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 Chinese Perspectives on Journalism and Communication

FROM CYBER-NATIONALISM
TO FANDOM NATIONALISM
THE CASE OF DIBA EXPEDITION IN CHINA
Edited by
Hailong Liu
i

From Cyber-​Nationalism to
Fandom Nationalism

This book gives a deep description of a new trend in Chinese cyber-nationalism

through an examination of Diba Expedition in 2016. The eight chapters,
written by researchers from the United States and China, touch on the topics
of history, mobilization, and the organization of new cyber-nationalism;
the evolution of symbolic devices; and the impact of information and
communications technologies (ICTs), consumerism, fan culture, and Internet
subcultures on cyber-nationalism and the political consequences of it. The
authors have embedded Diba Expedition and new cyber-nationalism, which
may be called fandom nationalism, in the media ecology of social media, the
mobile Internet, the smartphone, and a new generation of ICTs. They also try
to explain the change in Chinese political culture from the turn of the twenty-​
first century up to now under the impact of official nationalistic education,
commercial culture, and the grassroots Internet culture. Readers interested in
political culture, Internet culture, and youth culture will find this book helpful
in understanding why traditional nationalism, with hatred, anger, and actions
in the real world, has evolved into fandom nationalism, with love, satire, and
actions in the virtual world, as illustrated in Diba Expedition.

Hailong Liu, PhD, is a professor at the School of Journalism and

Communication, Renmin University of China, in Beijing. Liu is the chief
editor of the Chinese Journal of Journalism and Communication. He is the
author of Revisiting the Grey Area: Narration and Memories in the History of
Communication Studies and Propaganda: Ideas, Discourse and Legitimation.
His research interests include political communication, the history of Chinese
communication study, and intellectual history of communication.
ii

Chinese Perspectives on Journalism and Communication

With the increasing impact of China on global affairs, Chinese perspectives

on journalism and communication are on the growing global demand. This
series focuses on theory and research-​oriented scholarship on journalism and
communication broadly defined from Chinese perspectives, aided by a variety
of methods, and informed by indigenous, interdisciplinary, intercultural, or
global approaches.

Series Editor: Wenshan Jia is Professor of Communication at Renmin

University of China and Chapman University.

Titles in this series currently include:

Transformation of Chinese Newspaper Companies
Management, Production and Administration
Miao Huang

A History of Journalism and Communication in China

Yunze Zhao and Ping Sun

The Idea of Propaganda in China

A History in China
Hailong Liu

From Cyber-​Nationalism to Fandom Nationalism

The Case of Diba Expedition in China
Hailong Liu, ed.

Immersive Communication
The Communication Paradigm of the Third Media Age
Qin Li

For more information, please visit https://​www.routledge.com/​Chinese-​

Perspectives-​on-​Journalism-​and-​Communication-​Series/​book-​series/​CPJC
iii

From Cyber-​Nationalism
to Fandom Nationalism
The Case of Diba Expedition in China

Edited by Hailong Liu

iv

First published 2019

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Hailong Liu, individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Hailong Liu to be identified as the author of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Liu, Hailong, editor.
Title: From cyber-nationalism to fandom nationalism : the case
of Diba expedition in China / edited by Liu Hailong.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Series: Chinese perspectives on journalism and communication
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040160 (print) | LCCN 2018046850 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780429447754 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138330641 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Internet–Social aspects–China. |
Internet and youth–China. | Social media–China. | Nationalism–China.
Classification: LCC HN740.Z9 (ebook) |
LCC HN740.Z9 I56726 2019 (print) | DDC 302.23/10951–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040160
ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​33064-​1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​0-​429-​44775-​4 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Newgen Publishing UK

The research of this book is supported by the National Social Science Fund:
“New media technology and cyber-nationalism” (No. 17AXW011)
v

