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This study examines how the Chinese government has adopted authoritarian digital populism to justify its political programs through its official social media sub-accounts. Through discourse analysis, we investigate textual material concerning the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) posted on a representative WeChat account, Xiakedao. We find Xiakedao performing digital populism through stylistic-emotional manipulation to portray the benefits of the BRI to China, BRI countries, and the world, or, put succinctly, to legitimize the BRI. Specifically, in 2014–2016, through mixing informal and formal language, Xiakedao based its legitimization on stirring up a sense of hegemonic superiority by painting it as a strategy capable of significantly advancing China's interests. Since 2017, Xiakedao has shifted to emphasizing its massive global contribution to stimulate nationalist pride and exploiting a trauma complex to bestow a counter-hegemonic aura on it. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, we argue that Xiakedao has utilized the terms "China" and "BRI" as an empty signifier and a floating signifier, respectively. We unravel its discursive strategies of fixing their meanings and (re)drawing antagonistic frontiers to legitimize the BRI during different periods. The study contributes to theoretically understanding how an authoritarian state legitimizes the same political programs from disparate stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"'Us' and 'Others': The Chinese Diaspora in Japan and the Negotiation of Their Membership in the Sphere of Chineseness" examines the way first-generation Chinese diaspora in Japan make sense of their relationships with the Chinese nation. With empirical evidence collected from both the in-depth interview with 69 informants and the media ethnographic observation with 26 research participants, this thesis contributes to conceptualize the diasporic experiences as well as the identity politics of the Chinese diaspora who live in a crucial era – while we have witnessed China's rise and its transition from a diminishing to a returning power, as a response to this Japan has continuously articulated a "China threat" discourse, which not only further promotes its ethno-nationalistic ideology, but also directing the ethnicity-based marginality toward the Chinese diaspora in Japan. In this context, this thesis contributes to present that while these events create complex Sino-Japanese power dynamics, the presence of digital media means that the Chinese diaspora in Japan are influenced by them in a new way – "new" in the sense that the digital mediation fills those power and forces into every dimension of their lives, making their daily reality a constant identity negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism" by Shadi Bartsch explores the thriving study of Greek classics in China and the reasons behind it. Bartsch argues that the belief that the West is shaped by its classical antiquity, similar to how China is shaped by its own, has guided Chinese engagement with the West. The book examines the reception of Western classical antiquity in China, from Jesuit missionaries to modern conservative thinkers, and how it has influenced Chinese intellectual history. Bartsch also discusses the appropriation of ancient texts to challenge the legitimacy of liberal democracy and construct alternative visions of modernity in the context of rising nationalism. The book provides important insights into contemporary Chinese thought and offers a broader framework for analysis and critique. [Extracted from the article]

"From Culturalist Nationalism to Conservatism: Origins and Diversification of Conservative Ideas in Republican China" by Aymeric Xu is an intellectual-political study that explores Chinese conservative thought from the late Qing dynasty to the Republican period. The author challenges the notion that conservatism did not exist in China, arguing that Chinese conservatism is a polysemic term that attributes different values and judgments to liberalism, capitalism, industrialization, statism, social hierarchy, democracy, and Westernization. Xu identifies four typologies of Chinese conservatism: liberal conservatism, antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and authoritarianism. The book highlights the importance of the culture-politics nexus in modern China and examines the diverse perspectives within the conservative movement. While conservatism ultimately failed in Republican China, there has been a revival of New Confucianism in recent years. However, the book suggests that conservatism is unlikely to become an adequate political strategy in China. Overall, this well-researched book contributes to the understanding of modern Chinese thought and intellectual history. [Extracted from the article]

Studies on Chinese nationalist discourse in the late Qing era rarely consider the role of settler-colonialism in the development of nationalism, instead assuming that anti-colonialism was the dominant ideological source. This article transcends the traditional binary discourse of the colonised and the coloniser by exploring how settler-colonialism helped to project a borderless China in late Qing utopian fiction. I argue that this body of literature, as exemplified by Lü Sheng's A Madman's Dream, is a useful lens for exploring how Chinese settler-colonialism developed a (trans)national imagination. China, as a non-Western settler-colonist, had a dual identity: its experience of being colonised by the West resulted in its acting as a settler-colonist, while its efforts to promote a 'new China' overseas were intended to create solidarity with others who had suffered from colonisation. This article thus contributes to the growing body of scholarship about Qing expansionism as an instance of colonialism by demonstrating the internal tensions within Chinese discourse on colonialism in that era. I illustrate that Chinese settler-colonialism displayed a unique blend of discourse about expansion in the past, the experience of suffering in the present, and imagining the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few