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As sport has become more globalized, there has been an increase in the number of athletes who have changed their nationality to maximize their chances to compete in international competitions. In order to maximize its chances at its home hosted Winter Olympic Games, the Chinese government authorized many foreign-born athletes to gain Chinese citizenship to compete for China. The purpose of the study was to explore how Chinese social media users perceived athlete naturalization of Chinese athletes during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games. Through sentiment analysis and thematic analysis, results found that Chinese spectators generally had positive emotions toward these naturalized Olympians. Online discussions mainly focused on three topics: expressing their attitudes toward athlete naturalization, questioning the legitimacy of the strategy, and discussing athletes' heritage and cultural identities. This research hopes to broaden our understanding of the sport migrant issue in China, the perceptions of athletes who have naturalized, and the sentiments that Chinese consumers have of naturalized athletes at the Winter Olympic Games that were held in their country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts the notions of chronotope and scalar intimacy to discuss collective identification, in particular Hanfu identity among Chinese youth in the context of contemporary Chinese nationalism. Drawing upon ethnographic interviews and observations of self-identified Hanfu fans in Beijing, China, this paper analyzes how they, through invoking and shifting back and forth across multiple spatiotemporal scales, discursively enact collective and intimate identification among individuals, among Hanfu fan groups (on a local scale), and the general Chinese population (on a larger, national scale). This paper suggests that the great ancient China chronotope (GACC) has played a crucial role in establishing continuity between the present (or other time-spaces) and the 'past,' ultimately legitimizing the inseparable link between Hanfu groups and collectives and solidifying great China and collective identity ideologies. It also demonstrates that modern Chinese youth are internalizing the Chinese nationalist ideology in order to establish a sociocultural relationship of belonging to and sharing with Chinese collectives as a way to empower themselves to cope with uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since China has formally joined the WHO-backed global COVID-19 vaccine initiative known as COVAX, there is a presumed notion that China's vaccine diplomacy will make a significant contribution to the international public good and thus uplift Beijing's role as the rule-maker of international order. To scrutinize this, the paper asks if China succeeded in proliferating its weaponized vaccine policy to obtain maximum diplomatic gains and soft power projection to intensify its international image, geopolitical power, and domestic politico legitimacy. The authors argue that despite its vaccine diplomacy demonstrated the robust governance capacity and responsibility to be a great power. Yet, Beijing's geopolitical influence and international image are significantly overrated and not enough to play a more prominent role in the global power fulcrum/equilibrium. On the contrary, China enjoys a leading position on the domestic political front. Its successful portrayal of China's vaccine provision in the global market and remarkable configuration to leverage a deep-rooted nationalism has fundamentally provided China with a powerful rationale to divert its public's attention from Beijing's earlier inadequate handling of the outbreak. The evaluation of the paper reveals that China's vaccine diplomacy's influence in promoting international image and geopolitics is limited but has successfully stabilized its domestic political environment and enhanced its domestic legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rise has been accompanied by a rise in nationalism. But what are the characteristics of this nationalism now being witnessed? Does it support China's constructive engagement with the international order, or does it seek to assert China's supremacy? These questions lie at the hub of a rapidly expanding secondary literature on the emergence of nationalism in China and its impact on China's foreign relations. What is, however, absent from the academic discourse is the voice of the Chinese people themselves. What are their perceptions of the nation-state, and how do these beliefs shape their views of China's relationship with East Asia? To address this gap, we conducted a series of large-scale surveys in Beijing between 2011 and 2013 on the twinned topics of domestic nationalism and international relations. Our findings, as reported below, represent an initial attempt to answer this final and, arguably, most critical set of questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a growing political and scholarly interest in the re-emergence of Chinese development cooperation and this work explores the construction of South-South spatial matrix of knowledge, power and imagination. The paper examines the critical geopolitics of producing international development studies in China as an intellectual project over the last 5–10 years, in close relation to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing on eight months' fieldwork in Beijing, it develops a political economic geography of individuals, institutions and ideologies that have shaped the geographically and politically situated processes of inventing Chinese international development studies. The paper traces the spatial genealogy of the disciplinary regime, making visible the rise of a division of social scientific labour at a complicated moment of geopolitical flux, especially against the backdrop of intensifying US-China rivalry. It also maps out the tensions and nuances in an uneven field of knowledge and power. The future of the nascent state-disciplinary apparatus is uncertain, not least dependent on China's ongoing reinterpretation of its national identity and national mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]