Contents

List of figures and tables  vii

List of contributors  viii

1 Performing cyber-​nationalism in twenty-​first-​century

China: The case of Diba Expedition 1
Guobin Yang

2 Understanding Chinese nationalism: A historical perspective 13

Hongmei Li

3 From fans to “Little Pink”: The production and

mobilization mechanism of national identity under new
media commercial culture 32
Jing Wu, Simin Li, and Hongzhe Wang

4 “We are all Diba members tonight”: Cyber-nationalism as

emotional and playful actions online 53
Zhe Wang

5 Memetic communication and consensus mobilization in the

cyber nationalist movement 72
Xiaoan Guo and Shaoting Yang

6 Collective action as interaction ritual in cyberspace 93

Guoqiang Liu

7 Contested visual activism: Cyber-nationalism in China from

a visual communication perspective 109
Kui Zhou and Weishan Miao
vi

vi Contents
8 Love your nation the way you love an idol: New media and
the emergence of fandom nationalism 125
Hailong Liu

Index  148
vii

Figures and tables

Figures
4.1 Trend of top ten template comments within 48 hours 59
5.1 Organizational structure of “Diba Expedition” 82
5.2 Strong memes and their variants 86
6.1 Model of Collins’ interaction ritual theory 94
7.1 Controversial Japanese Ukiyo-​e about captured Qing soldiers
being beheaded by the Japanese army 114
7.2 Image-​driven cyber-nationalism model 114
7.3 Cyber-nationalism under the mechanism of image-​contesting
visual activism 116
7.4 Political communication under new visual rhetoric 119
7.5 Cartoon The Rabbit and His Stories, written by a military fan
with the nickname Fly into the Light 120
7.6 Through polysemy visual text combining descriptive words,
netizens aim at what the signified points to, and regard the
diverted signifier as a strategic direction 120

Tables
3.1 Interviewee features 46
4.1 Word frequency of no-​repeat comments (top 40) 60
4.2 Co-​occurrences of no-​repeat comments (top 30) 61
5.1 The form, content, and structural elements of memes in
“Diba Expedition” 79
5.2 The division of labor in each column 83
5.3 The form of consensus 83
viii

Contributors

Xiaoan Guo is a professor at the School of Journalism at Chongqing University,

China. He has an interest in political communication.
Hongmei Li is Associate Professor of Strategic Communication at Miami
University, Oxford, Ohio. Her research focuses on advertising and consumer
culture, globalization, national branding and public diplomacy, gender and
sexuality, Chinese culture and society, and the culture of new communica-
tion technologies. She is the author of Advertising and Consumer Culture
in China (2016) and co-​editor of The Middle Class in Emerging Societies
(2015, with Dr. Leslie Marsh) and a special journal issue titled Building the
BRICS: Media, Nation Branding and Global Citizenship (2016, International
Journal of Communication, with Dr. Leslie Marsh).
Simin Li is Assistant Professor of Journalism at Beijing Institute of Graphic
Communication, China. Her research interests include media and social
change, cyberculture studies, alternative media studies, and qualitative
research methods.
Guoqiang Liu is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at the
School of Journalism and Communication, Sichuan International Studies
University, China. His research focuses on international communication,
film and television, media culture, and media discourse studies.
Hailong Liu is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication
of the Renmin University of China, Beijing. Dr. Liu is the Chief Editor of
Chinese Journal of Journalism and Communication and the Associate Director
for the Institute of Communication Study at the Center of News and Social
Development at Renmin University, Beijing. He is the author of Revisiting
the Grey Area: Narration and Memories in the History of Communication
Studies (2015), Propaganda: Idea, Discourse and Legitimation (2013), and
Mass Communication Theories: Paradigms and Schools (2008). His research
interests include political communication, the history of Chinese communi-
cation study, and intellectual history of communication.
ix

