China’s nationalism guru now says nationalism has gone too far

Wang Xiaodong once delivered a speech in which he declared that “China’s forward march cannot be stopped.” He published articles urging the country to boost the Armed Forces. He co-authored a book with the not-so-subtle title “China Is Unhappy,” in which he said the country needed to expand the territories under its control and direct global politics. “China should lead this world,” he said.

Today Wang, a 66-year-old columnist who lives in Beijing and has been described in the past as a standard-bearer of Chinese nationalism, is delivering a different message: this has gone too far.

For years he was dismissed as too radical. He preached that the establishment was too committed to Western ideas and global trade, too happy to let China accommodate itself to a world order manipulated by the United States.

Then, as China grew more powerful, its message of promoting nationalism — as well as its combative, “only idiots disagree with me” style found a following. His book became a best seller. Today, arrogant speech about the greatness of the country is a regular element of Chinese public dialogue, present in diplomatic statements and comments on social media.

But instead of reveling in the success of his ideas, Wang is alarmed. Fueled by the regime’s propaganda, Chinese nationalism has become increasingly explosive and aggressive. And now Wang finds himself in the unexpected position of trying to calm the movement he himself helped spark nearly 35 years ago.

To his millions of followers on social media, Wang now preaches that China’s overly positive opinion of itself jeopardizes the country’s rise, something he no longer sees as inevitable. In intellectually-sounding posts and videos, Wang warns that severing ties with the US would be self-defeating. And he lashes out at nationalist influencers, accusing them of inciting extreme emotions to attract more followers.

Today this pioneer of nationalist chauvinism is having to defend himself against criticism that he is too moderate, that he treats the West with complacency — he is even accused of being a traitor.

Wang greets the inversion in amazement, amused. “In the last few decades these people have forgotten that I was called the father of nationalism. I was the one who created them,” he says. “But I never told them to be that crazy.”

The divide may be in part generational in nature. For young people who have only known China on the rise, the strident stance toward the world may seem natural. Other older public figures have expressed similar concerns. International relations professor Yan Xuetong, who often espouses hard-line stances, lamented this year that students take an unduly confident view of the country’s global stature, something he calls “make-believe.”

China’s humblest history was a key element in Wang’s worldview.

The son of highly educated parents — an engineer father and a teacher mother — he was 10 years old when Mao Tse-tung launched the Cultural Revolution. Wang’s school closed for two years. He spent time reading old textbooks on his own.

That turbulent period infused him with an enduring combative attitude. Living unsupervised, he and his friends often got into fights with other youths. “The fact that I could fight like that, without being punished, made me feel like I was right,” he says, with a mischievous smile that viewers of his videos are used to. “It wasn’t necessarily a very good lesson.”

When the Cultural Revolution ended, Wang enrolled at the prestigious Peking University to study mathematics. It’s an educational pedigree that he, an avowed elitist, often mentions.

But it wasn’t long before his attention strayed from the classes. The 1980s, with the country moving away from Mao’s suffocating rule, were heady, full of new ideas and a collective soul-searching. Wang began to devour foreign novels, practiced English by listening to Voice of America radio and reading “Selections from Reader’s Digest.”

But before long he would decide that China’s interest in the West had gone too far.

Wang identifies his first major brush with nationalism in 1988, when the state broadcaster aired the documentary “Elegy to Rio,” which attributed China’s backwardness to its traditional civilization and urged the country to learn from Japan and the West. Wang, then a young university professor of economics, was outraged. He wrote an article calling the doc self-deprecating, an idea he would later dub “inverted racism.”

Considering the film had received the state’s seal of approval, it was a bold argument. Wang said he was only able to publish the article because he begged an editor at the China Youth Daily, who gave it not to the political section but to the less prestigious entertainment pages.

The text provoked intense discussion, nonetheless. And it made Wang one of the leading voices of Chinese nationalism, which was gaining momentum as the broader political environment changed. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the government turned against the political opening of the 1980s and adopted a more defensive posture towards the outside world.

Wang was there to applaud the regime — and argue that it wasn’t doing enough.

He was releasing increasingly provocative books and articles, postulating that China needed to become more militant in order to survive American hegemony. He said that the immense Chinese population needed more resources and that it might not be possible to obtain them through exclusively peaceful means.

In 2009’s “China Is Unhappy”, he characterized those for whom Beijing was not prepared to face the US as “enslaved” who “glorified peace”. The book rose on the bestseller list, making international headlines. But, in a sign that China had not yet fully defined its relationship to nationalism, it was also criticized by many. Intellectuals accused him of militarizing and poisoning the minds of young Chinese.

This unease would not take long to dissipate. When China hosted the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and it fueled a new wave of national confidence, Wang was at first excited. He especially appreciated the way the internet helped these ideas spread, arguing that it demonstrated the intrinsic appeal of nationalism — and its ideas.

Little by little, however, this feeling of having had their ideas validated turned into concern.

Tensions between China and the West intensified as trade deficits grew and the Chinese military began to flex its muscles in places like the South China Sea.

Tempers flared with the pandemic, and some social media users began to applaud the idea of ​​cutting trade ties with the US. Even cultural exchanges have become targets of criticism.

A self-declared fan of American TV, especially “Game of Thrones”, Wang began to fear that many Chinese had gone too far, going from self-deprecation to imagined invincibility. He acknowledged that his earlier writings had exaggerated optimism about the pace of Chinese development and said the country was still not as powerful as the US.

“Before, the self-esteem of the Chinese was too low. They thought that China could not do anything right”, he says. “Today they think China is number 1 and is capable of taking on any other country. That’s something I can’t admit either.” As is his habit, Wang posted these views on Weibo, the local Twitter account, where he has 2.5 million followers.

Recently, when some social media users predicted Beijing would shoot down the plane on which Nancy Pelosi, the US House Speaker, was traveling to Taiwan, Wang said too much bluster makes China look weak.

Now, in turn, he is being branded by commentators as arrogant and outdated, and he seems to take pleasure in rebutting arguments in a condescending tone. When a user ordered him to go to the US, Wang replied, “For idiots like you, you’re lacking not only brains, but morals as well.”

There’s a noticeable absence from your hit list. Wang almost never criticizes the regime, which arguably has done more than anyone else to foment nationalism through its aggressive diplomacy and disinformation campaigns.

Wang says he intentionally avoids direct comments about national politics, focusing instead on social media users’ reactions to certain issues. He says he does it because he fears the possibility that his social accounts will be closed — he makes money from paid subscribers. And today he tries to make more comments on international affairs. Many of his recent videos deal with the War in Ukraine. “I’m quite shy actually,” he says jokingly.

Even so, if he is now being seen as moderate, it may only be due to the degree of radicalism of some Chinese nationalists online. Wang still defends the idea of ​​superpower China; His caveats have to do with tactics and timing. At times he joins the online masses to mobilize against the West, as when he applauded a boycott of Nike and H&M for those companies announcing they would not use cotton produced in Xinjiang.

Song Qiang, one of four co-authors with whom Wang wrote “China Is Unhappy,” said today’s Chinese nationalism is an unequivocal descendant of the movement Wang helped launch and shape.

“The national awakening has reached the mainstream,” he says, indicating that he does not agree that young nationalists are irrational. “There is no reason to say that the nationalism inherited by the new generation is different from that of the 1990s.”

Still, Wang knows his popular persuasive power may be waning, as the broader political climate today rewards more aggressive chauvinism than he considers prudent.

But he believes his positions will continue to have an audience — for now, at least. “Right now, it’s my generation that’s in charge, not theirs,” he says, of the younger ones. “We’ll see what happens after we die.”