State rhetoric, nationalism and public opinion in China

Abstract

The Chinese government is fond of invoking the ‘hurt feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens’ to protest foreign actions and policies. However, this rhetoric might be nothing more than propaganda and attempts to leverage nationalist sentiment. How much do citizens in China actually care about issues completely unrelated to their daily livelihoods? To answer this, the study employs a representative survey to investigate the extent to which rhetoric about ‘hurt feelings’ is consistent with public opinion on four contemporary socio-political disputes involving the NBA, Marriott International, Mercedes-Benz and the city of Prague. Across the scenarios, we found that the Chinese government did not exaggerate the displeasure of audiences—citizens are aware of the cases, were indeed upset by them and advocated for retaliatory measures that were surprisingly more forceful than those adopted in reality. These emotions were largely driven by nationalistic sentiment rather than personal experiences or encounters, suggesting the success of state propaganda in steering the public opinion toward outcomes favourable to the state. These findings support recent studies highlighting the peculiar case of rising nationalism in China, and have important implications for the impact of public opinion on Chinese policymaking.

Firms’ Rhetorical Nationalism: Theory, Measurement, and Evidence from a Computational Analysis of Chinese Public Firms

“…In the current era, the dominant agenda of Chinese nationalism is national revival. This theme is clearly demonstrated by the state-sponsored nationalist campaigns launched by the Chinese government (Neo & Xiang, 2022). The most common messages in these campaigns are that the Chinese Communist Party is leading Chinese people to restore the country's former position at the center of the world (Wang, 2014) and that the country has achieved rapid economic, technological, and infrastructural development under the Party's leadership in recent decades (Steele & Lynch, 2013).…”

“…Management researchers have typically used country-level nationalism to proxy that of a firm (e.g., Click & Weiner, 2010; Ertug, Cuypers, Dow, & Edman, 2023), and they have rarely unpacked the heterogeneity of firm-level nationalism within a country. Meanwhile, research on Chinese nationalism has traditionally relied on surveys (e.g., Johnston, 2016; Neo & Xiang, 2022) and case studies (e.g., Fisman, Hamao, & Wang, 2014; Tian, Tse, Xiang, Li, & Pan, 2021; Weiss, 2016). Although these research methods have provided valuable insights regarding Chinese nationalism, survey results tend to be sporadic and the findings derived from case studies can be bounded by specific contexts.…”

“…Firms’ rhetorical nationalism refers to their adoption of nationalistic language in their public communication to signal their commitment to act in line with the interests of a nation. Rhetoric is a central form of nationalist expression (Calhoun, 2017; Neo & Xiang, 2022). While firms can show off their nationalism through material actions, such actions tend to be triggered by external events and thus are often context-specific.…”