years, Chinese 'boys' love' television dramas (dangai) have attained immense popularity within China and globally. While state authorities are known to censor LGBTQ content, the Chinese state media has used guofeng ('national style') language to laud some such series, including The Untamed and Word of Honor, in nationalistic terms. Through effusively praising depictions of traditional Chinese culture while downplaying or obscuring the texts' origins in homoerotic novels, such commentary has sought to recruit dangai series towards advancing Chinese cultural power while containing the texts' queer transgressiveness. We refer to this phenomenon as brand nohomonationalism, or the undergirding of nationalist ideology by particular configurations of normative sexual discourse, which expands on the insights of Puar's 'homonationalism', Iwabuchi's 'brand nationalism', and Williams' 'brand homonationalism' in the broader Asian context. Although brand nohomonationalist commentary has been curtailed since recent injunctions against 'effeminate men' and danmei (boys' love) content, it is part of the Chinese government's broader efforts to exercise ideological authority over popular culture. Analysing the phenomenon provides new insights into how sexual and national identities are co-constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legitimation of Chinese medicine has long been a politically and morally charged subject in China since the early twentieth century. In recent years, there is an apparent surge of enthusiasm in developing and promoting Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), as evidenced by the state's frequent lauding of its advantages and the implementation of a series of supportive policies and regulations. During the Covid-19 pandemic in China, TCM has again gained ample attention in major state-owned media outlets due to its proclaimed effects in treating Covid-19. In this article, I will conduct an interdisciplinary study of the semiotic work dedicated to legitimating TCM treatment of Covid-19 in the social media account of an official TCM institution. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and textual analysis supported by reference to history and anthropology of medicine, I will examine closely how the above-mentioned semiotic work is achieved through reference to a range of theoretical and moral arguments. Moreover, the paradoxes and inconsistencies in this process of semiotic construction will be discussed to shed light on the deeper issues concerning the entangled relationship of health science and politics in China, as well as the epistemological difficulties in promoting TCM inside and outside China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking document analysis as its method, this paper examines the Tibetans' response to the Chinese state nationalism. Due to the fear of political secession, the Chinese government has stayed silent about the Tibetans' right to self‐determination and subjected regional ethnic autonomy to the centralised political system. The Chinese authorities continue to dismiss the Tibetans' nationalist struggles as an imported foreign design and warn the international community not to sympathise with the Dalai Lama and his supporters. Amidst an adverse national and international political environment, the Tibetans have managed to sustain their nationalist wishes and obtain substantive international attention. Taking this background into account, this paper explores how the Tibetans have succeeded to resist China's state nationalism and position themselves as a champion of inclusion, justice, and minority rights. It argues that the Tibetans recognise the Chinese government's fear of secession and utilise that fear to forward their nationalist aspirations. The Tibetans shift their demand from independence to autonomy and highlight their own desire for recognition as a distinct community within the Chinese state. This strategy has helped them to claim that they are against the violations of autonomy but not against the Chinese state's territorial norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars note that since the early 1990s, the CCP has been invoking Chinese nationalism to rescue the party's declining ideological legitimacy. Probing China's political indoctrination (thought work), this article makes two contributions to such conventional consensus. First, empirically it argues that the rise of nationalism in the 1990s was not altogether new. Instead, from the early 1980s, the CCP had been switching to "patriotism." Second, this article argues that the communist regime's transition to nationalism was hesitant. It was an interactive process whereby multiple layers of the society and elite, confused alike, worked together to explore whether and how to embrace nationalism. The nation‐building also bore the imprint of the revolutionary and state‐socialist past. This article suggests that though the nation‐state has become the dominant political format of the world, as a pattern it fuses with a society's traditions, preconditions, and internal struggles. Such fusions made nation‐building in the non‐Western world unseparated from quasi‐national legacies such as revolution and socialism and could yield consequences other than capitalism and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of citizenship in China has become popular not only as a research topic but also as a praxis that seeks to influence citizenship-related policies and address structural injustice. Analysis of the trajectory of developing citizenship research over the decades indicates that scholarship focusing on socioeconomic injustice has affected various policy actions, and the struggle associated with the cultural dimension of citizenship seems to have intensified. This special issue deconstructs the state's monolithic interpretation of culture and examines the cultural underpinnings of citizenship discourse and practice in China. We take a broad view of cultural traditions, which have been deeply rooted throughout history and have shaped the underlying relationships between the state, society, and citizens in modern China. The articles in this special issue