ABSTRACT
Nationalism seems to be on the rise in China. At least, this is the impression that foreign correspondents in China convey to audiences abroad. 2 Indeed, there is empirical evidence that nationalist protests have increased since the late 1990s and that these anti-foreign protests have been primarily directed against Japan and the United States (Johnston and Stockmann 2007; Weiss 2008), though they also included criticism of bias against China in European media, and popular appeals to boycott French products in response to Western reactions to the uprisings in Tibet shortly before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. It is widely believed that this rise of Chinese nationalism is mainly a result of propaganda initiated by the state to boost regime stability.
