Traffic, Money, and Political Consent: Explaining the Growth of Commercial Cyber-Nationalism in China

This article aims to explore how non-state actors have commercialised nationalism in China. A mixed-methods approach is used to examine how the influential “we media” (or “self-media” or zimeiti) construct a nationalistic discourse in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war. It was found that in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, nationalism is most closely related to anti-USA sentiment, followed by pro-Russia, patriotic, anti-Ukraine, and anti-West sentiments. In addition to an explicit expression of dislike and disapproval of the USA, the influential “we media” also set the agenda centred on the USA rather than on Russia or Ukraine. Drawing from recent research on Chinese cyber-nationalism and the political economy of China’s social media industry, a model of the symbiotic triangle is proposed to conceptualise how non-state actors and the party-state interact to enable the commercialisation of nationalism to sustain itself as a profitable business. It is concluded: first, that the commercialisation of cyber-nationalism is a traffic-driven business in which the “we media” practitioners and social media platforms extract profits by pandering to popular appetite under political consent; and second, the party-state and non-state actors have formed reciprocal triangular relations to serve their respective interests.