When the Communist Party took power in 1949, China was a vast, multi-ethnic state with borders largely drawn during the Qing dynasty. To manage the country’s diversity, the party took a leaf out of the Soviet Union’s book, giving larger ethnic groups living near China’s borders their own nominally autonomous regions. Mandarin became China’s official language, but linguistic and religious diversity were not extinguished.

That’s changing. In recent years China’s leaders have been peddling a far narrower notion of what it means to be Chinese. And as Emily Feng, a Chinese-American journalist, discovered over nearly eight years reporting in China, failing to conform can have consequences.