Foreign observers see the rise in nationalism as a reflection of the Communist Party’s own mindset, and wonder whether it could portend more aggressive behaviour by China abroad
and that’s it,” a social-media user called Zhang Beihai wrote to her 2.6m followers on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. “He deserved to perish.” Another Weibo user went further: “His whole family deserves to die.” The
, using microblogs, short videos and messaging apps to wage furious verbal campaigns against “traitors”, “spies” and “secondary devils” .in 2020, when she wrote the 60th and final instalment of an internet diary about life in Wuhan in central China when the pandemic began. Her journal had described not only the hardships of the world’s first city to experience a covid-19 lockdown, but also her own.
. Taking control of the island has been a project of Chinese nationalism since 1949, when the Communist Party seized power on the mainland, forcing the defeated Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang , to flee to Taiwan. In 2017 China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said the country’s “complete reunification” was an “inevitable requirement for realising the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, which he has said should be completed by mid-century. Like his predecessors, he has not ruled out using force.
But Mr Li’s opinions are controversial, even within the establishment. In 2020 Qiao Liang, a hawkish former general, published an unusual rebuke to those who have been demanding an invasion of Taiwan. No government decision, he said, is made merely on the basis of public views. “Restraining factors must first be considered.” He wrote that doing otherwise “may be patriotic in name, but harm the country in practice”.
During the pandemic, however, the party has propelled popular nationalism to new heights. Its propagandists speak of “the West’s chaos and China’s order”—a line that at least until recently has resonated with many Chinese who appreciated the party’s huge effort to keep the virus out of the country and to deploy legions of people to contain outbreaks at home. As a result of this vigilance, the death toll was kept extremely low and most Chinese were able to go about their lives much as normal.
Mr Xi knows how difficult it sometimes can be to keep patriots on message. The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were a dramatic example. Students took to the streets chanting “patriotism is no crime.” They described their actions as a “patriotic, democratic movement”—hoping that highlighting their love of China would help to temper the party’s hostility. Their tactics worked, for a while, as leaders bickered over whether or not to acknowledge the students’ patriotism.
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