Emily Feng, NPR’s China correspondent, in “Let Only Red Flowers Bloom” writes a deeply personal, reflective piece that blends memoir with political commentary. It’s not just a report—it’s her attempt to reconcile her identity as a Chinese-American with the realities of modern China.
Fractured Loyalties: Emily Feng and the Western Gaze on China
Emily Feng’s “Let Only Red Flowers Bloom” is a beautifully written, emotionally loaded piece—a blend of memoir and indictment, threading together personal family trauma with pointed critiques of modern China. Feng draws on her grandparents’ persecution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution to justify a lifetime of suspicion and skepticism toward the Chinese state. Through her narrative, she walks the tightrope of inherited memory and Western liberal values, casting herself as both witness and conscience in the face of a rising authoritarian China.
But dig deeper, and Feng’s storytelling reveals more than just trauma—it exposes the ever-repeating pattern of diaspora voices reinforcing the West’s preferred version of China: morally compromised, politically repressive, and in need of constant correction from outside forces.
And that’s the issue.
Inherited Pain Isn’t Lived Reality
Feng writes with conviction, but her outrage is secondhand. Her grandparents lived through Mao’s purges—she didn’t. She came of age not in the shadow of Red Guards, but in the halls of Western academia and press rooms shaped by American exceptionalism.
What she has isn’t lived persecution. It’s the echo of it. And that echo, filtered through the lens of Western liberal democracy, gets repackaged as objective journalism. But it’s anything but.
Western Operating System in Chinese Skin
Feng’s worldview was programmed by the West. Raised in liberal democracies, educated in institutions built to uphold “freedom,” “rights,” and “individualism,” she does what many diaspora intellectuals do: critiques China not as someone trying to understand its evolution, but as someone measuring it against an imported set of ideals.
She sees the Belt and Road Initiative as economic aggression. She sees the handling of Xinjiang as state-sponsored oppression. She sees Hong Kong’s security law as the death of freedom.
But what she doesn’t see—or refuses to account for—is the reason China became what it is: a nation wounded, humiliated, and determined never to be subjugated again.
The Century of Humiliation: China’s Political DNA
From the Opium Wars in the 1840s to the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, China endured a century of systemic humiliation. Western gunboats forced open Chinese ports, flooded it with opium, and dictated unfair treaties. Foreign powers carved out spheres of influence while mocking Chinese sovereignty.
China's descent into warlordism, civil war, and foreign occupation wasn't the product of internal failure alone—it was engineered by Western greed and imperial arrogance.
When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, it wasn’t just a political shift—it was a national survival instinct snapping back. Everything since then—tight media control, the obsession with internal unity, zero tolerance for separatism—is rooted in the bitter memory of being divided, colonized, and violated.
Feng and her cohort rarely interrogate this history. They don’t have to. Their audiences—NPR, The Atlantic, New York Times—prefer the story where China is always one step away from totalitarian collapse and the West gets to play savior...again.
The Convenient Villain: Xi Jinping
Feng’s critiques almost always orbit Xi Jinping. She paints him as the strongman, the censor, the architect of a new digital surveillance state. But this characterization isn’t insightful—it’s predictable.
Western media needs its villain, and Xi fits the bill perfectly. He’s confident, unapologetically nationalist, and doesn’t play by Western rules. That makes him dangerous in their eyes—not because he’s brutal, but because he’s effective.
What Feng sees as control, China sees as stability.
What she calls oppression, the Party frames as sovereignty.
And what she derides as “debt-trap diplomacy,” African and Southeast Asian nations increasingly see as infrastructure no one else would fund.
The Real Double Standard
Feng criticizes China with a fervor she doesn’t apply to the West. She writes about Uyghur camps but remains muted on Guantanamo Bay. She raises the alarm over state surveillance in Beijing but doesn’t mention the NSA’s dragnet on American citizens. She mourns Hong Kong's freedoms, but says little about Julian Assange rotting in a British cell.
This isn’t journalism. It’s ideological performance. A morality tale dressed in personal trauma, designed to resonate with Western audiences hungry to feel morally superior to a China they no longer understand.
Conclusion: Truth or Convenience?
Emily Feng doesn’t speak truth to power—she speaks comfort to empire. Her pen doesn’t challenge the Western gaze; it feeds it. She’s not a bridge between East and West. She’s a mirror, reflecting Western fears back to themselves under the soft light of human rights and journalistic integrity.
China, for all its flaws, has made a singular vow: never again. Never again will it be colonized, dictated to, or shamed into submission. That vow, forged in a century of humiliation, explains more about China's present than any diaspora memoir ever will.
So if Emily Feng wants to critique the system, that’s her right.
But let’s not pretend she’s doing it from a place of unfiltered truth.
She’s doing it from a stage the West built—and she’s playing the role it wrote for her.
“She may carry our name, but she speaks their language.”
— Unfiltered and Unfuckwithable
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