When the Chinese Communist Party encourages and unleashes fanatical nationalism and “cyber-nationalism” in the streets and online, are CCP officials then able to calibrate what would be just the “right” amount of civic expression of this irrational mentality?
The BBC’s Tessa Wong wants to know: “A Japanese boy was killed in China. Was cyber-nationalism to blame?” (October 14, 2024).
On a Tuesday morning in September, a 10-year-old boy was approaching the gates of a Japanese school in Shenzhen in southern China, when a stranger walked up and stabbed him.
He died of his injuries….
The Japanese government said it believed what happened was motivated by xenophobia, with the country’s foreign minister blaming the attack on “malicious and anti-Japanese” social media posts….
The online posts are part of a wider phenomenon, which encompasses both xenophobia and attacks on Chinese nationals for being unpatriotic. One argument by analysts is that this digital nationalism has gone mostly unchecked by the Chinese government, with online patriotism fanning flames of anti-foreigner sentiment as well as accusations against Chinese figures.
Has the trend gone “too far,” as “some are asking”? Since there should never be any malicious, unprovoked verbal and physical attacks on people, the answer is yes. But there’s no tipping point at which a legitimate amount of such irrational lashing out now goes “too far.” It’s always too far.
As for the question in the first paragraph: no. The CCP cannot control the hatreds it encourages such that nobody would ever do anything to others, like murder, that would prove embarrassing or inconvenient for the Party.
But does the Party find such extremes to be embarrassing or inconvenient? What happens if and when CCP functionaries in the South China Sea actually kill a fisherman or sailor from the Philippines or Vietnam that the Chinese Coast Guard and others have been violently harassing? Whether the Chinese government will regard such an incident as a mistake will depend on what other countries do. China will either get away with it or not.
