Michael Schuman
In late June, a Chinese man stabbed a woman from Japan and her child at a bus stop for a Japanese school in the eastern city of Suzhou. Two weeks earlier, four foreign teachers from a U.S. college were attacked by a knife-wielding local as they strolled through a park in the northeastern town of Jilin. In a country where violence against foreigners has been practically unheard-of in recent years, the assaults have led to some uncomfortable soul-searching among a shocked Chinese public.
Are hard economic times fueling a dangerous spike in nationalism? some ask in online debates. Has the Chinese school system, with its focus on patriotism, fed people bad ideas? they wonder. Occasionally, a bold voice risks angering China’s censors by posing an even more sensitive possibility: Could the government be to blame?
Chinese state media bombard the public with warnings about foreign spies, plots, and threats, as well as deluging them with negative portrayals of the United States, Japan, and other countries. “What impact,” one commenter on the social-media platform Zhihu asked, will this “false and one-sided content have on ordinary people’s cognition and social trends?”
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