ABSTRACT
Arriving in Beijing to mend fragile US-China, ties which had been damaged fourteen months earlier by NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Secretary of Defense William Cohen was greeted by the official English-language China Daily with a banner headline, ‘U.S. a Threat to World Peace’, across its front page (13 July 2000). The article accused the United States of ‘going against the will of the world and seeking military supremacy’. This public display of anti-Americanism betrayed mutual desire for conciliation and symbolised the convergence of statist and populist nationalism in China, which has been on the rise since the 1990s. The media have been quick to seize particularly emotive external events and frame them in a variety of sensational ways as an affront to China’s national pride and sovereignty. Media discourses have harped on the themes of the US media’s demonisation of China (Xiao and Liu 2001) to stir up public sentiment. Media production of orchestrated nationalism fits into official craving for legitimacy and recognition that is commensurate with China’s increased economic prowess, while filling the void left by a dying communist ideology (He Zhou). The end of the Cold War has stripped China and the United States of the basis for strategic alliance against the Soviet Union and has exposed China to
international criticism of its human rights abuses. The selling of orchestrated nationalism also satisfies the consumerist logic for a collective therapy, hence garnering a huge profit for the media in a more secular post-Tiananmen Square China (Lee 2000a).