List of contributors ix
Weishan Miao is an assistant professor at the institute of Journalism and
Communication, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His research
interests focus on new media, technology, and social change in China.
Hongzhe Wang is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and
Communication, Peking University, China. His research interests include
digital technology, media history, cyberculture, and class-related issues. He
is working on a book called Machine for a Long Revolution: Computer as the
Nexus of Technology and Class Politics in China 1955–​1984.
Zhe Wang is an assistant professor at Zhejiang University of Media and
Communication, China. Her main research areas are social media studies,
political communication, and science, technology, and society studies (STS).
Jing Wu is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at
Peking University, China. She got her PhD in Communication from the
Department of Communication Studies, The University of Iowa in 2002.
Her research areas are media and cultural studies, social theories of mass
communication, media and the public sphere, identity and ideology, media
and modernity, etc. She has published articles both in Chinese and English
on topics concerning various aspects of media, culture, and society. Her
recent book is entitled Visual Expressions of Cultural Modernity: Ways of
Seeing and Communication.
Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and
Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for
Communication and Department of Sociology. He is the author of The
Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009) and The Red
Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016). He has also edited
books on media activism, collective memory, and Internet politics.
Shaoting Yang is PhD candidate at the Law School of Chongqing University,
China. Her main research area is visual rhetoric.
Kui Zhou is an associate professor in the Faculty of Journalism and
Communication, Communication University of China. His research
interests focus on political communication, global communication, and
visual communication. He worked with Hong Kong–​based Phoenix Satellite
TV as a documentary journalist, where he won the Silver Hugo Award of
2009 Chicago International Film Festival for his documentary of Sichuan
earthquake of 2008.
x
1

1 
Performing cyber-​nationalism
in twenty-​first-​century China
The case of Diba Expedition
Guobin Yang*

Every country has its patriots, but the ways of expressing patriotism may differ.
A kind of patriotic and nationalistic action was the so-​called Diba Expedition
that happened in cyberspace on January 20, 2016. A variety of insights are
discussed in the following chapters, which show that major participants
in the “expedition” were youth born in and after the 1990s. Many of them
were online gamers and members of online fandom communities. The main
platform where the action was launched was Baidu’s online forum “Diba”,
although there were also activities on other major social media platforms ran-
ging from Sina Weibo, to Douban, to the Tianya Club, to AcFun, to Bilibili,
and to QQ groups. The targets of attack included Tsai Ing-​wen’s Facebook
page and the websites of several Taiwanese newspapers. The main “weapons”
used by the participants were known as emoji packs (biaoqing bao), which typ-
ically show facial expressions and other images in exaggerated and humorous
forms. The most popular biaoqing bao became viral memes widely circulated
online. “Warriors” in Diba Expedition would bombard the targeted websites
by posting biaoqing bao on them. According to Guo and Yang in Chapter 5
of this volume, biaoqing bao consists of two varieties, the visual and the lin-
guistic. The linguistic ones further fall under three categories based on their
functions—​those used to educate and lecture, those used to mock and deride,
and those used to attack and threaten. In her chapter, Zhe Wang finds that
from 00:00 hours on January 20, 2016 to 24:00 hours on January 21, 2016, a
total of 13,684 comments were left on Tsai Ing-​wen’s Facebook page. Of these
comments, over 2,000 were a slogan often used in public morality education
in mainland China, called “Eight Honors and Eight Disgraces”. In addition,
447 comments expressed longing for the homeland, 276 comments were the
national anthem of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and 245 comments
were slogans in praise of the motherland. They were, in other words, repetitive.
In analyzing the causes of Diba Expedition, the authors in this volume
emphasize the influence of the Internet subculture, of commercial culture, of

