A book published in Taiwan turns some of the most widely reported political events of the Xi Jinping era into something rarer: sustained portraits of the individuals who lived through them — after the news cycle moved on.
Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in the Xi Jinping Era (唯紅花綻放：習近平時代的認同與歸屬), released by Taipei-based Acropolis Publishing (衛城出版), is the work of a Hong Kong writer who spent years tracing what became of the people behind the headlines — the human rights lawyers swept up in Beijing's 2015 crackdown, the Uyghur families separated by the Xinjiang detention system, the Hong Kong youth who boarded small boats in the dark hoping to reach Taiwan.
The book's title borrows from Mao Zedong's famous 1956 directive — "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend" — and deliberately inverts it. In contemporary China, the author argues, many varieties of life still exist on the surface: lawyers, entrepreneurs, Muslims, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers. But only one political identity is officially encouraged, and the cost of drifting outside it tends to be swift.
Mao's Garden, Xi's Rules
The inversion at the heart of the title gives the book its organizing principle. The original Hundred Flowers Campaign of the mid-1950s nominally invited citizens to criticize the Communist Party; what followed was a political trap, as those who spoke up were targeted in the Anti-Rightist Movement. The author draws a line from that history to the present: the mechanisms of suppression have grown more sophisticated, but the underlying logic — that acceptable speech and identity are defined by the state, not by individuals — remains intact.
You can be a lawyer, a businessperson, a Muslim, a Uyghur, or a Hong Konger, the book argues. But when those identities come into conflict with political requirements, what seemed like ordinary, unremarkable life can quickly become grounds for surveillance, restriction, or punishment.
Lawyers, Entrepreneurs, and Uyghurs Face the Same Political Ultimatum
The book does not unfold chronologically or by event. Instead, each chapter follows a different set of people — building, piece by piece, a composite picture of what the Xi era looks and feels like from inside it.
The opening chapter centers on Yang Bin, a human rights attorney who once believed China's legal system offered real protection for citizens. The 709 crackdown of July 2015 — named for its start date — exposed the limits of that belief. In coordinated raids, Chinese authorities detained hundreds of rights lawyers and activists nationwide, including Wang Yu and Ren Quanniu. Yang Bin watched colleagues lose their licenses, face criminal charges, or vanish from public life. The legal system, the chapter suggests, had not been a safeguard against political power so much as a temporary accommodation of it.
A subsequent chapter tracks the arc of China's private entrepreneurial class — people who built businesses and accumulated wealth during the reform era and concluded, reasonably enough, that financial success might offer a degree of stability. The fates of businesspeople including Sun Dawu and Ren Zhiqiang, both of whom faced prosecution after testing the limits of permitted expression, complicate that assumption. Wealth can accumulate; independence from the political environment, the author writes, cannot.
The chapter on internet culture takes an unlikely entry point: Zhou Liqi, whose deadpan declaration that "going to work is impossible" turned him briefly into a symbol of working-class cynicism and one of China's most recognizable online figures. His rapid fade from public view after the state launched its Qinglang ("Clear and Bright") internet cleanup campaign illustrates the book's broader claim — that even entertainment, even pure virality, operates within political limits that are real even when they are invisible.
The book's treatment of Xinjiang draws on the experiences of Uyghur families to describe how an overlapping system of re-education camps, saturation-level surveillance, and boarding schools that separate children from their parents has reshaped language, family structure, and cultural continuity across the region. A parallel chapter follows Yusuf, a Hui Muslim, through China's "Sinicization of religion" policy, which has progressively restricted Islamic practice — a different ethnic community, a different geography, but a structurally similar encroachment.
A chapter anchored in the 2022 Xuzhou chained woman case — in which footage of a woman restrained by a chain around her neck and identified as the mother of eight children prompted waves of public outrage and a series of shifting official accounts — examines how Chinese women's bodies have long been framed within population policy rather than as a matter of individual rights. The author connects the incident to the history of the one-child policy, documented patterns of human trafficking, and the more recent push to reverse declining birth rates.
Across these chapters — lawyers, entrepreneurs, internet users, Uyghurs, religious minorities, women — the author identifies a shared structural condition: individuals forced to renegotiate their own identities as political authority extends into law, commerce, speech, family, and faith.
Hong Kong's Transformation, and the Midnight Boats to Taiwan
If the earlier chapters trace gradual institutional erosion, the book's Hong Kong section documents something faster and more visible — a city reshaped within the span of a few years.
The author begins with the 2019 extradition bill, a proposed amendment to Hong Kong's fugitive offender ordinance that triggered the largest protests the city had seen since its 1997 handover to China. Millions took to the streets. Confrontations between police and protesters escalated into prolonged standoffs at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Polytechnic University; the encirclement of the Polytechnic University campus by security forces became one of the defining images of the movement.
After Beijing imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong in June 2020, change accelerated across every dimension of public life. Pro-democracy figures faced prosecution under the new legislation. Apple Daily, one of Hong Kong's most widely read newspapers, ceased publication after its founder, Jimmy Lai, was arrested and the paper's assets frozen. The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China — which had organized annual Tiananmen Square vigils for more than 30 years — dissolved under legal pressure. New oath-taking requirements for public servants, education reforms, and "patriots governing Hong Kong" criteria reshaped institutions that had seemed stable.
The book records what individuals did in response. Some stayed and faced prosecution. Others chose silence. A significant number left.
Among those who left, the account that receives particular attention is the case of 12 young Hong Kongers who in August 2020 attempted to reach Taiwan by speedboat, only to be intercepted by Chinese coast guard vessels and transferred to detention in Shenzhen. Their families were initially refused access to them. Ren Quanniu — the same human rights lawyer introduced in the book's opening chapter on the 709 crackdown — attempted to provide legal assistance and came under considerable pressure as a result.
Others reached Taiwan. The author describes departures carried out in near-total darkness: passengers who did not know who else was on the boat, who had no certainty the crossing would succeed, and who did not know they had made it until Taiwanese coast guard vessels appeared and guided them in to shore.
The book is careful not to frame arrival as resolution. For those who reached Taiwan or other destinations, what was lost was not only a particular address but a city, a way of life, and an orientation toward the future that could not simply be reconstructed elsewhere. A new start was possible; an answer to the question of where one belongs was not.
The Question That Outlasts Every Border Crossing
The book's final section turns to overseas Chinese communities, extending its central inquiry beyond any national boundary. Whether the subject is a lawyer in a mainland courtroom, a Uyghur family in Xinjiang, or someone watching Hong Kong from abroad, the author returns to the same underlying question: when a state claims the authority to define what its citizens should be, can an individual still decide who they are?
Let Only Red Flowers Bloom does not offer a resolution. What it does instead — through dozens of individual stories assembled into something close to collective testimony — is insist that the question is worth keeping open, and that the people who have had to live inside it deserve to be seen clearly, not only as symbols in a news event but as people with specific, particular lives.
*The author is a Hong Kong-based writer. （Related： Analysis | The Three Red Lines a Chinese Blockbuster Couldn't Cross ｜ Latest ）
