Search

At the theoretical level, Bartsch shows that Plato's I Republic i and the creation myth underpinning the ideal city, Kallipolis, have been the subject of considerable discussion in China. I Plato goes to China i is an expanded version of the Martin Lectures that Shadi Bartsch delivered at Oberlin College in 2018. [Extracted from the article]

There are growing concerns about the role of identity narratives in spreading misinformation on social media, which threatens informed citizenship. Drawing on the social identity model of deindividualization effects (SIDE) and social identity theory, we investigate how the use of national identity language is associated with the diffusion and discourse of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on Weibo, a popular social media platform in China. Our results reveal a pattern of identity communication contagion in public conversations about conspiracies: national identity language usage in original posts is associated with more frequent use of such language in all subsequent conversations. Users who engaged in discussions about COVID-19 conspiracies used more national identity expressions in everyday social media conversations. By extending the SIDE model and social identity theory to misinformation studies, our article offers theoretical and empirical insight into how identity–contagious communication might exacerbate public engagement with misinformation on social media in non-Western contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of international relations, it has long been believed that nationalism generates adverse foreign policy preferences. This article revisits this long-standing assumption by investigating how stimulating nationalistic sentiments shapes mass foreign policy preferences in two contexts, namely when celebrating national achievements and greatness with a focus on the national Self and when invoking negative historical memories in relation to a salient Other. Using a survey experiment conducted in China, which capitalized on visual stimuli drawn from real-world sources to stoke respondents' nationalistic sentiments, this article shows that not all rises of nationalism are the same. Adverse foreign policy preferences, such as a preference for a hawkish approach, an uncompromising attitude, and a dislike for the status quo, emerge when nationalistic sentiments are stoked by invoking negative historical memories but not by celebrating general national achievements and greatness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations of ethnic minority women often symbolized China's efforts in nation-building. This study uses insights from the post-alteric frame to analyze the images of the Khitan empress Xiao Yanyan in the 2020 TV series the Legend of Xiao Chuo (LXC). It uses a critical multimodal discourse analysis of the series and viewer comments to examine three images of Xiao as her relationships with two romantic partners unfolds: the unruly and innocent child; the self-sacrificing political victim; and the pan-Chinese superheroine. Taming the great Khitan empress has created a spectacular matriarchal fiction for cosmopolitan Chinese post-feminists and endorsed the grand narrative of assimilating ethnic minorities into the building of China's identity as a pan-Chinese "melting-pot." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government is fond of invoking the 'hurt feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens' to protest foreign actions and policies. However, this rhetoric might be nothing more than propaganda and attempts to leverage nationalist sentiment. How much do citizens in China actually care about issues completely unrelated to their daily livelihoods? To answer this, the study employs a representative survey to investigate the extent to which rhetoric about 'hurt feelings' is consistent with public opinion on four contemporary socio-political disputes involving the NBA, Marriott International, Mercedes-Benz and the city of Prague. Across the scenarios, we found that the Chinese government did not exaggerate the displeasure of audiences—citizens are aware of the cases, were indeed upset by them and advocated for retaliatory measures that were surprisingly more forceful than those adopted in reality. These emotions were largely driven by nationalistic sentiment rather than personal experiences or encounters, suggesting the success of state propaganda in steering the public opinion toward outcomes favourable to the state. These findings support recent studies highlighting the peculiar case of rising nationalism in China, and have important implications for the impact of public opinion on Chinese policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China and Japan continue to partly live in the shadow of World War II (WWII) with recurrent expressions of anti-Japanese nationalism in China periodically ebbing bilateral relations. How does the Chinese government manage anti-Japan public manifestations of nationalism and what factors explain it? The government has to walk a fine line by managing the nationalism it has bred without undermining its own rule and considering elite divisions, heightened public nationalism, and the developments in its external environment. Six case studies from the Hu-Wen era provide a comprehensive understanding of what pertains to Chinese nationalism, the means used to express it, and more importantly the way the government chose to tackle them. While nationalism can be a mean of garnering legitimacy and exercising pressure on Japan to bend to its wishes, the Chinese government is embarked on the sinuous task of preventing an escalation beyond its control at both the domestic and international levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-COVID era, the prevalence of "fandom nationalism" on Chinese social media has led to the development of two distinct attitudes toward Squid Game among Chinese netizens. Some nationalist netizens are dedicated to accusing Squid Game of plagiarism or dismissing it as a "cultural invasion." Another group of fans, due to the ever-tightening Chinese Internet governance, use fandom nationalism as a disguise to protect themselves against cyberbullying by declaring an anti-Korean political stance before posting positive comments about Squid Game. Therefore, two such divergent attitudes eventually led to a negotiation between fan culture and state power, where on the one hand fandom nationalistic practices were accepted by the mainstream for party-state propaganda, but on the other, in order to prevent being censored, fan culture had to be subordinated to the state's governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid increase in recent years of Chinese outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) has prompted growing scholarly interest in its economic and political implications for host countries. