RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksImportant ... Crafting a comprehensive volume on Chinese identity is a daunting endeavor, but I was pleasantly surprised by the range of issues Feng was able to tackle within these pages. The book is cleverly structured to cover a breadth of Chinese identities through several core themes—politics, ethnicity, and diaspora—and the author moves smoothly between analyses of state policies and narratives and efforts to push back against the state’s identity-making project ... We witness this tumultuous expansion and contraction of rights through a cast of characters and stories that Feng vividly brings to life ... A fascinating portrayal of people on the margins of Chinese society ... Provides illuminating historical and political context ... Feng provides a holistic depiction of the current landscape of resistance ... Complicates mainstream media narratives on ethnic divides in China by incorporating testimonies from minorities who have been co-opted by the state ... The book’s final chapters—covering Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora—are engagingly written and effectively encapsulate the messiness of Chinese identity politics in the peripheries of the People’s Republic ... Yet the book falls short of critically examining the factors that lead citizens to become (and choose to remain) loyal to the state. These final sections could have been a good place to dive more deeply into the seductiveness of the party’s nationalist, racist, and sexist propaganda.