reveal the culture-informed citizenship practices enacted by various actors, including the government forces, cultural minorities, and grassroots activists. They suggest that spirituality is a site of experiencing and negotiating citizenship in the Chinese context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to reveal the relationships between a Chinese influencer’s “kimchi” video content on YouTube, news reports about it in portals, and online nationalism, which will help explore how the issues of history and traditional culture in portal news reports are conveyed and understood. The results demonstrated that the correlation of nationalism and the Chinese Northeast Project, and responsibility frames was the largest in the Naver portal. The more the origin and pride of kimchi are emphasized, the more the kimchi issue is attributable to the Chinese Northeast Project, which is one of China’s policies. This is the responsibility of China and affects anti-Chinese sentiment in Korea. As Chinese government officials accelerate this issue, it is ultimately amplified to develop into public opinion. On the other hand, the correlation between the anti-Korean sentiment and conflict frames in the Baidu portal was the largest, which means that shifting the responsibility for conflict between Korea and China tends to enhance anti-Korean sentiment inside China, resulting in enhanced cohesion of the Chinese people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on public opinion and foreign policy in China has focused on nationalism as the driver behind public support for the use of force. However, nationalism is just one of many potentially significant factors that can increase support for military deployments. In this article we build a mediation model to test the relative effects of psychological predispositions, foreign policy attitudes, perceptions of the opposing state and calculations about the likely outcome of the conflict on support for China sending naval forces to the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. We find that dislike of the Japanese government and a belief that China would be victorious in a conflict with Japan are both powerful predictors of support for the use of force. Nationalism and militarism directly increase support but also indirectly increase it via different pathways. Nationalists are more confident in a Chinese victory while militarists have a stronger dislike of the Japanese government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examined the relationship between ideology and conspiratorial thinking and the related mediating effect of ingroup favoritism in a non-Western society. We investigated patriotism and nationalism as two favorable orientations toward national ingroups. We also examined their relationship with the general conspiracy mentality and the specific conspiracy beliefs that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results revealed that conservative ideology was associated with conspiratorial beliefs in China regardless of the specific conspiracy theories related to ingroups or outgroups, which indicates such tendencies may exist universally across cultures. Patriotism was not associated with conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19, whereas nationalism was negatively associated with the conspiracy theories about China (an ingroup) and positively associated with conspiracy theories about the US (an outgroup). Moreover, nationalism mediated the relationship between ideology and specific conspiracy beliefs during the pandemic. The general conspiracy mentality did not predict conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19. The results indicate that believing conspiracy theories is not only the result of a stable conspiracy mentality but is also influenced by ideology and intergroup relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An iconic characteristic of Hong Kong's social unrest in 2019 was the establishment of the so-called "yellow economic circle"—a networked system of retailers and consumers linked by shared political values. Movement sympathizers chose to consume products from retailers perceived as supporting movement aims and boycotted retailers thought to be in favor of closer ties with China. This research focuses on the challenges of the yellow economic circle through the lenses of class and consumer nationalism. Drawing on social media posts and interviews with pro-democracy individuals from different socio-economic backgrounds, we highlight challenges to the sustainability of the "yellow economic circle." Class-based purchasing power represented an obstacle to the success of the yellow economic circle; however, it was not the biggest challenge. Instead, an inherent incompatibility between the movement's aims and the means for achieving these aims posed the biggest hurdle. Navigating this incompatibility represented an opportunity for movement participants to develop innovations in thinking about consumer nationalism and the role purchasing power may play in participation. We conclude that the way participants defined consumer nationalism determined whether the yellow economic circle could be understood to engender a shared "Hong Kong identity" and eliminate existing class differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Football has developed to different degrees in Europe and Asia. Wu Lei, who played for Reial Club Deportiu Espanyol, was the only Chinese footballer in the top five European football leagues from 2019 to 2022. Applying critical discourse analysis, this study examines how Chinese and Spanish news reports have constructed Wu Lei's identity and represented the political and economic forces that supported Wu Lei in becoming the only Chinese player in La Liga in Spain. The research reveals the same subject was constructed by nationalism in China and Orientalism in Spain. Chinese nationalism is reproduced through the semi-colonial memory of an underdeveloped China and articulated in tandem with neoliberalism. Facing aggressive investments from Chinese private capital, Spanish media reproduced Orientalism by constructing the image of China as an economic hegemon and site of political otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation of Chinese cities has engendered new forms of spatialized urban inequality. Research on these processes of segregation has captured the attention of urban researchers, generating a large and varied body of work. Yet its influence on urban theory remains constrained, reflecting the concern with the parochialism of urban theory. A review of segregation research on Chinese cities presents several intertwined findings: Chinese cities are framed in terms of their difference, mostly in contrast to Euro-American cities. This framing renders findings intelligible for an audience familiar with Chicago, but perhaps not Shenzhen. In translating the findings, the research often resorts to a methodological nationalism, which contextualizes Chinese cities in terms of their "Chinese-ness," a reductionist heuristic that elides the diversity of these cities and construes residential segregation as incommensurate with the experience of cities elsewhere. The effect of this is to limit the potential of this research to contribute to a "more global urban studies," by inscribing a kind of exceptionalism into Chinese cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the epic national narratives of modernization and development in China is the story of Beidahuang ('Great Northern Wilderness') in the country's northeast. The term 'Beidahuang' refers originally to state-sponsored campaigns, starting in the 1950s, that involved the enlistment of tens of thousands of People's Liberation Army soldiers, educated youth, and Communist Party cadres. Their task was to transform the vast northeast 'wasteland' into productive farmland that would feed the nation while securing the nation's borders with Russia. This article examines the significance of Beidahuang as a feature of the environmental discourse in China's northeast borderlands, focusing on the first decade of the twenty-first century when the Chinese state was establishing more systematic measures for addressing environmental concerns. In the context of the northeast borderland, the massive deforestation that resulted from the socialist campaigns to transform 'wasteland' into productive farmland has left a controversial legacy for regional elites grappling with the Party leadership's turn towards environmental conservation as an emerging political priority. This article suggests that the ongoing importance of the 'Great Northern Wilderness' in the Chinese cultural imagination has shaped the ways in which regional elites frame environmental issues in relation to economic development, nationalism, and border relations with Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses trademarks of the textile industry issued between 1912–1949 in the Republic of China, revealing the trademarks' art features and hidden messages. The trademarks' images and information folders were critically examined within their historical context. The work, by analysing the themes and patterns of the trademarks, revealed that the people-oriented conception, humanistic spirit, nationalist sentiment and the multiple connotations of era development were behind the trademarks, which answers questions about the social connotations of textile trademarks of the Republic of China and also gives us some guidance to understand how to use these connotations for innovation trademark design to inherit better traditional culture in the future. [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]

In this case study, the authors examined media representations of two Chinese female athletes—state athlete Ding Ning and professional athlete Li Na—in China, a nation undergoing social transformation and a sport-reform initiative. Analyzing stories from two Chinese web portals (i.e., Sina and Tencent), the authors analyzed how (a) gender, (b) nationalism, and (c) the individualism–collectivism continuum entered into media representations of these two female athletes. Notable differences emerged in all three conceptual areas. A fourth theme, which the authors have identified as the commercialized athlete, also emerged. Possible explanations and implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical review of new policies in China, the United States, and the European Union that characterize genomic data as a national strategic resource. Specifically, we review policies that regulate human genomic data for economic, national security, or other strategic purposes rather than ethical or individual rights purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 15 years, Chinese videogames and fan communities have become a site where state-sanctioned gender norms are reproduced, altered and challenged. This article analyzes the representation of masculinity in the MMORPG Jian 3 and how fan-fiction writers transform this representation. The videogame predominantly evokes soft masculinity, a sexually ambiguous form of masculinity that represents men with traditionally feminine characteristics but not as explicitly homosexual. Much of the fan-fiction removes this ambiguity, transforming the game's soft masculinity into an explicit form of homosexual masculinity. This diminished ambiguity has political valence in the Chinese context, where national identity is intertwined with a specific form of heterosexual masculinity. The fan-fictions serve to disentangle the relationship between nationalism and masculinity by advancing an alternative form of masculinity and decoupling it from the national project. These two textual strategies – the advancing of a homosexual form of masculinity and the decoupling of masculinity and nationalism – are present in other Chinese games and their fan-fictions, and indeed can be found in other media forms too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarship of "wolf warrior" diplomacy either studies the label under China's digital diplomacy targeting the overseas audience or associates it with digital nationalism within China. However, we still know little about how "wolf warrior" is viewed by the Chinese diplomats and the Chinese digital public, respectively. This study identifies six moments when the Chinese diplomats publicly responded to the