Following the success of China’s economic reform in the past few decades, Chinese nationalism has entered a new stage. The sentiment born of ‘the century of national humiliation’ is insufficient to explain the phenomenon of Chinese new nationalism. In this new era, China no longer regards the West as the benchmark against which it defines its success, but is becoming more assertive about its own values and perspectives. This emphasis on a Chinese perspective is related to the cultural shift in China’s post-socialist transition, where the source of legitimacy in China’s development has moved from an ideological dimension of socialism to a cultural dimension of ‘Chinese characteristics’. Following this transition, growing importance is being placed on an indigenous voice in many aspects of China’s development, including the recent efforts to reinvent traditional Chinese culture as a source of China’s soft power. In particular, with strong state sponsorship, Confucianism is being revived as a new nationalist discourse, which not only provides new discursive resources for continuing authoritarianism in mainland China, but also redefines governance and nation-building with respect to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why do people spectate eSports on the internet. The authors define eSports (electronic sports) as “a form of sports where the primary aspects of the sport are facilitated by electronic systems; the input of players and teams as well as the output of the eSports system are mediated by human-computer interfaces.” In more practical terms, eSports refer to competitive video gaming (broadcasted on the internet).

Media, communication and information flows now define the logic and structure of social relations, a situation that affects almost every dimension of cultural life and activity. This article analyses the transformation of the relationship between computer gaming, media and sport in the global age of 'second modernity'. This analysis is undertaken through a critical case study of the World Cyber Games (WCG). This popular event and the 'cyber-athletes' that compete in it cannot be explained fully by reference to existing studies of computer and video gaming, media and sport, media events or organized sporting competition. It is not possible to think in terms of sport and the media when considering the WCG and organized competitive gaming. This is sport as media or e-sport, a term that signifies the seamless interpenetration of media content, sport and networked information and communications technologies.

In August 2016, Wings Gaming won the sixth edition of the International, a tournament for the videogame Dota 2. Wings Gaming, a team consisting of five Chinese players, was praised for bringing honour to China. This article explores various ways in which this Chinese Dota 2 community frames its fandom using nationalistic rhetoric. Teams identified as Chinese represent the country, honouring or disappointing the nation when they square off in tournaments. This article focusses on the everyday experience in this online community, arguing that the way in which people cheer for their teams stems from a nationalistic filter that makes nationalism the normative discourse in the community. A further comparison is made to American social media to discuss the role that truth plays when nationalism is discussed in the daily experience. This study concludes that a combination of factors surrounding the Chinese community creates a form of banal (cold) nationalism, which normalizes and strengthens national truths and myths.

This article starts with a literary review of the conceptual frames through which esport has been labeled academically. It shows how the concept of “electronic” has been taken as the core term for labelingesport, often accompanied by a strong emphasis on “professionalism.” The literary review is followed by the submission of an alternative conceptual frame based on the economic notion of executive ownership, which provides a theoretical grounding for esport as a cultural phenomenon. In accordance with the above, the article concludes with a reframed look at the history of esport and suggests commercial analog gaming (especially Magic: The Gathering) as its point of origin.

The emerging realm of eSports has become an inescapable part of overall sports and game culture. However, this study investigates eSports beyond sports and games, regarding it as a meta-change in the context of neoliberal Chinese society. In particular, this study focuses on the practices of Chinese eSports players to explore research questions of why and how eSports practitioners, especially professional players in China, have transformed themselves into new, self-enterprising subjects. Based on data collected from our fieldwork and interviews, this study demonstrates that Chinese eSports players pursue meritocracy, suffer from precarity, and face disposability in the future. The study finally proposes questions for sports ontologies and the challenges that eSports have created for the games empire.

This article explores why apparent political indifference coincides with nationalist passion in Chinese cyberspace. Drawing on interviews with university students and the notion of ‘new politics’, this article argues that online nationalism constitutes an important extension of the political being in the Chinese context, or a form of ‘new politics’ among contemporary youth in certain societies. The ‘dual’ political identity emerging from Chinese youth’s uses of the internet is reflective of, and reinforces, their offline self. Both their apparent lack of interest in engaging with the government and their strong nationalism are products of the same changing subjectivities in post-Mao China.

This article adopts the theory of social practices as a critical lens for understanding computer game consumption as multiple ‘nexuses of doings and sayings’, which represent the elements of and are situated within the broader context of consumer culture. Specifically, we explore an emerging phenomenon of an organised and competitive approach to computer gaming, referred to as ‘electronic sports’ or ‘eSports’, by offering a novel conceptualisation of eSports as an assemblage of consumption practices. In our endeavour, we illustrate that eSports practices are performed by consumers through multiple interconnected nexuses of unique understandings, tools, competencies and skills, whereby these nexuses transcend the elements of digital play to include the watching and governing of eSports. Accordingly, eSports consumers take on multiple roles beyond being considered merely as ‘players’, engaging with this phenomenon using different nexuses of practical activities. Our findings suggest that, in order to gain a more comprehensive perspective of what consumers actually do with computer games, we should explore gaming consumption in relation to different social practices that co-constitute multifaceted consumer engagement within this genre.

