Chaguan
China’s online nationalists turn paranoia into clickbait

AN ANXIOUS WORLD has long worried that rising nationalism might one day lead ordinary Chinese—especially the young—to outbursts of uncontrollable rage. If recent months are any guide, outsiders missed a more insidious threat: that anti-foreign paranoia would become a nasty but profitable game.

These are frightening times for Chinese civil-society activists, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and private businesses that see their role as building bridges between China and other countries. Nationalist bloggers, supported at times by media outlets controlled by the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army, have spent months denouncing groups and individual campaigners for receiving foreign grants, or merely for relaying foreign concerns about China’s growing impact on the world, even in such relatively safe fields as the environment.