Category: Politics

“White Left” and Surging Chinese Nationalism

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It is certainly not easy to be white nowadays. On the Chinese version of the World Wide Web, “White Left” is a term loosely referring to white people who hold left-wing political views. The phrase has acquired negative popularity on various Chinese social media such as Weibo and Zhihu, the Chinese equivalence of Twitter and Quora, since the European refugee crisis and the latest US election. Why do Chinese netizens hate left-wing politics so much? And in particular, why do they target at white people?

China’s Reluctance to Develop its Soft Power

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Soft power, often associated with a country’s social and cultural charisma, allows a state to attract other states and obtain its preferred outcomes through non-coercive means (Nye 2012, 151). While many developed economies such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan have invested substantially in developing soft power, China, the emerging economic and military superpower in today’s world, largely fails to develop its soft power that matches its economic and military expansion.