道德？你西方人甭跟讲道德！就像网上年轻人所说的：你从世界各大洲除了欧洲都卷了铺盖，你就有道德了。

Morality? You Westerners shouldn’t even bother speaking with me about morality! It’s like that netizen said: ‘[if] all of you pack up and leave all of the other continents (except Europe), then you will have morality.

This comes from Wang Xiaodong (albeit in one of the more vitriolic essays) where he refers to a comment made by a Chinese netizen that ‘Westerners should pack up and leave North America, Africa, and Oceania, and all return to their ancestral homes in Europe. Then they can talk with us about leaving T1bet.’ Another essay, 美国不是纸老虎，是“老黄瓜刷绿漆” (America isn’t a Paper Tiger, but rather an old cucumber painted green’) strikes a similar tone.

The book received a lot of attention from Western media, for being ultra-nationalist, and espousing tenants of a new political philosophy – 新爱国主义 (‘new patriotism’) that advocates the aggressive use of soft power in foreign policy, and reduced reliance on Westerners (culturally, economically, and technologically). Though I personally mostly agree, I also think it would be very wrong to characterize these opinions as being shared by everyone here – especially those in power. My experiences with party officials is that they are more critical than the average Chinese, though in a much more nuanced way. That’s unsurprising, considering they have to deal with whatever problems exist within the bureaucracy.

This is all anecdotal of course, and risks ignoring the ephemeral (but palpable?) sense of populism / nationalism that you get glimpses of. As of writing, Chinasmack, an amazing website that catalogues popular / controversial stories in China is under a Denial of Service attack. It would not be surprising that this is being done by ‘new patriots’ who feel the website portrays China in a negative light, especially right before the 20th anniversary of 6.4 – the notion that they are probably drawing attention to the very site they are trying to shut down seems not to have occurred.

Many of the essays in the book talk a lot about how Chinese, especially youth, must rise up and be strong, like when ‘young nationalists’ organized boycotts of Carrefour after Olympic Torch protests in Europe last year. This ‘defense of national honor’ is exactly the sort of activity that the authors would approve of, but stinks of the very same [unwarranted] inferiority complex that ‘new patriots’ take issue with. The biggest risk for people like me is misconstruing that such views are homogenous – even within ‘nationalism,’ there’s a large variety of views. Rather than risking polarization, discussion of these issues are an important avenue forward.

Perhaps I haven’t quite run into the truly proto-nationalist crowd here yet – but no one really seems to care at all about centuries old tin animal facsimilesnational treasures; and some of the discussion that can be found (see translated comments here) seems downright reasonable. To what extent does Western media report only on headlines (themselves directly from Chinese State-Media outlets, which in these cases naively assert that every single member of the 1.4 billion strong Han diaspora are ‘furious‘)? Should we be worried about such a bias?