talk to, it seems like there is a
little bit of lethargy settling in. It's not so bad,
but that energy that you could feel that was tangible
if you went to a first your city isn't really there.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
That's a good too philosophical. But throughout Chinese history isn't
there this thing called lant or chaos? And there's this
fear of chaos, and it seems to be there through
the centuries and through the dynasties to what extent is
the Chinese Communist Party just the most modern dynasty, and
you have the emperor in charge, and you're trying to
(22:42):
preside over this billion and a half people more or
less continent sized country, and you're just like, oh, if
we let go, it's going to be chaos. It's our
responsibility to cap this chaos. Is that an accurate description
of how you talk how Chinese identity, how Chinese leaders
see reality? Yes?
Speaker 4 (23:04):
Absolutely, And I think that's the narrative that they sell
that out there are these great oceans of chaos. Everything
tends towards disorder, and we need this dynastic kind of bureaucracy,
this incredibly elaborate scientific system of governance we've built up
through practice to keep that at bay, to regulate this
(23:26):
country with so many people in it.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
All the characters in the book, which one made the
biggest impression on you?
Speaker 4 (23:33):
And why all these people made an impression on me?
Which is why I wrote about them rather than the
dozens of other people I could have written about. The
story that I spent the most time reporting was the
one about a leager family who find themselves separated between
Turkey and China. Part of that time was because it
took them a while to feel safe to share their story,
and another was the COVID pandemic. I got in touch
(23:54):
with them in twenty nineteen and was hoping to go
visit them in the Father and Turkey, and found myself
unable to travel as borders closed and China closed its borders,
and so it took a really long time, basically until
twenty twenty two that I could finally visit them and
finish that reporting. So we stayed in touch with them
after the initial stories came out and have tracked their progress.
(24:16):
And yeah, so that's one that I think stayed with
me because just the scale of what they've gone through
has been so almost comedically tragic. I mean, just like
the worst luck family. And you know, recently I learned
that the father, Abdulahtif who I profiled the story, passed away.
He had been suffering from gall bladder cancer for the
(24:37):
last two years that I knew him and couldn't beat it.
So just kind of like they can't really catch a break.
And yeah, that stayed with me.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
Emily questioned for you, for people outside of China thinking
about seeing John Province up there in the Northwest, what's
the best way to understand it. Should it be tard
of China or should it actually be independent?
Speaker 4 (25:00):
I mean, how did Wigers feel about their political status?
How did I see it?
Speaker 3 (25:04):
How did you see it?
Speaker 4 (25:04):
I think there's room in the Chinese project, in the
umbrella of Chinese identity, to have space for everyone. And
initially that was what the promise was. That was for
weaker people, for Tibetans, for anyone living in an autonomous
region of the PRC. In practice that has not happened,
(25:26):
and so most of the Wigers I talked to had
no political ambitions of trying to set up a political
state at this point separate from the PRC. They were
hoping to get the right safe and promised in their
constitution in the PRC. And the family that I profiled
is weager family whose children are taken away from them.
Were part of this moderate, very wealthy, quite well educated
(25:49):
level of entrepreneurs and leager civil society that came up
during Opening and Reform and thought, hey, maybe there actually
is an opportunity for us to put down roots and
build a community, build some thing lasting for the weaker
people within China, within the Chinese project. Abd La chief
and his brother end up becoming very wealthy businessmen because
they're in China, and it's only until they're really kind
(26:13):
of forced with their back against the wall metaphorically that
they start pushing back.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Now, let's move from the northwest to way the other
end of the country, the southeast, and that island called Taiwan.
From Beijing's perspective, the people in charge of People's Republic
of China, what should be Taiwan's destiny.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
So in China, I think there's a very clear stance
which is that this is an unfinished, open ended wound
in some ways that hasn't healed yet, and one has
always been part of China and their eyes, and it's
just temporarily been this issue where they've been able to
set their own government and basically function like their own country,
mostly because of meddling from the US support from the
(26:57):
US in Taiwan. The viewpoints are always shifting. There is
more and more of a shift towards we don't really
need to have anything to do with China. That kind
of began under the mind Yale period when trade and
people exchanges were at their height, and then Mind Joe
tried to force through this crosstrates trade packed essentially, and
(27:19):
people objected legislatively to the way you pushed that through
the parliament and also to where that might lead Taiwan
maybe being too economically enmeshed with the PRC, and so
there were huge protests. It was called the Sunflower movement.
And since then I think you see much more of
a public, mainstream conversation in Taiwan about not necessarily we
(27:41):
have to be independent, but just what are the ways
in which we should be interacting with the PRC and
what are ways where we should disentangle ourselves and look
towards Southeast Asia, for example, and more and more because
China has rebuffed working with the DPP kind of from
the outset of chai Wan's first term, rejected working with
(28:04):
her and mounted more military exercises and patrols around Taiwan
that you've seen, also more public support for serious military reforms,
and more spending on the defense budget, extending the reservist
training period from four months to one year, to buying
(28:26):
different kinds of weapons and doing civil defense trainings among civilians.