* Guobin Yang is Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at

the University of Pennsylvania, guobin.yang@asc.upenn.edu.
2

2 Guobin Yang
emotional expression, and of visual memes in mobilization and communica-
tion. Focusing on the analysis of visual memes, Zhou Kui and Miao Weishan
argue that Diba Expedition is a case of cyber-​nationalism made possible through
the competitive use of visual symbols. Guo Xiaoan and Yang Shaoting similarly
focus on the visual aspect of the incident, while Li Hongmei argues that Diba
Expedition is consistent with a model of nationalism in modern Chinese his-
tory characterized as reactive, because it happens in response to Western media
bashing of China. Liu Guoqiang uses sociologist Randall Collins’s (2004)
theory of interaction chain to argue that Diba Expedition was a performance
made possible through collective emotional interaction. Based on interviews
with participants, Wu Jing, Li Simin, and Wang Hongzhe argue that Diba
Expedition reflects the identity concerns and cultural habits of contemporary
youth who are immersed in digital and postmodern commercial cultures in their
daily lives. They contend that the participants were not ignorant or irrational,
but were informed nationalists. Wang Zhe argues that Diba Expedition was like
an online game of war on behalf of the nation. Decentralized and messy, it was
driven primarily by the expression of strong collective emotions. Finally, Liu
Hailong proposes that Diba Expedition is a case of fandom nationalism, which
is the product of a unique combination of nationalism with digital culture and
commercial culture.
Taken together, the chapters in this volume offer new theoretical insights and
rich empirical descriptions about the most recent wave of cyber-​nationalism in
China. which have made important contribution to the study
of digital culture and Internet politics. In recent English-​language scholar-
ship on digital and online activism, the emphasis has been on changing organ-
izational forms and structures, while there is a shortage of analysis of actors’
motives, the meaning of media practices, online narrative and stylistic forms,
and their cultural resources and repertoires. This is where the chapters in this
volume fill a gap.
In the remainder of this chapter, I highlight several features of Diba
Expedition that I believe offer some additional insights into the changing char-
acter of cyber-​nationalism in contemporary China.

Self-​performance
Diba Expedition is commonly viewed as a case of cyber-​nationalism. But
what does it mean to say so? Does the concept of cyber-​nationalism exhaust
its meaning or are there other possible explanations? In her chapter, Wang
Zhe calls it an “emotional game”. This is very revealing. A game is a show,
a performance. With its dramatic and sensationalizing visual memes, the
“Expedition” certainly has the distinct features of a public performance, but it
is a performance of the self more than a performance for its alleged audience
in Taiwan.
If, as Guo Xiaoan and Yang Shaoting argue, the purpose of the
“Expedition” was, literally, to punish its target and teach a lesson, we would
3

Performing cyber-nationalism 3
expect to know its effects on the target audience, especially how Taiwanese
responded to it. Yet, reports about the “Expedition” in Chinese media and
on social media platforms contain little information about the effects. Those
who were interviewed in Chinese media hardly ever refer to the responses of
the Taiwanese. Instead, participants were preoccupied with their self-​image.
They enjoyed talking about their biaoqing bao memes—​how these memes
were made, how they were circulated. Chinese media stories also discussed the
meticulous organization of the “Expedition”—​how participants set up teams
in charge of intelligence, translation, logistics, publicity, weapons, slogans,
and so forth. We are left with the impression that the participants imagined
themselves to be engaged in a real war, and that they themselves were military
strategists planning it.
Interestingly, there is little evidence that the numerous biaoqing bao memes
online were all posted on the targeted websites in Taiwan. Instead, they were
seen mostly on websites in mainland China. Since Tsai Ing-​wen’s Facebook
page was the main target of the “Expedition”, we might be led to believe
that it was bombarded with many of the biaoqing bao memes. Yet as Wang
Zhe notes in her chapter, in fact, the functionality to post images on Tsai
Ing-​wen’s Facebook page had been closed before the “Expedition” started,
so that it was mainly textual comments, not visual images, that were posted
on her Facebook page by China’s cyber warriors. The real targeted audience
of Diba Expedition was not necessarily Taiwanese. Rather, the real audience
was PRC Internet users and the participants themselves. Put differently, a key
motivating force of Diba Expedition was not to bombard the websites on the
other side of the Taiwan Straits so much as to stage a drama of self-​pride,
self-​glorification, and self-​performance. We see revealing evidence of this in
the popular hashtag “I’m deeply in love with this country” on Sina Weibo in
the days immediately following the “Expedition”. One of these hashtagged
passages goes as follows:

