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How China’s Attempt To Ban A Book Backfired

Emily Feng’s ‘Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China,’ has become an important book for understanding China’s authoritarian abuses.

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On July 15, 2026, Hong Kong national security police raided two independent bookstores and arrested five people on suspicion of displaying and selling publications with “seditious intention” under the city’s national security laws. One of the books reportedly seized was Emily Feng’s Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China.

Feng is an American journalist born to Chinese parents in Connecticut. From 2019 to 2022, she served as an international correspondent for National Public Radio in Beijing, where her reporting highlighted critical issues such as the mass incarceration of Uyghur Muslims. In 2022, after a reporting trip, Chinese authorities barred her from returning.

Her case reflects a broader pattern of the regime’s tightening grip on press freedom. Spring 2020 saw China expel about nineteen reporters from major outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, in retaliation for U.S. restrictions on Chinese state media. In the years that followed, foreign correspondents continued to face visa delays and denials, shortened press credentials, constant surveillance, online smear campaigns, physical obstruction, and threats of legal action.

Ethnic Chinese journalists with foreign passports often endure harsher treatment, because the Communist Party regards all ethnic Chinese, regardless of citizenship, as owing loyalty to the motherland. Therefore, state media labeled Feng a “race traitor” and a “banana” (yellow on the outside, white on the inside), for her reporting that shed light on the regime’s oppressive practices.

After being denied re-entry to China, Feng relocated to Taiwan. While her personal journey inspired her to write the book, she deliberately keeps herself in the background, allowing the experiences of others to take center stage. The narrative is a collection of intimate portraits of nearly two dozen individuals whose lives intersect with the state’s strict definition of being “good” Chinese, including a human rights lawyer who lost his license for representing a Hong Kong activist, an Inner Mongolian........

© The Federalist