Right-wing populism with Chinese characteristics? Identity, otherness and global imaginaries in debating world politics online
| Author | Chenchen Zhang |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119850253 |
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JR
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119850253
European Journal of
International Relations
2020, Vol. 26(1) 88 –115
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066119850253
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Right-wing populism with
Chinese characteristics?
Identity, otherness and global
imaginaries in debating world
politics online
Chenchen Zhang
Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Abstract
The past few years have seen an emerging discourse on Chinese social media that
combines the claims, vocabulary and style of right-wing populisms in Europe and
North America with previous forms of nationalism and racism in Chinese cyberspace.
In other words, it provokes a similar hostility towards immigrants, Muslims, feminism,
the so-called ‘liberal elites’ and progressive values in general. This article examines
how, in debating global political events such as the European refugee crisis and the
American presidential election, well-educated and well-informed Chinese Internet
users appropriate the rhetoric of ‘Western-style’ right-wing populism to paradoxically
criticise Western hegemony and discursively construct China’s ethno-racial and political
identities. Through qualitative analysis of 1038 postings retrieved from a popular social
media website, this research shows that by criticising Western ‘liberal elites’, the
discourse constructs China’s ethno-racial identity against the ‘inferior’ non-Western
other, exemplified by non-white immigrants and Muslims, with racial nationalism on the
one hand; and formulates China’s political identity against the ‘declining’ Western other
with realist authoritarianism on the other. The popular narratives of global order protest
against Western hegemony while reinforcing a state-centric and hierarchical imaginary
of global racial and civilisational order. We conclude by suggesting that the discourse
embodies the logics of anti-Western Eurocentrism and anti-hegemonic hegemonies. This
article: (1) provides critical insights into the changing ways in which self–other relations
are imagined in Chinese popular geopolitical discourse; (2) sheds light on the global
circulation of extremist discourses facilitated by the Internet; and (3) contributes to the
ongoing debate on right-wing populism and the ‘crisis’ of the liberal world order.
Corresponding author:
Chenchen Zhang, Department of Political Science, Université libre de Bruxelles, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50,
1050 Bruxelles, Belgium.
Email: chenchen.zhang@ulb.ac.be
850253EJT0010.1177/1354066119850253European Journal of International RelationsZhang
research-article2019
Article
Zhang 89
Keywords
China, Chinese identity, discourse analysis, liberal world order, right-wing populism
Introduction
The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.
(US President Donald Trump’s speech in Warsaw, Poland, July 2017)
It’s about the instinct of survival. The West has lost this instinct, but China has it.
(A Zhihu posting on the question of ‘Muslims in the West’, May 20161)
On 20 June 2017, World Refugee Day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) posted a brief message raising awareness about the plight of displaced people
around the world through its official account on Weibo, a pre-eminent Chinese social media
platform. The post was soon bombarded with some 30,000 negative comments, and the
reaction was so overwhelming that the organisation’s goodwill ambassador was forced to
come forward and clarify that she had never advocated for China to take in refugees (Ryan,
2017). The recently widespread anti-refugee sentiment in Chinese cyberspace,2 the surge
of online Islamophobia (Leibold, 2016) and the exceptional popularity of American
President Donald Trump in the country (Carlson, 2018), at least before the trade dispute
intensified, all draw our attention to an emerging online discourse that combines traditional
elements of Chinese cyber-nationalism, which has been much discussed in international
studies (e.g. Cairns and Carlson, 2016; Hughes, 2000), with the ideology, vocabulary and
style of right-wing populisms in Europe and North America. In other words, it provokes a
similar hostility towards immigrants, Muslims, multiculturalism, the so-called ‘liberal
elites’ — known as the ‘white left’ in Chinese online communities (Zhang, 2017) — and
progressive social movements in general. However, compared to its Western counterparts,
right-wing populist discourse in China takes issue with the international order from a dif-
ferent geopolitical perspective and integrates popular discontents with the ‘liberal hegem-
onic order’ (Acharya, 2014) with expressions of nativist and authoritarian ideologies.
Although reproducing many of the claims of nationalism, racism and Han supremacism
that have long existed on the Chinese Internet (Cheng, 2011; Leibold, 2010), the emergent
discourse also rearticulates national identity and self–other relations in new ways by shift-
ing focus from historical memories of ‘pride and humiliation’ (Callahan, 2012; Gries,
2004) to debating the political norms and values of the present.
Puzzled by this unexplored phenomenon, this article examines how, in debating
global political events such as the European refugee crisis and the American presidential
election, well-educated Chinese Internet users appropriate the rhetoric of ‘Western-style’
right-wing populism to paradoxically criticise Western hegemony, on the one hand, and
discursively construct China’s ethno-racial and political identities, on the other. We also
interpret the discourse as popular narratives of global order, which diverge in certain
ways from (and converge in other ways with) official and academic discourses that
largely monopolise accounts of ‘Chinese’ visions of global order. The article is premised
on the recognition that the configurations of right-wing populist discourses in both
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