media question about the "wolf warrior" label. Through discourse analysis, this study finds that the Chinese diplomats defend and justify their assertive communication styles as counter-attacks to the Western attacks while refusing to recognize "wolf warrior" as the hallmark of China's foreign policy. Meanwhile, by examining the most popular and representative user comments under Weibo posts featuring diplomatic responses, the study finds that most Chinese digital public exhibit varied nationalist sentiments, whereas some users defy the mainstream nationalist sentiment and challenge diplomatic assertiveness. This study shows more nuances in the interactions between the top-down and bottom-up nationalist approaches in China's foreign policy. It suggests top-down state-driven forces' essential but restrained role in shaping bottom-up nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the intersections between state and fashion in China by examining the facilitation of a new fashion identity in a fashion edutainment program produced by national television. It argues that the state-sponsored (re)appraisal of traditional sartorial esthetics from which a decolonized fashion identity is expected to evolve is intimately interweaved with the state's metanarrative of national revival. The study interprets the reversion back to native historical traditions to counter and offer an alternative to Western cultural episteme as an inherently decolonial effort. With an emancipated fashion identity, the state aims to reclaim cultural authorship from the dictates of colonialism and orientalism. The paper examines how sartorial nationalism is given new expressions and highlights the question of authenticity working within state-prescribed parameters. The desire for international recognition however undermines the decoloniality of this undertaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bagamoyo Port Project (BPP) was meant to have set in motion the development of East Africa's largest port. Yet, with the advent of former President John P. Magufuli to power in October 2015, the BPP has led a chequered existence. This article explores the dynamics behind the stalled talks over the BPP by emphasising Magufuli's penchant for developmentalism, nationalism and authoritarianism ultimately as a political strategy designed to mask his vulnerable electoral standing within the party and with the electorate. The renegotiations over the BPP served as an ideal opportunity in this regard to shore up his base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses how population genetics has impacted on nationalist discourses across the Taiwan Straits and affected the relationship between Taiwan and China since the 1990s. In Taiwan this cutting-edge science has helped to construct a native-based and Taiwan-centred national identity through promoting indigenous peoples' rights, rejecting a blood-based, cross-Straits nationalism, and founding a pan-Pacific indigenous peoples' community through genetic links and cultural affinity. In China, after subverting the nationalist myth of Peking Man (a Homo erectus group believed to be the common ancestor of the Chinese) by analysing genetic data, the same group of Chinese genetic scientists have constructed another nationalist myth of a genetically homogenous nationhood. Such a discourse not only valorizes Chinese nationalism through claiming a DNA-based Chineseness across ethnic distinctions but also asserts genetic links between China and Taiwan, therefore providing a 'scientific' basis for China's nationalism in the new century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative studies of nationalism rarely incorporate China as a case in their observations. Despite the rise of nationalism in salience throughout Chinese society, studies of nationalism in China are frequently tagged as insularly focused and unsuitable for comparison. However, a survey of the literature in Chinese nationalism studies reveals that similar blind spots and limitations challenge studies of China with more general comparative research on nationalism. Given this parallelism in development, I argue that looking to observations of China provides scholars of nationalism with vital opportunities to expand and refine theory to include insights from a non-western, non-democratic case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sketches out the mode and influence of the sports culture of martial arts, from Republican China to Southeast Asia's Chinese societies. The Chin Woo Athletic Federation was the first non-governmental sports organization in Republican China after the feudal monarchy. In the 1920s, it began to expand its organizational territory to Southeast Asia, and its development reached its peak in the 1930s. This paper focuses on the spread of Wushu to Southeast Asia against the background of the rise of overseas Chinese nationalism. It interprets how it embodied the Chinese immigrant nationalism, especially contextualizing the conflict between tradition and modernity in the early twentieth century, which is a rarely discussed topic. The results show that the dissemination of Chin Woo organizations was a form of organizational cloning of 'mother' organizations in the mainland. The association between different Chin Woo athletic associations suggests an attempt at cloning the organizations and their practice in the interests of building a form of quintessential Chinese-ness, at the initiative of Chinese business and other community leaders. The physical training and performance of the Chin Woo members was a manifestation of Southeast Asian Chinese immigrant nationalism. Finally, Wushu was a cultural element in the historical identity of Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Covid-19 pandemic has swept across the world, the wearing of medical facemasks has become a hot topic on social media. In China, the relevant discourses are entangled with codes of medical science, national self-esteem and appropriated modernity. These discourses can be dated back to the narrative established by Dr Wu Lien-teh, the great fighter in the Manchurian plagues of 1910–1911 and 1920–1921. This paper reveals that Wu and his colleagues used different strategies when displaying to the Western world their achievements in the anti-plague battle and when proving the effectiveness of the Western medical and hygienic system to Chinese people. Wu and his colleagues used metonymies, analogues and metaphors on or related to medical facemasks to illustrate the possibility of building a modernised nation with sovereignty. Because the construction of a sanitary system in China has always been labelled as a patriotic movement (Rogaski, Ruth. 2004. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 285–298), the wearing of medical facemasks has constituted an important part of the narrative of nationalism and hygienic modernity. This discourse continues to play a significant role in today's campaign against the coronavirus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is Chinese nationalism? Is nationalism the most effective framework for understanding how people in China are making sense of the world today? These are among the questions raised by Allen Carlson in his 2009 article 'A flawed perspective: the limitations inherent within the study of Chinese nationalism', which developed a provocative critique of decades of scholarship. Acknowledging the insights of Carlton's questions while disagreeing with his proposed conceptual shift towards national identity construction, I propose a further shift towards national identity deconstruction. In doing so, I combine the political insights of Hong Kong nationalists with the theoretical insights of deconstruction. This shift redirects the study of Chinese nationalism away from an abstract conceptualisation of nationalism to a more precise definition of the phenomena under study, as well as moving the debate on potential impacts away from international relations to consideration of the complex dynamics of China's ethnic politics. New definitions of both nationalism and minzu (of minzu zhuyi) are developed, reconceptualising the phenomena heretofore known as 'Chinese nationalism' as external symptoms of underlying tensions between conflicting identity narratives. In conclusion, the practical implications of this reconceptualisation are considered, exploring potential future paths for the People's Republic of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the gender undertone of China's nationalist discourses, especially in familial metaphors of nationalism, and how such an undertone shapes people's understandings of state authority and state‐citizen relations. Conventional nationalist discourse of the 'motherland' evokes the image of an insulted and raped mother as the symbol of national humiliation and calls for actions from patriots (masculinised in the discourse). In recent years, however, we have seen the emergence of a new discourse that depicts the nation‐state as a rich, powerful and masculine 'daddy'. Using discourse analysis and Foucauldian genealogical methods, this article argues that the discursive development has to be analysed against China's historical backgrounds, especially considering new standards of masculinity and femininity in the era of economic reform. Capital is equated to masculinity and righteousness, whereas femininity is shaped by the middle‐class values of consumerism and political disengagement. The 'daddy state' discourse conjures strong paternalistic power from China's economic capacity that can be projected onto challengers of state authority, while also constructing the nationalist public as feminised consumers whose consumerist enjoyment relies on patriarchal state protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies CDA and story grammar analysis to investigate how Chinese language textbooks for primary schools foster Chinese national identity through their depiction of Chinese people struggling against foreign invaders. The analysis was conducted on 12 textbooks and the findings were based on stories featuring a range of ages, from children to soldiers and artists, who all displayed patriotic spirit and were willing to risk their lives for China. The textbooks also highlight China's past humiliation, such as the Nanjing Massacre and the loss of territories such as Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. The authors of those textbooks seek to encourage the students' national identity by promoting a sense of patriotism, sacrifice, vigilance against foreign threats, affirmation for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and putting the interests of the People's Republic of China (PRC) ahead of personal interests. Additionally, students are expected to have a strong sense of territorial sovereignty, recognizing Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan as parts of China. However, the results also show that the portrayal of Chinese national identity is Han-centric, excluding ethnic minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19, as a major public health crisis, has triggered nationalism to different degrees all around the world. This study utilises an online survey to explore the relationships between media use, media trust, and nationalism in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the level of nationalism was still considerably high in China at the time of the pandemic and that the role of the media in nation-state building enterprises remains significant. It becomes more pervasive after the news media's adoption of digitalisation. Our study argues that contemporary China's expression of nationalism is socially constructed by media and rooted in its Chinese Confucian culture. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is increasingly designing the news media and manages social media. It has already successfully constructed a sense of nationalism to facilitate its own interests in response to the national crisis. This has led nationalism being embodied in the media's constructed social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent public opinion polls conducted in Europe and the United States show increasingly negative views of China. Does the Chinese public hold similar views of "the West"? Conducting a two-wave survey in China, we found great divergence and asymmetries in Chinese public perceptions. First, Chinese views of European countries and the US diverge sharply, despite these countries being typically grouped together as "the West" in mainstream English and Chinese discourses; the Chinese viewed the US much more negatively than Europe. Second, whereas the Chinese reciprocated American antipathy, there was an asymmetry in public perceptions between China and Europe, with the Chinese expressing much greater favourability towards European countries than the other way around, though the degree of favourability still varied by country. Analyses of respondent attributes also yielded insights that both confirm and challenge some of the conventional wisdom regarding age, education, and party membership in Chinese public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For all the popular interest in "wolf warrior diplomacy," scant attention has been paid to the internal logics and mechanics of representative communications, notably the intersection with grassroots cyber-nationalism. Centring the connections between official and unofficial actors, we situate Chinese diplomatic communications within the domestic nationalist cyberspace cultures that demand and nourish the "dare to fight" orientation of formal Chinese diplomacy on the international stage. We argue that there is a synergistic interaction between officials and popular nationalism that creates bottom-up incentives to adopt a "wolf warrior" posture, distinct from simultaneous top-down pressures from the central leadership under Xi Jinping to appropriately represent China's "confident rise." We show through case studies involving MoFA spokesperson and archetypal "wolf warrior" Zhao Lijian, that this interaction extends to sharing unofficial content and ideas in a mutually reinforcing cycle that facilitates a harder edge to diplomatic communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to explore Chinese and U.S. athlete self-presentation in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. By examining 1200 photographs posted by Olympians on social media, this study finds that (a) male athletes feature themselves in more revealing clothes than female athletes, (b) Chinese athletes actively show more nationalistic notions compared to their U.S. counterparts, and (c) U.S. female athletes are involved in more subordinating behaviors than Chinese female athletes. This study underlines how the intersection of gender, nationalism, and culture influences athlete social media self-presentation in the global pandemic context. Possible explanations and implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1949, ethnic minority nationalism in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has consistently concerned the People's Republic of China. Most previous studies on nationalism in XUAR focused on organised visible nationalist movements and ignored everyday life, particularly regarding interactions between the government and citizens or between the majority and the minority. This study investigates daily practices of ethnic minority nationalism in XUAR within the framework of everyday nationalism. It explores daily life in Altay City to determine how members of ethnic minority groups produce and maintain their sense of ethnic identity in this context. The article found that members of ethnic minority groups are engaged in a struggle to retain their sense of ethnic identity by resisting state nationalism and expressing antagonism towards Han Chinese in their everyday lives. This study reveals a covert nationalist movement involving almost everyone in XUAR. Ethnic nationalism is central to XUAR society and will continue to shape its social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, against the backdrop of multiple anti-Japanese protests in China, the rise of Chinese nationalism has been much debated. By taking the 2010 and 2012 Sino–Japanese crises over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands as a case study, the article applies discourse analysis to media articles and interviews to ascertain the Chinese government's propaganda toolbox in shaping the nationalist discourse, as well as to substantiate the defining features of anti-Japanese nationalism. The findings reveal a combination of strategies and techniques that the propaganda apparatus uses, such as the creation of an 'us-versus-them' dichotomy, galvanised inclusiveness, censorship, and 'card-stacking' to mould nationalism. The article substantiates empirically both top-down and bottom-up strains of nationalism, and their interaction through the four key themes of sovereignty, history, mistrust and reactivity. It finds that Japan bridges these strands of Chinese nationalism, but in its absence alternative views of nationalism are articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union and China resurveyed their border in order to restart their long-stalemated border negotiations. These negotiations resulted in only a partial border settlement: the agreement was signed in 1991. By the end of 1989, nationalities openly expressing their wish to secede from the Soviet Union caused the Soviet government to slow down the negotiation process, and Moscow insisted on setting aside the most contentious sections. China's nationalities issue had the opposite effect on Zhongnanhai: Chinese leaders wished to settle the entire Sino-Soviet border as quickly as possible. However, once the collapse of the Soviet Union became imminent, the Chinese saw advantages of delaying the negotiations on the disputed sections of the border. They calculated that would allow for China to negotiate with weaker, newly independent countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nation-building in modern China at the beginning of the twentieth century had to manage the strain between ethnic nationalism and the claim of a multi-ethnic national identity. This study focuses on how history textbooks defined China and addressed this paradox. Based on the qualitative content analysis of eight popular middle school history textbooks about imperial China, this paper demonstrates how Han nationalism and the multi-ethnic nationality of China evolved in the textbooks. While these two