This study focuses on consumer choice behavior in the context of a new European Union (EU) member state by examining cognitive, affective and normative mechanisms in consumer preference formation for domestic vs imported products.

In the following article, the author explores the notion of playing computer games as sports by sketching out the labors and sensations of Counter-Strike teams playing at pro/am e-sports local area network (LAN) tournaments. How players are engaged physically in practice and play is described in this qualitative study through the core themes of movement, haptic engagement, and the balanced body. Furthermore, the research describes how technologies in play are laboring actors too; the players and technologies in this study are rendered as networked, extended, and acting in and on the same fields of play. In asking is there a “sport” in e-sports, this study questions the legitimacy of a traditional sports ontology and simultaneously tackles the notion of engagement with computer game play as a legitimate sporting endeavor.

This article analyses the coverage of the current US–China trade war in the Global Times. Some scholars argue that official nationalism, which stress the unity of the Chinese people, is challenged by popular nationalism, which privileges the dominant Han ethnicity, and that official nationalism is forced to make concessions to popular nationalism. If this is true, then one would expect to find evidence in the coverage of international issues in a ‘popular’ official newspaper like Global Times. The newspaper’s coverage stresses negative features of the USA, but devotes considerable space to the damage that Trump's policies are doing to ordinary Americans. It does not present China as the unique victim of US economic aggression. The coverage stresses broad international agreement for free trade, leaving the USA isolated in adopting protectionist policies. At least in this instance, state-led nationalism remains central and no concessions are made to popular sentiments.

The decline of Communism after the end of the post-Cold War has seen the rise of nationalism in many parts of the former Communist world. In countries such as the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, nationalism was pursued largely from the bottom up as ethnic and separatist movements. Some observers also take this bottom-up approach to find the major cause of Chinese nationalism and believe that “the nationalist wave in China is a spontaneous public reaction to a series of international events, not a government propaganda.” (Zhang, M. (1997) The new thinking of Sino–US relations. Journal of Contemporary China, 6(14), 117–123). They see Chinese nationalism as “a belated response to the talk of containing China among journalists and politicians” in the United States and “a public protest against the mistreatment from the US in the last several years.” (Li, H. (1997) China talks back: anti-Americanism or nationalism? Journal of Contemporary China, 6(14), 153–160). This position concurs with the authors of nationalistic books in China, such as The China That Can Say No: Political and Sentimental Choice in the Post-Cold War Era (Song, Q., Zhang Z., Qiao B. (1996) Zhongguo Keyi Shuo Bu (The China That Can Say No). Zhonghua Gongshang Lianhe Chubanshe. Beijing), which called upon Chinese political elites to say no to the US, and argue that the rise of nationalism was not a result of the official propaganda but a reflection of the state of mind of a new generation of Chinese intelligentsia in response to the foreign pressures in the post-Cold War era. Indeed, Chinese nationalism was mainly reactive sentiments to foreign suppressions in modern history, and this new wave of nationalist sentiment also harbored a sense of wounded national pride and an anti-foreign (particularly the US and Japan) resentment. Many Chinese intellectuals gave voice to a rising nationalistic discourse in the 1990s (Zhao, S. (1997) Chinese intellectuals' quest for national greatness and nationalistic writing in the 1990s. The China Quarterly, 152, 725–745). However, Chinese nationalism in the 1990s was also constructed and enacted from the top by the Communist state. There were no major military threats to China's security after the end of the Cold War. Instead, the internal legitimacy crisis became a grave concern of the Chinese Communist regime because of the rapid decay of Communist ideology. In response, the Communist regime substituted performance legitimacy provided by surging economic development and nationalist legitimacy provided by invocation of the distinctive characteristics of Chinese culture in place of Marxist–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. As one of the most important maneuvers to enact Chinese nationalism, the Communist government launched an extensive propaganda campaign of patriotic education after the Tiananmen Incident in 1989. The patriotic education campaign was well-engineered and appealed to nationalism in the name of patriotism to ensure loyalty in a population that was otherwise subject to many domestic discontents. The Communist regime, striving to maintain authoritarian control while Communist ideology was becoming obsolete in the post-Cold War era, warned of the existence of hostile international forces in the world perpetuating imperialist insult to Chinese pride. The patriotic education campaign was a state-led nationalist movement, which redefined the legitimacy of the post-Tiananmen leadership in a way that would permit the Communist Party's rule to continue on the basis of a non-Communist ideology. Patriotism was thus used to bolster CCP power in a country that was portrayed as besieged and embattled. The dependence on patriotism to build support for the government and the patriotic education campaign by the Communist propagandists were directly responsible for the nationalistic sentiment of the Chinese people in the mid-1990s. This paper focuses on the Communist state as the architect of nationalism in China and seeks to understand the rise of Chinese nationalism by examining the patriotic education campaign. It begins with an analysis of how nationalism took the place of the official ideology as the coalescing force in the post-Tiananmen years. It then goes on to examine the process, contents, methods and effectiveness of the patriotic education campaign. The conclusion offers a perspective on the instrumental aspect of state-led nationalism.