In Chapter 2 I examined the Chinese blogging community as a case of Chinese government encouragement of consumerist culture in order to stimulate nationalism. In this chapter, I focus on one blogging phenomenon in particular, the Anti-CNN website established in the Chinese blogosphere, in order to portray how the Chinese government also regulates nationalism to prevent it from getting out of control. I argue that although party propaganda does not cause the nationalist sentiments of Chinese bloggers, as is the dominant perception in the West, those sentiments are, as suggested recently (Fong 2004; Zhao 2002; Zhou 2005), not free from Chinese state intervention. Drawing on the explanations offered in Part II of this book, together with an analysis of samples collected from the Anti-CNN forum, this chapter argues that instead of using a direct tool such as propaganda, the Chinese government shapes bloggers' nationalist sentiments by encouraging their reliance on consumer culture.

A rational approach to nationalism

The Anti-CNN episode

On 18 March 2008, a 23-year-old male Chinese graduate from Tsinghua University registered the domain name “anti-cnn.com” in response to what he perceived as biased Western coverage of the Tibetan unrest. He followed this with the registration of a series of domain names such as “anti-bbc.com”, “anti-voa.com”, “anti-spiegel.com”, “anti-ntv.com”, and “anti-rtl.com”.