So yeah, I see people thinking and worrying more about
China these days in Taiwan than before.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
If we look into the crystal ball five ten years out,
does China does Taiwan just become part of China?
Speaker 4 (28:47):
It depends. I think there's so many movies.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
So you lived there, you felt that you lived on
both sides. You see both perspectives. You're saying, it's not
a foregone conclusion one way or another could go in
any direction.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
You could go in any direction. And I think even
people in China are very nervous about this too, especially
people who live along the East coast in Fujian and Judzian,
where there's a lot of military bases that would be
directly facing Taiwan in the event of war or invasion,
and they don't want to put their lives on the
line for a place that feels really far away, even
(29:23):
if it's not that far away. So I think that
ordinary people, of course don't want war at all. And
I think it's really a matter of political leadership more
than anything.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
You lived in China, you lived in Taiwan. How strong
is the sentiment would you say that Taiwan will eventually
become part of mainland China?
Speaker 4 (29:41):
Uh? Not very strong anyway, strong, fascinating think among as
a slightly older cohort of people, still very strong, okay.
And it's emotional and it's political, and it's also about
family histories and trauma. If they have someone who came
over from the mainland and was never able to go
back and still have family there. But that's kind of
(30:01):
dying out, and I think those emotions fade with time.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I take away from your book and from our conversation
today is that when we're at the next cocktail party
or happy hour and people go China, you go, Oh,
it's very complicated. There's no single narrative. There's a lot
of narratives woven together, and it's yeah, unclear.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
What you've got it. I'll do that annoying academic thing
which if someone tries to ask you a straightforward question,
instead of saying yes, now, you say, well, it's complicated.
But in this case in China, it really is.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Emily, you speak fluent Chinese. What is the fundamental difference
between Chinese and any other language.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
I do think that there is a more roundabout way
of expressing oneself and culturally than in English or a
romance language, or I don't speak this language, but it
seems Arabic, where I think people are me at self
expression and self narrativizing their own stories. And in China
there is a reluctance to speak about individual opinions and feelings.
(31:07):
Especially you're never going to be so straightforward suspicious of
someone who's that straightforward.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yes, they're suspicious as someone who's that direct. Can you
give us an example of what that might look like,
that in directness or that subtlety.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
So, for example, if someone had gone through the most
amazing transformative experience or the worst day of their lives,
these are usually the two experiences that journalists gravitate towards
and are interviewing people about. You would expect people to
have all these reflections about how they feel, how this
has changed their lives, how terrible or great it is,
and go on and on and on. But in China
(31:45):
would often get monosyllabic like yes or no, answers to things,
or just shrugs like this is the way it is,
what can we do about it? And so getting like
getting someone to actually teasing, teasing out how they felt
and getting a before, middle, and end to any story
could be really, really difficult.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Fantastic Emily Fang, author Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, tremendous book.
Go get it? How do we get it? Where should
we look for it?
Speaker 4 (32:12):
You can go to bookshop dot org and you can
order it from your local bookstore. You can I think
it's in libraries already. You can go to Amazon, of
course for the e book version. I did an audible
audio book, so it's my voice. I recorded my own book.
You can listen to that if you don't want to read. Yeah,
it's basically it's everywhere where you would normally get it
(32:33):
online or offline.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Emily you've written a phenomenal book. I know you're just
stepping out right now as we speak to do a
book talk and signing. No doubt in my mind that
you will absolutely crush it. When you think about it,
(32:56):
it's actually not a surprise that China is complicated. We're
talking about as civilization's been around for thousands of years
that occupies a continent and has a massive population, and
within that population you have enormous diversity when it comes
to those individual values, aspirations, and behavior. Chinese rulers for
(33:19):
thousands of years have felt that it's their job to
keep this sort of potential chaos from erupting in society,
whether it was the tong or the song, or the
ming or the ching. The CCP in twenty twenty five
is no different. Thus the three hundred million cameras, thus
(33:40):
the monitoring and tight management of the Internet. As a result,
we have tensions from below that create a lot of confusion.
The question comes down to this, is China or surveillance
state or is it home to a lot of individual
personalities bursting with energy and ambitions. The answer, of course
(34:01):
is yes both of those. Hey, I hope you enjoyed
this conversation with Emily Fang I certainly did. Thank you
so much for joining This is the Driving with Done podcast.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Where you meet the experts creating the technologies that will
power tomorrow's cars electric autonomous software. To find this is
a Driving with Done podcast. Thank you for joining this
episode of the Driving with Done podcast. To connect with
Michael Donn, visit doneinsights dot com or find Michael on
(34:35):
x or LinkedIn This is the Driving with Done Podcast
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com