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Current scholarship on Chinese public perceptions of international affairs tends to highlight the growing hawkishness and nationalistic tendencies in popular public opinion during the Xi Jinping era. Whereas these studies tend to deal with cases and contexts directly involving China, little is known about how the Chinese public responds to geopolitical crises in which China is not a direct participant. Our study attempts to address this gap by examining how Chinese social media commentators narrated and debated Russia's war in Ukraine—a major geopolitical event that has shaped China's interests but thus far has not directly implicated China in the conflict. Our analysis, drawing on online commentaries during the first six months of the Russia-Ukraine war, finds that the dominant narratives are still rooted in China-centric objectives and experiences. These nationalistic sentiments, however, diverge when it comes to advocating for China's positions on this war, ranging from direct support of Russia as part of China's battle against the West, to a cautionary position of learning from Russia's mistakes, to support for Ukraine as rooted in China's own experiences with foreign aggression. All these positions are distinct from the official stance of ambiguity in this conflict, highlighting the possibility of alternative, albeit still nationalistic, perspectives presenting themselves on social media despite strict censorship. This analysis contributes to our understanding of popular expressions on international affairs in the Xi era and, specifically, of the different manifestations of Chinese popular nationalism in contexts outside of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on the corpus of the news from TASS and UKRINFORM between February 24 and March 5, 2022, investigates different concerns of the two media platforms regarding conflict discourses, and analyzes their different naming strategies of social actors from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA). It is found that Russian and Ukrainian media attempted to construct different national identities for each other through distinct discourse strategies. The Russian TASS named Ukraine a security threat while including Donbas as Russia's in-group member. It also utilized out-group discourse strategies to exclude western countries, such as the United States, from its friend circle. The Ukrainian media discourse from UKRINFORM, however, grouped Ukraine itself together with western countries allied with the United States while stigmatizing Russia and excluding the Donbas region. The current research shows that the politically driven principle is commonly used in the media discourses from TASS and UKRINFORM as the representative national media of the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New information technologies increasingly allow autocrats to shape public opinion outside their borders. Regimes like Russia and China spend millions on such efforts, raising concerns that they may be swaying foreign publics through their illiberal nationalist appeals. We know little, though, about the actual impact of such endeavors. We ask here: Where such regimes can find foreign audiences who support them and the values they represent, does this translate into an ability to sway public opinion on important foreign policy issues through their endorsements? We focus on the Putin regime's ability to shape orientations toward US President Donald Trump's foreign policy through an experiment-bearing survey in two countries that share EU aspirations but have different baseline orientations to the USA and Russia: Serbia and Albania. We first establish that Putin has a considerable number of sympathizers in both countries and that this sympathy is indeed linked to illiberal nationalist ideas. We show, however, that these sympathies do not translate into an ability to move public opinion, and that where pro-American priors are strong, illiberal nationalist endorsement can actually backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the XIXth century the relations of dependency and inter-dependency between the Iranian monarch and foreign officials became an integral part of Iranian political life. During the Iranian Constitutional Movement (1905–1911) nascent Iranian nationalism harshly condemned the Qajars as tyrants and lackeys of foreign powers. Muhammad 'Ali Shah (r.1907–1909), the first Qajar sovereign who had to share his powers with the representative assembly, was quickly discredited by his political opponents as despot and Russian puppet, an accusation that seemed to be proved when the deposed Muhammad 'Ali returned to Iran from his exile and launched a military campaign. This study represents an attempt to shed more light on the relations between Muhammad 'Ali and Russian officials, especially in the context of his return campaign of 1911. Relying mostly on unpublished Russian archival sources, this paper proposes a critical assessment of Muhammad 'Ali's link with Russia, avoiding the habitual reductionist scheme of 'patron-client' relations and putting more emphasis on the role of agency in Russian foreign policy in Iran as well as the proper intentions and ambitions of the Qajar princely elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the build-up to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia's state-owned media pushed a nationalist-imperialist narrative according to which Crimea is ethnically and historically Russian, and should, therefore, return to the Russian Motherland. This article underscores the critical role of news translation in the debate around the status of Crimea and in the circulation of global news, more generally. It focuses on the Russian website InoSMI, a portal that monitors and translates foreign press, during the peak of the Crimea crisis. Our analysis reveals that Russian translations reframe Western reports in such a way as to over-emphasize ties between Russia and Crimea. Drawing on both ethnonationalist and imperialist narratives that capitalize on the place Crimea holds in Russian imagination, and exploiting old metaphors of brotherhood, InoSMI promotes specific definitions of Russian space and identity that legitimize an aggressive foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]