The D8 Expedition has caused shock and heated discussions in public opinion both inside and outside China. It has renewed the understandings of the 90s and 00s generations among scholars and elites, and thus exposed theoretical and cognitive blind spots in the past studies of Chinese Internet nationalism. This paper tries to develop some “middle range” explanations of the “informed nationalists” under the context of new media commercial culture. We will frst give a historical recapitulation of the developments of online popular nationalism in China, and then use multi-sited online and of?ine ethnography to investigate how fans are turned into nationalists. The research is the frst step to reveal complex mechanisms of cultural production and collective identity formation in the era of new media and among cultural industries, and to explore their development, potential and limitations.