A divide certainly exists in the analysis of Chinese nationalist movements in Western media sources. One of the discourses that exists on this subject is composed of foreign observers that assume all nationalist protest in China to be manufactured by the government.(1) Gries briefly observes that this “idea that the Chinese people are largely impotent before the vast coercive apparatus of the Oriental state has a long history in the Western study of Chinese politics, and it continues to impede Western studies of state legitimation in China today.”(2) In analyzing the coverage of Chinese nationalist movements by Western news sources, the Economist is a good example (of one subset of Western sources) because it explicitly takes a Western liberal point of view.(3)
An article by The Economist covering the nationalist protests against South Korea in 2017 makes this assumption that the Chinese government can finely manipulate public sentiments in its title, “China is whipping up public anger against South Korea.”(4) Throughout its coverage, the article referred to nationalism as a “weapon in China’s diplomatic armoury” and only briefly does it recognize the threat that nationalist sentiment can pose to regime stability.(5) The way meaning is constructed by this particular discourse is a puzzle because, as Weiss notes, China has a long history of instability and revolution created by antiforeign unrest.(6) This history would seem to indicate that nationalist protests should be understood in the context of being a constraint on government decision making, but that is not the belief that this particular discourse advances. In one sense though, the article from The Economist is unhelpful because the names of the authors of all articles from The Economist are concealed. This means that we cannot know with certainty the identity of the author, but we can still assess it as a Western news source with a liberal point of view.
(1) See for example “China Is Whipping up Public Anger Against South Korea.” The Economist, May 17, 2017. https://www.economist.com/news/china/21718876-it-wary-going-too-far-china-whipping-up-public-anger-against-south-korea.
(2) Peter Hays Gries. “Chinese Nationalism: Challenging the State?” Current History; Philadelphia 104, no. 683 (September 2005): 252.
(3) “China Is Whipping up Public Anger Against South Korea.”
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Weiss, Jessica Chen. Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014: 7-11.
A very good start, Jack, with some good sources here. As you continue your work, focus on clarifying *whose* discourses your analyzing (it appears to be the media discourse here?) and what those discourses are *on* or *about* — you are are proposing to analyze discourses on _________ . Going beyond that, then, you could work on clarifying exactly who/what is being constructed by the discourse. Finally, just as a note on your observation that the Economist does not list author names: this is not necessarily a problem, as the important thing in discourse analysis is that a text is widely read/shared, such that it is part of the collection of texts that forms some intersubjective meaning. In some sense, the author doesn’t matter at all — it is the meanings and identities established in this and other texts (and then shared and taken as “real” by readers/consumers of these texts that matters).