Love Our Country With A Negative Patriotism: Three Cases Study On The Cyber-patriotism

Since 2008,the patriotism with outraged emotion against Western countries has gradually emerged on the Chinese social media under the domination of the Chinese state propaganda.It is considered that the Western has been the hindrance to Chinese economy development;therefore,Chinese patriotist must regard patriotism as the primary principle to show support for China to improve the national competitiveness.Such kind of patriotism spread by the internet was well accepted by many Chinese patriotist,especially the youth.The thesis focuses on three cases of the patriotic events on Chinese Internet,including the“humiliation from NBA”,“controversy of Paperclip’s video” and “Ru Guan Xue”.By analyzing them,I examine the patriotism propaganda from state media,popular patriotic expression on social media and the articulation of the academic think tank on the online patriotic expressions,and discuss the social problems the kind of patriotism have been caused.On the one hand,Chinese have formed a cognitive inertia that “government will step in everything”and have been lack of awareness of the relationship of state and individual under the long-standing domination of China’s totalism ideology.When encountering difficulties related to the social problems,people negatively believe that relying on the state could be the only way to change the status quo.On the other hand,the representations in the state media about the Western “unreasonable suppression” to China,with Chinese historical memory about national humiliation,created Chinese xenophobia with a feeling of victimhood.With these two factors,the public discontent towards different aspects of social problems finally generates the extreme patriotism.Such a patriotism demonstrates a complete subordination for both Chinese official views and civil society to the unjust social and world system.Under the seemingly enthusiastic patriotic media environment,the society have a negative and conservative preference about the social problems and the their future.