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National identity is the cognition of citizens regarding to which political community they belong, and the tendency to accept the political, cultural and ethnic values of the state. Previous studies have found that national identity is heterogeneous at the subnational levels. Why do people hold different degrees of nationalism and patriotism in the subnational units? In this paper, we offer a political economic explanation of national identity, which links the state capacity with political attitudes. We employ a nationalism-patriotism framework to decompose the concept of national identity, then use the supervised learning approach to measure nationalism and patriotism based on a massive number of Weibo posts dating from 2011 to 2017. Automated text analysis shows that the state capacity plays an important role preventing the national identity from being weakened by globalization and the diversity of social information. Specifically, with the progress of China's globalization, multiculturalism and various information have crossed the national boundaries, which undermines China's national identity. In order to maintain this identity, the Chinese government utilizes its redistribution capacity to reinforce both nationalism and patriotism, and also its information capacity to strengthen nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the theory of social construction of reality deriving from the writings of Max Weber, Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger to explain the origin of national identity and hence the emergence of a nation. It argues that social construction of national reality originates from everyday life experience taken for granted during the process of socialization. Individuals make sense out of the external world. Experiences taken for granted become actor's stock of knowledge. A common scheme of knowledge shared by the community serves to differentiate in-group (nationals) and out-group (foreigners). Collective consciousness thus defines national identity and hence a nation. Unless people (both in-group and out-group) interact with and learn from each other, different stocks of knowledge taken for granted will create political tension. This theory will be applied to understand the tensions in Tibet and along the Taiwan Strait. The paper further argues that Taiwan can hardly separate from mainland China in the future, while strong Tibetan consciousness continues to defy against powerful Chineseness, resulting in endless upheavals in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature has sought to address the question of Chinese nationalism, and particularly whether or not its rise over the last decade could make China more prone to international conflict. Yet these discussions have often not been well grounded in either theories of nationalism or international relations (IR) theory. This paper will seek to fill this gap by using a constructivist approach to examine how nationalism is constituted by the interaction of states. By doing so, it will be argued that Chinese nationalism can best be understood as a reactive response to international events rather than domestic political manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]