China’s Generation N: the young nationalists who have Beijing’s back
- Nationalism has been on the rise, encouraged by the Communist Party and put to effective use by President Xi Jinping
- Younger generations’ perceptions and expectations of their country differ from those of the past, offering the government support but also challenges
Zhang, who has 230,000 followers on Zhihu, China’s equivalent of Quora, follows international news organisations such as the BBC, and regularly points out coverage she considers biased against China.
She breaks down what global events mean for Chinese interests, and the losses and gains in each round of arm-wrestling between Beijing and foreign governments.
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She said award-winning Afghan director Sahraa Karimi, who filmed herself running down the street in Kabul warning people against the Taliban, was “a US proxy” and conducting “performance art”, although she said the Taliban’s takeover could give rise to global extremism.
“I chose to be a nationalist, and I think it’s the right path for the country and for myself personally,” said Zhang, 28, a chemist at a research institute in Changsha, central China.
“A state that applies nationalist policies usually claims its rights in a proactive way and it benefits everyone in that country,” she said. “The most typical example is the US. It earned itself the hegemony and everyone in the US a kind of privilege. Who won’t envy that?”
Zhang is one of a new generation of people in China who are more vocal and more nationalist than those a decade ago. Fuelled by the Chinese government’s messaging on the country’s growing economic power, and pressure from China’s critics, they are staunch defenders of Beijing’s policies, especially those deemed assertive by foreign governments.
Her generation of Chinese nationalists no longer take to the street to vent their anger against foreign governments and businesses, instead doing battle on the internet.
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The trend worsened amid growing tensions between Washington and Beijing, with Chinese figures including President Xi Jinping repeating the narrative of China’s historic humiliation by Western powers.
Experts say the rise of China’s nationalism is a result of the Communist Party’s efforts to reinforce its legitimacy, as well as a shifting expectation of China’s international status as its power grows.
“China’s leaders have done this because they see nationalism as key to shoring up much-needed domestic support for the Communist Party,” said Kacie Miura, who teaches Chinese politics at the University of San Diego.
“Moreover, China’s continued international rise has led to shifting expectations within China about the respect that foreign countries, companies and individuals ought to show to China.”
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Unlike older generations of Chinese, those born in the past two decades did not witness the once huge development gap between China and the West, or China’s painful growth before the 1990s, said Zhao Suisheng, a political scientist with the University of Denver.
“All they see is China’s high-speed railway, roads and the pace of urbanisation that they believe other countries are not capable of building,” he said. “It’s natural for them to feel proud, though there is the issue of distortion of information.”
State messaging and information control remain key tools for directing public opinion, yet some have argued that exposure to more sources of information only makes some young Chinese more nationalistic.
In a 2018 survey by Purdue University, 42 per cent of Chinese students in the United States said their perceptions of the US had become worse or much worse after going there. An even higher 46 per cent said their views towards China grew more positive after living in the US.
“My students now are very different from those 10 years ago, and many of them have been abroad before college,” said Jin Canrong, an international relations professor at Renmin University in Beijing.
Jin, a hawkish scholar known for his call to ban rare earth exports to the US as retaliation in the trade war, said those experiences had deepened suspicion towards the West for some young minds.
“They are better English speakers, more tech-savvy and able to surf the external internet more,” he said, referring to websites banned by China’s internet censors.
“And after reading more coverage by the Western press, some [students] became sickened by it.”
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Albert Yang, an engineer based in Changzhou in eastern China, is another influential blogger on Zhihu, with more than 150,000 followers.
The main driver of nationalism was China’s economic miracle, he argued.
“In 2005, we debated whether China’s economy could outgrow Japan’s by 2035, and people called us delusional,” Yang, 39, said. “That happened only five years later.”
Yang, who grew up watching Japanese cartoons, said he still felt favourably about certain elements of Japanese and Western culture.
“But patriotism or nationalism is one of the purest forms of human instincts, just like loving a sports team or a writer,” he said.
To Zhang, the chemist, Beijing’s endorsement of nationalism is a clear one and sent from the very top.
“The government has no guard against nationalism; otherwise there wouldn’t have been the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ slogan,” she said, referring to the phrase cited frequently by Chinese officials including Xi. “To me, that [slogan] is a very typical nationalist narrative.”
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Enshrined in the party’s constitution since 2017, the slogan has been referenced in almost all key policy statements under Xi. The goal, which includes vague targets to improve China’s comprehensive power, will be achieved by 2049, according to party statements.
Xi turned up the nationalistic rhetoric in his speech on the party’s centenary last month, saying that anyone who tried to enslave the Chinese people would “have their heads cracked and bleed”.
“Without the Communist Party of China, there would be no new China and no national rejuvenation,” he said.
Although nationalism had been on the rise since the 2008 global financial crisis, Xi had absorbed it very successfully to rally domestic support, said Zhao Suisheng, of the University of Denver.
“The old generation of nationalists were critics of the Chinese government, and some thought that if China became a democracy, it would allow less compromise with the US,” said Zhao, who has followed the issue for over a decade.
“But once Xi was in power, a lot of what nationalists thought was said by him and his ambassadors. There’s a convergence of state-centric and popular nationalism.”
But amid the rise of nationalist sentiment there has also been rare resistance from China’s usually quiet political establishment.
Amid a victorious mood last September over China’s control of the coronavirus, Yuan Nansheng, vice-president of foreign ministry think tank the China Institute of International Studies, sounded a note of warning.
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“Although China has done well in the fight against the pandemic, to see this as a historic opportunity for China’s rise is a strategic misjudgment,” wrote Yuan, who was China’s consul general in San Francisco in 2013-14.
“If we let populism and extreme nationalism flourish freely in China, the international community could misinterpret this as Beijing pursuing ‘China first’,” Yuan said, referring to then US president Donald Trump’s “America first” policy.
Posted on WeChat by Peking University’s Institute of International and Strategic Studies, the article went viral for days before it was censored.
Months later, similar sentiment was voiced at the annual legislative session in Beijing by a retired party ideology guru, in a group discussion featuring Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
“[China should] continue to expand opening up, actively and prudently handle relations with major countries, and prevent the rise of domestic populism,” said He Yiting, former executive vice-president of the Central Party School, where the party trains officials.
Officially, China has avoided using the term “Wolf Warrior” for fear the US and other Western countries will use it to damage the country’s image. A government source said state media have also been told not to use the term.
Last year, public nationalistic sentiment showed its capacity to influence policy, when a proposed regulation making it easier for foreigners to get permanent residency was suspended after online uproar.
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Reliance on nationalism could be costly for policy flexibility and China’s international image, Miura said.
“Audiences abroad are increasingly attuned to expressions of nationalism within China, which risks undermining China’s efforts to advance its soft power and portray itself in a benign light,” she said.
But Beijing is capable of toning down nationalism if it wants to, according to Yun Sun, director of the China programme at Washington-based think tank the Stimson Centre.
“Beijing has a pretty good record on managing public opinion and nationalism,” she said. “It has many means: government shaping the narrative through media, controlling internet content, formal messaging by the government.
“The danger may not be Beijing being pushed by nationalism to be forceful and tough, but a mutually reinforcing effect between nationalism and Beijing’s position.
“Beijing might see Wolf Warriors as the righteous path because Chinese people love the government for it.”