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how concerns over the rise of China may shape public attitudes towards such investment. This article tests the link between threat perception and preferences for FDI in the United States. We argue that, due to heightened geopolitical concerns and nationalism, perceptions of the China threat negatively affect how the American public views the impact of incoming Chinese FDI. Using a survey experiment, we show that respondents are indeed less likely to support Chinese FDI when primed with information that highlights the security and economic threats posed by China than when they receive no such priming. Furthermore, causal mediation analyses reveal that the treatment effects of security and economic threats are mediated by respondents' concerns about the challenges that Chinese FDI poses to national security as well as to American economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's new assertiveness and the sudden inward turn of United States are a function of causes located in both the second and third images. The key second-image variable is nationalism, which combines with the power trajectories (a third-image variable) of both China and the United States to define how their relationship will unfold in the coming years. The interaction between nationalism and power trajectory produces entirely different foreign policy orientations in rising and declining powers–the former embraces an outward-looking, extroverted foreign policy of expansion, while the latter adopts an inward-looking, introverted foreign policy of restraint and retrenchment. The resurgent nationalisms of the rising challenger and the declining hegemon are entirely compatible with a future relationship characterized by peace and harmony. Obviously, the two nationalisms pose no inherent conflict of interests: China currently wants more global influence; the Unites States wants less. Hence, there is good reason to expect a soft landing as the world moves from unipolarity to bipolarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'International Responsibility' has become one of the most significant topics in Chinese International Relations studies over the last decade. Although growing numbers of scholars have focused on this issue, there remains a low awareness of the need to explore its roots in China's academia, and to investigate the internal debates that display the different Chinese perceptions of international responsibility. This article provides a discourse-activation framework to explain why Robert B. Zoellick's speech polarized China's attention on international responsibility. It moreover constructs a typological framework based on dimensions that include the nationalism-internationalism orientation and degree of fulfilling international responsibility. It singles out three camps of scholars and their respective viewpoints on international responsibility and China's relevant policies in this regard, and demonstrates the 'divergent convergence' feature that characterizes the debate on the topic. In addition to this structural analysis, the article also summarizes the overall trend from 1950 to 2015 of the preventative to projecting preferences apparent in China's academic studies and political discourses on international responsibility. Subsequently, the article briefly investigates the possible factors affecting convergence and divergence of perceptions of international responsibility, which imply that fulfilling international responsibility is crucial to China's growing presence on the global stage, and that Chinese academics' attention to international responsibility should focus on collaboration towards improving the effectiveness of China's assertive behaviour in international affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has China's foreign policy become more assertive since 2009, and what is driving Beijing's foreign policy orientations? Given the significance of China's rise over the past few decades, it is surprising that this question has not been subjected to systematic analysis as well as general investigation within scholarly research. This article serves to examine the sources of China's assertiveness using a system-level, unit-level and individual-level analysis. This article first looks at system-level explanations such as state power, external threats and national interests, and then considers unit-level factors including bureaucratic competition, struggles of the elite and the surge of nationalism. However, both system-level and unit-level explanations alone fail to account for China's more assertive foreign policy. This suggests that individual factors play a major role in explaining the country's more assertive external behaviour. This is especially the case when the perceptions of the political elite are deeply embedded in the state leader's preferences. This finding can enhance our understanding of why traditional explanations, that do not incorporate the role of the state leader, may fail to predict Chinese foreign policy behaviour. To understand better the implications of China's rise, therefore, we must take into account the role of the state leadership and its impact on China's growing influence in international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of cultural heritage and historical preservation in Russia and China. The author compares policies on the preservation and destruction of churches under communism and postcommunism. Emphasis is given to topics such as protection under state ownership of churches in the Soviet Union, the relationship between modern Chinese nationalism and temples, and religious life in communist China.

In 1970, Shi Lu (1919–82) created a group of paintings while suffering from a schizophrenic condition; they were the first paintings he worked on after his imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. These historical and pathological circumstances have formed a blind spot shifting the paintings outside the scope of art-historical analysis. This essay pulls them back into the context of artistic and intellectual discourse of Maoist China by reading the paintings and inscriptions not as notations of ‘madness’, but primarily as artistic statements. The paintings are not only expressions of psychological and political stress, but reflect a cosmopolitan worldview that is informed by the Soviet model and the artist's experience of travelling to India and Egypt, as well as cultural events and debates, and political conflicts. These multi-faceted images thus condense a broad scope of cultural and ideological discourses of Maoist China before and during the Cultural Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]