Tomorrow I’m going to leave China for another country. I feel low
the whole day today, sunk in an unnamable kind of feeling. And then
I thought of the #D8 fb Expedition which I had forgotten in the past two
days. So from 9pm to now, I have been reading this hashtag. The acts of
the expedition warriors and those moving poems and passages make me
feel like…I can no longer contain the primordial powers within my body!!
January 23, 2016, Sina Weibo

Note how the person was deeply moved by “the acts of the expedition
warriors and those moving poems and passages”. Examples like this show
that the slogans and memes of Diba Expedition worked to move none other
than the participants themselves and their fellow netizens in the PRC. It is
in this sense that Diba Expedition may best be viewed as a self-​performance.
Of course, all politics has a performative character (Alexander, Giesen, &
Mast, 2006). What is significant about claiming that Diba Expedition was
4

4 Guobin Yang
an event of self-​performance? To answer this question, it is necessary to look
back at the earlier history of Internet culture in China and its relation to social
change.

Disenchantment and re-​enchantment

Chinese Internet culture started to develop in the mid-​1990s. At that time,
Chinese society was going through a period of unprecedented disenchantment.
With accelerated transformation of the market economy and the upsurge of
commercial culture, the moral orientation of Chinese society began to swing
dramatically toward individualism. This is the study of the individualization
of Chinese society investigated by anthropologist Yunxiang Yan (2009). It is
also in this period that a new crisis of faith appeared. In the late 1990s, when
the material conditions of life had significantly improved, people began to
rediscover questions about the meaning of life and personal happiness. This
was a rediscovery, because barely 20 years earlier, in 1980, a national debate
about the meaning of life occurred in China that was triggered by a letter to
the editor, now known as Pan Xiao’s Letter (Yang, 2009). In the late 1990s, the
question returned to the public sphere with a vengeance. Whereas in 1980, the
debate focused on the damaging consequences of rigid Mao-​era collective life
on the individual, in the late 1990s, the question became the consequences of
individualization for personal and collective identities. The debate in 1980 was
a reflection of a disenchantment with extreme collective life; in the late 1990s,
it reflected a disenchantment with the meaning of excessive individualism.
In this context, the development of the Internet took on special social and
cultural significance. The Internet provided a new space for the work of the
imagination (Appadurai, 1996) and for cultivating a new social imaginary
(Taylor, 2004). The radical newness of the Internet at that time gave it a spe-
cial technological aura, or charisma. For many people, it became a space for
finding meaning, or re-​enchantment, in a world of disenchantment. In the late
1990s, the BBS forums and online communities became very popular, bringing
together large crowds of active participants in online conversations. Part of
the appeal of these new Internet spaces is that people can explore alternative
visions about their lives, identities, and society. Three of the dominant images
of the Internet in the online discourses of that time were images of home,
freedom, and romantic heroism of the martial arts world (Yang, 2009, p. 156).
Many of the contentious events that happened in Chinese cyberspace at that
time similarly reflected yearnings for freedom, solidarity, and community. It is
in this sense that the Internet provided a site for re-​enchantment.
As self-​performance, Diba Expedition reflected a collective yearning for
grandeur and heroism in a postheroic, disenchanted world. Despite the abun-
dance of humorous and funny slogans and memes, the most notable, and
certainly the most widely circulated, images in the “Expedition” express
yearnings for a romantic heroism. For example, one Internet meme used in the
Expedition is called “Expedition for the Sake of Yourself ”. Taken from Robert
5

