Over the past month, I’ve been surprised (pleasantly?) at how brittle social media Chinese nationalism is in the face of still moderate socioeconomic upheaval. If my Weibo feed (which includes most of the major nationalist public intellectuals) is any indication, it’s been…

… forced into a defensive posture far more swiftly than it’s near-total domination over the last two years could have reasonably suggested, and the backlash has been far fiercer. A number of developments have colluded to make this possible: the Shanghai fiasco, economic pain…

… across the country, and even the current failures of the Russian invasions of Ukraine—and yet the impact that these developments have had on social media discourse has been amazingly broad. It seems that online Chinese nationalism doesn’t have a very high pain tolerance. …

… I personally think that this is because it lacks a core set of positive sociopolitical values, outside of material success (i.e., “we’re richer/more powerful than you”), and so it sheds support rapidly whenever such success is even moderately called into doubt, but who knows.