Everything, Everywhere (in China) All at Once

A hundred flowers could bloom, the choice ones picked—but even that was no guarantee that a few of the most beautiful buds were to be trampled on later when tastes changed.¹

— Emily Feng, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom (2025)

I am currently reading Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, a banned book in China and apparently now in Hong Kong². The book depicts the government largely in a negative light—so it wasn’t surprising that it was banned—and shattered many of my prior assumptions about the CCP. As many reviewers have noted, it is one thing to look at abstract data and dry statistics, but encountering raw, heartbreaking personal stories taps into something far more primal and intimate. This is where the book becomes a much more effective medium than other sources (that I have read, for what it’s worth). Reading the intimate account of a human rights lawyer—from the height of their career to the harrowing, minute-by-minute reality of their detention and torture when they start to challenge the Party—leaves a mark that no summary of the 709 crackdown (en, zh) ever could.

And yet, the general sentiment towards China seems to be more positive now than it has ever been. Pew Research Centre recently published survey results showing that “China is now seen more positively than the U.S. in most of 36 countries surveyed,” with most respondents having more confidence in Xi than in Trump³. The same view seems to be echoed in my corner of the internet as well. This morning, I watched a video on China’s lead in renewable energy, and on how it produces most of the world’s electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines. Another example: across Reddit, I also see plenty of disillusioned Americans, exhausted by domestic politics, praising Xi Jinping’s sweeping anti-corruption drives⁴. Juxtaposed with the many Trump-critical posts (and the occasional slurs) found on the same platform, and you’d easily fool yourself into believing China is a utopian society living in the future while the rest of the world is burning.

When I tried to pull these thoughts together, there seems to be some internal friction. I realised that the narratives pulled in opposite directions, one heavily critical, the other admiring. I grew frustrated with this internal resistance, because in reality both of these thoughts can be true at the same time, and refusing to let them coexist felt completely dumb and illogical. It is very easy to fall into—and relapse into—the trap of reducing things to a single binary: good or evil.

Most reasonable adults would readily acknowledge that nothing is purely good or purely evil. Instead, our standard impulse is to weigh the good against the bad. While this revised definition is more nuanced, even this perspective is a bit too black-and-white when taken on its own. Good and evil go beyond a simple definition; an entity can be mostly good in one respect but cruel and evil in another. True inquiry is about mapping where those achievements and atrocities lie, understanding the forces that drive them, and measuring the real human weight of both.

For example, one of the Chinese government’s primary objectives is the preservation and stability of the Party. Recognising this core imperative explains two seemingly contradictory realities. On the political side, independent legal advocates and civil rights lawyers represent alternative centres of power—voices that dare to hold the state accountable under the rule of law. Because they threaten the Party’s monopoly on power, they are neutralised through disbarment, surveillance, and detention. Yet the same top-down approach also explains the Party’s remarkable effectiveness in stimulating growth in at least some economic sectors. The book Why Nations Fail describes how political regimes can engineer rapid economic growth by using authoritarian command to forcibly allocate resources. The Party hand-picks which sectors will win—in this case green technology such as electric vehicles and solar power—and channels vast rivers of cheap credit, land, and subsidies to build global dominance and secure economic legitimacy. Grasping this underlying motive therefore allows us to weigh the consequences of the two policies and what they mean for the future⁵.

The trap is how easily we slide back into moral absolutism. It imposes significantly less cognitive load than the mechanism discussed earlier; no matter how many times I have learnt that this simplistic system is not an accurate representation of reality, I keep falling back into it nevertheless. Holding the full picture in working memory—tracking how a system causes harm in domain X through mechanisms A and B, while simultaneously delivering progress in domain Y through mechanisms C and D—demands continuous, active effort that our brains naturally resist. When a situation actually demands nuanced judgment, my brain’s default autopilot overrides what I consciously know, flattening these complex realities back into binary caricatures. And thus this mental shortcut often leads to faulty deductions and inferences, which in turn lead to the wrong conclusions.

I am unsure how to prevent myself from relapsing, or if a clean way out even exists.