Performing cyber-nationalism 5
Fisher’s popular novel The Knight in Rusty Armor, the image conveys the sense
of a solitary but brave warrior in search of his self—​a fitting metaphor for the
meaning of Diba Expedition. Another image, showing Spartacus in a fierce
battle cry and taken directly from the Hollywood film 300, about Spartacus,
even more clearly expresses a sense of bravery and heroism, again a fitting
image of the symbolic meaning of Diba Expedition to its participants.
One of the social functions of nationalism is that it provides strong emo-
tional resources for personal identity and a sense of belonging. Benedict
Anderson’s (1991) work shows that nationalism arose at a time when reli-
gion was on the decline. The waning of religion as a system of belief and
enchantment thus made way for the rise of nationalism as a new form of
enchantment. Cyber-​nationalism of Diba Expedition type is similar to the
nationalism in Anderson’s study in that it provided an occasion for strong
emotional experience and for imagining a sense of collective identity and
solidarity.

The style of performance

To view Diba Expedition as an event of self-​performance is to invite an ana-
lysis of its style. Dramatic performances have styles. As acts of dramatic
performance, online activism also has its political styles (Yang, 2009; Yang
& Wang, 2016).
Style is a distinct feature in the media-​saturated politics of the contem-
porary world. Pels (2003) defines style as “a heterogeneous ensemble of ways
of speaking, acting, looking, displaying, and handling things, which merge
into a symbolic whole that immediately fuses matter and manner, message and
package, argument and ritual” (p. 45). Stressing the centrality of media to pol-
itical practices in their study of contemporary populism, Moffitt and Tormey
(2013, p. 7) argue that “politicians have become pseudo-​celebrities, political
events like protests often gain attention for their novel stylistic features”. They
define political style as “the repertoires of performance that are used to create
political relations” (Moffitt & Tormey, 2013, p. 7).
The concept of style is both similar to and different from the concept of
repertoires in social movement theory. Political style resembles repertoire of
contention when it is used to identify the common patterns of action across
multiple cases. Political style, however, highlights the outward appearances,
tones, aesthetic features, and manner of action (Ankersmit, 1997; Hebdige,
1979), whereas the concept of repertoire as used by Tilly (1995) refers
mainly to an ensemble of tactics from which activists can pick and choose.
Political style is what unifies an ensemble of political tactics, just as literary
style unifies different works by the same author or by the same “school” of
authors.
In a recent study, Yang and Wang (2016) identify four political styles of
online activism in China, namely, the playful, the subversive, the confronta-
tional, and consensus:
6

6 Guobin Yang
In the consensus style, activists work with, rather than against, govern-
ment authorities to achieve social change. In the playful style, netizens
participate in contentious activities through the use of online humour,
jokes, parody, cartoons, and other playful activities. The confrontational
style targets individual government officials or agencies through direct
action without challenging the political system. Finally, a subversive style
generates a discourse directly challenging the legitimacy of the Chinese
political system. The four styles are not mutually exclusive and elements
of one may be mixed in another.
Yang and Wang, 2016, p. 193

Although by and large, authors of the chapters in this volume do not use the
notion of style as their analytical concept, their detailed empirical anatomy of
the visual and symbolic features of Diba Expedition provides insights into the
Expedition’s stylistic features. Zhou and Miao, Liu Hailong, Guo Xiaoan and
Yang Shaoting, and Wang Zhe, among others, draw attention to the playful
and colorful expressions. Guo and Yang emphasize the consensus character of
its mobilization. Liu Hailong further points to the slightly subversive flavor of
a subcultural style. All this suggests that although Diba Expedition seems to
manifest a mixed political style, it is clearly dominated by the playful. It is its
playful style that distinguishes it most clearly from earlier waves of nationalism
in China. Think about the cases of cyber-​nationalism enumerated in Xu Wu’s
(2007) study. Whether it was the “Say No to Indonesia’s Anti-​Chinese Riot”
protest from 1997 to 1999 or the Sino-​US cyber wars from 1999 to 2011, or the
online and offline anti-​Japanese protests from 2001 to 2003, the dominant style
of protest at that time was angry earnestness and somberness, not playfulness.

