When Taiwan last year elected a president eager to reduce the island’s reliance on China, tens of thousands of Chinese netizens attacked Taiwanese websites in a co-ordinated action that was as much a surprise to Beijing as it was to its targets.
In what they called a “sacred war”, online nationalists plastered pro-Chinese propaganda on Taiwanese Facebook pages. Now, as US President-elect Donald Trump shakes up international diplomatic pieties, the volatile reaction of Chinese nationalists and the ability of China’s assertive president Xi Jinping to keep them on his side is one of the many uncertainties facing Asia.
In the past, a small group of hardcore nationalists in mainland China focused exclusively on Japan. Now a younger and more vocal generation is weighing in on new fronts, including relations with Taiwan, the US and the Muslim world. “There are lots of historic questions still unresolved but we can’t just look at Japan. We need to change US-China relations,” says Sima Pingbang, a vocal “red” or nationalist blogger. “The real problem is the US.”