features of national concept contradict each other, the thesis of Hanhua may serve as a bridge between them within the symbolic framework of Chinese nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since the late 1990s, China has experienced an explosion of popular interest in English language study. This nationwide "English fever" reflects how, with the global spread of neoliberal doctrines that were gradually adopted by Chinese governments, English was naturalized as the language of competitiveness and entrepreneurialism. While there is a growing body of literature examining the English‐learning craze as a facet of the transnational neoliberalization processes, this anthropological study focuses on the frictions generated in the encounter of English, conceived as a neoliberal technology of the self, with the Chinese nation‐state. It examines the understudied phenomenon of Crazy English, a language‐teaching enterprise that received unprecedented state patronage among such edu‐businesses in the decade of 1998–2008. Conceptualizing Crazy English as a self‐cultivation method provides insights into how English study in turn‐of‐the‐century China embodied tensions between key values that characterized the state's project of desirable citizenship: entrepreneurialism and patriotism. Through the idealization and promotion of the new exemplary model of the "wolf entrepreneur," Chinese state agents, edu‐entrepreneurs, and citizen‐learners sought to reconcile their desires to simultaneously participate in neoliberal globalization and protect their cultural identities and national interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese idol fans have been identified among the main forces in cyber nationalist activisms in recent years, acting as the nationalist fans protecting the state as an idol in response to external political shocks. Their skills in acknowledging, involving, and even reinventing the image of the state and national pride in cyber nationalist activisms do not emerge in a vacuum. This article examines how idol fans involve and reinvent the nationalist discourse in their everyday fan activities – idol promotion. We focus on the pandemic in 2020 as it provides a specific social and political context that allows us to understand better the interaction between idol fans and the state in their mundane fan activities. We construct our analysis under the computational grounded theory framework with over 6 million fan posts collected from Weibo and 11 in-depth interviews with active idol fans. Our findings show that when engaging in pandemic-related discussion, idol fans actively borrowed official discourse on nationalism and strategically responded to key political and social events in their idol promotion activities. The idol images they built are not only positive but also nationalist. Therefore, they play not only the commercial logic commonly seen in the Japanese and Korean K-pop/idol culture but also the political logic propagated by the state in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of nationalism in China in recent decades has grown in part out of a state-sponsored patriotic education project centered on the production of narratives involving the century-long history of China's subjection to foreign imperialism. In the northeast, the regional history of Russian and Japanese colonialism during the first half of the twentieth century has provided abundant materials for this collective commemoration of China's anti-imperialist struggles. A network of commemorative projects undertaken at local, regional, and national levels of the PRC state since the 1980s, including oral histories, monuments, museums, gazetteers, and party histories, has reframed the history of the northeast borderland in terms that legitimize post-Mao nationalist and market reform ideology. This study brings attention to another dimension of these commemorative projects, the translation and republication of Chinese and Japanese historical accounts originally produced in northern Manchuria during the 1920s and 1930s. I argue that the diverse representations of the borderland's history that are included in these accounts, while originally embedded in the colonial institutional contexts of Manchuria, acquired new significance in post-Mao reimaginings of the region's place in defining nationalism and negotiating Sino-Russian relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Relaciones Internacionales (1699-3950) is the property of Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, International Relations Studies Group (GERI) Law Faculty and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

China's recent termination of strict COVID-19 control necessitates taking a booster vaccine shot as a precaution against the pandemic as quickly as possible. A large body of research has examined people's attitudes toward and intentions for the booster shot. However, most studies failed to explore how China's sociopolitical context has shaped their attitude regarding the booster jab take-up. The current study utilizes data from a national survey adopting quota sampling to analyze the Chinese public's medical and non-medical considerations to determine their intention for the third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. The study found that thanks to China's initial successful lockdown policies, personal risk and benefit perceptions did not dominate their views regarding booster vaccination. Instead, respondents' gender, nationalism, endorsement of the zero-COVID policy, self-efficacy regarding vaccination, and perceived infection severity were the major factors underlying their booster shot intention. The situation highlights how the politicized context of China's COVID-19 control has impacted people's plans to practice preventive behaviors. It is necessary to offset the negative consequences. One strategy is to educate the Chinese public with more medically relevant information to help them make rational choices regarding vaccination and other protective measures. On the other hand, such education can utilize this nationalistic mental status to enhance the persuasion effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]