Managing Nationalism: Experiments in China

One of the most urgent problems in politics today is to understand and manage nationalism. In particular, much attention is paid to the dangers of nationalism in China, but to date, there is little causal evidence on whether and how the government can rein in the anti-foreign sentiments of a nationalistic public. We fielded national survey experiments in China to evaluate the persuasion devices used by the government to contain anti-foreign sentiments. Through a novel “question-as-treatment” design, we identified their effectiveness in making citizens more likely to cooperate with a foreign rival at the operational level, even when they did not always change how people felt at the emotional level. The persuasion devices, however, were less effective on highly patriotic citizens, unless it was salient to them that the government was trying to persuade them. These results contribute a first set of causal evidence on whether anti-foreign sentiments can be contained by the Chinese government, and how.