Nationalists in China are demanding less freedom of speech. It is an autocrat’s dream
use fear and coercion to keep foreign ideas at bay. Smart regimes know that nationalism is a more subtle tool. Bring a society to the right pitch of rage against foreign rivals, and people will scorn outside influences of their own accord. Something like that is happening in China, four months into the outbreak of covid-19. In early February it was easy to find Chinese livid about cover-ups by their government.
Then news broke that Fang Fang’s “Quarantine Diaries” would be translated and published in America and Germany this summer. Back home, the shift in opinion was brutal. The social-media hashtag “Fang Fang’s Diaries” has received 550m views and 194,000 comments. Recent posts are overwhelmingly hostile.
In China, the most benign interpretation put on Fang Fang’s actions is ignorance. Chairman Rabbit, a well-connected, Harvard-educated blogger with 1.5m followers, wrote recently that Fang Fang comes from a generation that naively idealises the West, so fails to see how she is serving the “anti-China industry”. He contrasted the diarist with his own generation who, in his telling, have the worldly confidence to compare the West and China objectively.
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