Invented borders : tension between grassroots patriotism and state-led patriotic campaigns in China
Abstract
Patriotic campaigns and mass mobilization draw on existing xenophobic attitudes of the public, reinforcing the ‘us vs. them’ dualism between China and ‘the West’. However, patriotic campaigns are not always top-down, state-led, nor are they always primarily driven by political ideology. Patriotic content appeals to a growing nationalist audience who consumes a mixed feeling of perceived victimization at the hand of foreign aggression and the pride arising from being a Chinese citizen. This paper argues that the profitability of patriotic content circulating on social media exacerbated the tension between market-driven grassroots patriotism and state-led patriotic campaigns. The tension grows out of, and is manifested in, the online popular debate around economically driven, grassroots ‘patriotic’ content that can challenge the state state-led patriotic rhetoric. While the state sometimes strategically co-opts some patriotic contents into its own patriotic narratives, it also delegitimises other undesired ones through labels such as ‘high-level black’ (gaoji hei) or ‘low-level red’ (diji hong). These labels were initially used to differentiate meticulously crafted political satire and parody from incompetent, illogical and vulgar propaganda pieces that unintendedly blemish the state’s patriotic campaigns, but later evolved into an exercise of power to distance the CCP from undesired patriotic content.
Citation
Zhang , C & Ma , Y 2023 , ' Invented borders : tension between grassroots patriotism and state-led patriotic campaigns in China ' , Journal of Contemporary China , vol. 32 , no. 144 , pp. 897-913 . https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2023.2167054
Publication
Journal of Contemporary China
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1067-0564Type
Journal article
Description
Funding: Chi Zhang is funded by the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (PF20/100052).Collections
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