Right-wing populism with Chinese characteristics? Identity, otherness and global imaginaries in debating world politics online

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.

Boris Johnson in hospital: a Chinese gaze at Western democracies in the COVID-19 pandemic

“…This allows them to implicitly articulate their expectations of the CCP by comparing its politics to political systems elsewhere, especially Western democracies (Lin, 2020). Such a domestic orientation has been well-documented by recent studies of how high-profile Western politicians, such as Angela Merkel (the German Chancellor), Donald Trump (the US President), and Theresa May (the former UK Prime Minister), are assessed in the Chinese context (Lin, 2020;Peng et al, 2020;Zhang, 2020b). An account of this phenomenon informs our advancement of the 'China gazing at the West' approach to the analysis of Internet users' discussions about international politics on Chinese social media platforms.…”

“…Yet, existing studies of international politics have largely taken China as a research object and analysed it using theoretical approaches developed upon Western experiences of capitalism, democracy and national identity formation (Chan and Lee, 2017; Song et al, 2019). To date, limited scholarly attention has been paid to how Western democratic politics is perceived and understood in the Chinese context (Lin, 2020; Peng et al, 2020; Zhang, 2020b). This is a major omission in cultural studies scholarship, pointing towards a Eurocentric research agenda in the field.…”

“…This article is based on a case study, collecting data from the most popular Chinese question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu. Allowing its users to generate original content by asking and answering questions, Zhihu has increasingly been used by researchers to observe China’s socio-political trends reflected in Chinese digital cultures (Peng et al, 2020; Zhang, 2020b). In the present research, we analysed all the answers retrieved from two sampled questions about the hospitalization of Boris Johnson by triangulating content analysis (CA) and thematic analysis (TA).…”

Neoliberalism, Authoritarian Politics and Social Policy in China

“…In this way, China's authoritarian politics have seen 'right-wing', neoliberal-looking economic and social policies emerge in a 'communist' or 'socialist' system, and then be challenged by an intra-Party New Left. But China's right-wing policies are not best termed 'New Right', because they are neither straightforwardly economically liberal nor socially conservative -at least not openly within the CCP (Pan and Xu, 2018;Zhang, 2019). 15 The politics that shape social policies in China are also different from right-wing 'populism' in many other parts of the world.…”

“…Nor are its policies presented, as in conventional definitions of populism, as pitting ordinary people against a corrupt elite. Furthermore, while China's current top leader, Xi Jinping, has sometimes been labelled as a populist due to his nationalism and hard‐hitting anti‐corruption campaign (Babones, ; Perry, ; Tang, ; Zhang, ), most of the social policies discussed in this article were introduced before Xi became the CCP's top leader in 2012.…”