Since 2002, the survey has also asked questions designed to tease out respondents’ nationalism, including the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with the following standard measures of nationalist sentiment: “Even if I could choose any other country in the world, I would prefer to be a citizen of China than any other country”; “In general, China is a better country than most others”; and “Everyone should support their government even when it is wrong.”
The paper’s headline result suggests that nationalism among Beijing’s residents has not increased over time. On the contrary, the proportion of survey respondents strongly agreeing with the first and third statements decreased sharply from 2002 to 2015, while the number of those who agreed “somewhat” rose. Those strongly agreeing with the second statement, about China being “a better country,” did increase slightly — perhaps an understandable finding given that personal incomes and infrastructure in Beijing both improved significantly over the survey period.
The results not only show a drop in sentiment resembling nationalism; they strongly suggest that Chinese youth, at least those in China’s capital, are less nationalistic than their elders, belying notions of growing numbers of internet-addled youngsters ready to take the government to task for any perceived failure to defend the national honor. In each instance of the survey since 2002, respondents born after 1978 were markedly less likely to “strongly agree” with any of the nationalist survey prompts than were their older peers. Perhaps most striking, by 2015, the proportion of older Chinese strongly agreeing to support their country “even when it is wrong” was more than twice the proportion of youth who felt that way.
While it often looks like nationalism is ascendant now, sometimes it looks like it’s a last desperate gasp of a vanishing way of thinking. Can nationalism survive a population that grew up in a globally connected world?
As a Nationalist, a last, desperate gasp isn’t the way I’d put it. But then, I wouldn’t call it ascendant, either. Nationalism will fall in and out of favor as the consequences of Anti-Nationalism become apparent and then wane.
For China’s case, though, you have to consider that the PRC is incompetent, corrupt, and authoritarian. In the presence of international information, it’s going to be more difficult to cultivate Nationalism when the state, which is a key organ of Nationalism, is so highly at odds with the needs of the people.