Cultural skills and cyber-​nationalism

Why did Diba Expedition assume a predominantly playful political style in
the twenty-​first century? It has everything to do with contemporary culture,
which is a culture of consumerism plus Internet play and bantering. This is a
theme that emerges clearly from most of the chapters in this volume, especially
those by Wang Zhe, Liu Hailong, and Wu Jing, Li Simin and Wang Hongzhe.
Instead of dwelling further on this point, I wish to add that understanding
the peculiar style of Diba Expedition calls for an analysis of its dramatic
repertoires and the cultural skills of its “actors”.
Adapting the language of drama and performance, Tilly (1995, p. 41) coined
the concept of “repertoire of contention” to refer to forms of action in social
protest. In his words, repertoire of contention refers to “the ways that people
act together in pursuit of shared interest”. How people act together, however,
depends on the cultural resources available to them and their cultural skills and
habitus. If we grant that contemporary Internet culture is the habitus of the
cyber-​nationalists, what are their cultural skills? What do I mean by cultural
skills?
18

18 Hongmei Li
China’s deepening of global participation—economic, political, and
c­ ultural—​and its rising power are also accompanied by increasing clashes with
the United States. For example, in 1993, the United States accused a Chinese
container ship of carrying illegal chemical weapons to Iran. However, a sub-
sequent examination by a US-​Saudi team did not find any chemical weapons,
but the United States refused to apologize or compensate for China’s loss.
This made many Chinese nationalists furious and they called the incident
“the shame of China’s navy”. Many Chinese also viewed China’s loss of the
2000 Olympics bid to Sydney as the result of American intervention and its
“unfair” criticism of China’s human rights issues. Thus, since the 1990s a
common theme in Chinese media has been that the United States aims to con-
tain China’s development. The two countries’ different views toward China’s
human rights and sovereignty pertaining to Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen
have further exacerbated the tense relationship. Since 2016, the US-China rela-
tion has been dominated by an ongoing trade war between the two countries.
Therefore, geopolitics, different ideologies, and national interests contribute to
the rise of China’s nationalism.
The rising nationalism in China demonstrates the following characteristics.
First, Japan and the United States are the two major targets. China opposes
Japan due to its invasion of China during World War II. Many Chinese believe
that Japan has not shown adequate remorse nor provided appropriate indem-
nity. Specific criticisms include that Japan has not yet officially apologized
to China, and that Japan continues to whitewash its history by revising its
textbooks and paying tribute to war criminals. Moreover, the territorial
disputes between the two countries over the Diaoyu Islands continue to trigger
nationalist reactions in China. In addition, the United States has a complicated
role in these disputes: the United States managed the Ryukyu Islands after
World War II, and when it returned Okinawa (part of the Ryukyu Islands) to
Japan in 1971, it also returned the Diaoyu Islands to Japan. Furthermore, the
US and Japanese security arrangement and US-​Taiwan relations often make
Chinese nationalists anxious. China frequently views any military actions and
exchanges between these parties as targeting China. Even though China and
the United States enjoyed a honeymoon period in the 1980s when both coun-
tries opposed the Soviet Union, these two countries have had more conflicts
since the June Fourth movement in 1989. With China’s rising economic
power, China and the United States are in direct competition in many areas,
making the relationship more like that of “frenemies” rather than “strategic
collaborators”.
Despite its reluctant support, the Chinese government also harbors an
ambivalent attitude toward nationalism because nationalism is a double-​edged
sword. Oftentimes, it condones or implicitly encourages nationalism initially.
Once the situation is out of control, the authorities then take actions to crack
down on or arrest active participants or leaders.3 Such an approach results
from the fear that nationalism may threaten the rule of the CCP because many
nationalist movements later turn to criticizing domestic issues.
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