Reactional politics

From intellectual history to the dazzling, chaotic, and jargon-laden world of digital culture, this book explores how ideas of ‘the West’ and articulations of China/West difference are produced and mobilized in Chinese political discourse. It foregrounds not only the co-construction and appropriation of civilizational binaries from the ‘peripheries’ of the international social order, but also the entanglement between ostensibly ‘pro-Western’ and ‘anti-Western’ narratives in Chinese nationalism.

The book offers an in-depth study of digital reactionary discourse on Chinese social media, analysed within globally interconnected and locally embedded reinvigorations of racial nationalism, authoritarianism, and backlash against social justice movements. Theorizing the postliberal conjuncture from digital China, Zhang delineates how postliberal political sensibilities converge across conventional geopolitical and ideological fault lines. Employing identity markers such as ‘East’ and ‘West’ as flexible transnational codes, geopolitically opposed actors capitalize on structurally similar narratives to justify oppression at home and perpetuate logics of civilizational rivalry through mutual othering. As the legitimacy of liberal orders erodes, the political valence of critique is unstable. The anticolonial language may be mobilized not for emancipatory ends, but to consolidate authoritarian control and legitimate violence against racialized and marginalized groups.

This book makes an original contribution to the international cultural politics of reaction by centring Chinese digital narratives as a constitutive site of ideological production in our shared global present. It deepens understanding of transversal alignment and the repurposing of critique in the postliberal conjuncture and in digital reactionary formations. Link.

Abstract: Drawing on a range of regional expertise and perspectives from international relations, political economy, political, and sociology, this collective discussion makes the following contributions to research on global reactionary politics and discussions of decolonization. First, we argue that the erosion of the legitimacy of liberal orders renders the anticolonial language available for authoritarian and conservative projects in both Global South and North to articulate a selective rejection of universalism. While framing liberal universalism as imperialist, they remain embedded within neoliberal structures and embrace a market universalism in tandem with claims of cultural particularity. Secondly, the contributions explore a series of ironies, reversals, and convergences not only across regional divides, but also across conventional ideological boundaries. This includes conceptual affinities between the radical right’s emphasis on ontological difference and the nativist temptation within the history of anticolonial nationalism, as well as the confluence between the radical conservatives, the postcolonial authoritarians, and a certain strand of decolonial discourse in their envisioning of a multipolar civilizational order. Finally, we suggest that for international political sociology, this urges us to deepen engagement with anticolonial traditions that are radically incompatible with the far right and to centre forms of vernacular anticolonial theorizing from marginalized places.

Abstract: Scholarship on “non-Western” civilizational discourse in international relations remains largely limited to the versions crafted or endorsed by the state. This paper takes the representation of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony on Chinese social media as an entry point to exploring vernacular and competing narratives of civilization in global cultural politics. Drawing on data from multiple platforms, I scrutinize visions of civilizational progress, decay, and betrayal, interlaced with contested imaginaries of “China”, “France”, and “the West”, in celebratory and demonizing discourses on the spectacle. First, I argue that ideas of “civilizational standards” have always been co-produced, appropriated, and negotiated by actors from the peripheries, rather than monopolized by the centre. A nuanced and situational reading of the celebratory discourse shows how users employ civilizational and universalist vocabularies to contest locally hegemonic structures, which may simultaneously reproduce and challenge homonationalist logics. Secondly, the paper contributes to the emerging literature on the co-opting of the anticolonial language in reactionary politics, showing that in this case, the accusation of coloniality is turned inwards to target the internal other, whose identification with progressive values is recast as colonial subservience and betrayal. Finally, I show that the trope of “Western civilizational decay” and certain constructions of difference/affinities are instrumental to queerphobic nationalist narratives. However, civilizational signifiers such as “West” and “East” function in digital reactionary discourse less as a tool for narrating cultural distinctiveness than as flexible transnational codes, allowing for transversal alignment to emerge across conventional geopolitical and ideological boundaries. [Article link]

Abstract: This article seeks to deepen understanding of the global politics of reactionary discursive formations, which at the current conjuncture increasingly coalesce around self-victimising articulations of racial nationalism and a rejection of social justice struggles, often delegitimated as ‘elitist’ in Western core contexts or ‘Western’ in postcolonial spaces. Drawing on insights from feminist and postcolonial scholarship on racial entanglements, masculinism, and Occidentalism, I argue that racialised and gendered imaginations about an emasculated and overly multiracial West and, relatedly, renewed East/West binaries enable reactionary discourses in both Western societies and elsewhere through adaptable mechanisms of mediating between the international and the domestic. I then extend an analysis of global racial entanglements and gendered East/West binaries to Chinese anti-baizuo discourse from both online nationalists and dissident intellectuals, which provides a prime example of how grammars of global reactionary discourse are localised in different political projects and ideological constellations. It demonstrates how reactionary imaginations of the West are instrumental for animating narratives of racial-civilisational hierarchy and masculinist notions of politics and society hostile to egalitarian and emancipatory ideals in a ‘non-Western’ context. Moreover, by highlighting overlaps and divergence in the refashioning of dualistic constructs in American and Chinese ‘anti-woke’ narratives, I show that reactionary discourses operate not only across the geopolitical divide, but also through it, invoked by opposing political forces sharing ethnonationalist and masculinist logics in processes of mutual othering to perpetuate antagonistic identities. The article contributes to the intersection between critical research on the global right and postcolonial International Relations (IR). [Article link]

How can postcolonial critique address the use and abuse of the anti-colonial in contemporary reactionary and ultranationalist projects in the Global Easts and South? Building on the literature on amalgams of authoritarianism, social conservatism, and racial nationalism beyond the Western core, especially the emergent scholarship on the rise of the digital far right, I reflect on the ways in which postcolonial critique can help us think about the multifaceted relationships between postcolonial identity and the global right. First, postcolonial nationalism is a prevalent strategy employed by authoritarian and conservative actors who mobilize subaltern identity in a US/Western dominated world to legitimate reactionary politics. Secondly, while illiberal movements that appropriate the anti-colonial rhetoric purport to challenge the moral geography underpinning the liberal international order, they reproduce its essentializing, hierarchical, and racialized logics in reversing its value judgement. Thirdly, the rise of the digital far right in the Global Easts and South provides a particularly productive lens through which to explore the transnationality of contemporary formulations of racism, anti-feminism, Islamophobia, and the “culture war” discourses. I conclude by suggesting that attending to the role of postcolonial nationalism in global reactionary movements has wider implications for both postcolonial critique and the study of right-wing politics in general, including in the Western core. [Article link]

The past few years have seen an emerging discourse on Chinese social media that combines the claims, vocabulary and style of right-wing populisms in Europe and North America with previous forms of nationalism and racism in Chinese cyberspace. In other words, it provokes a similar hostility towards immigrants, Muslims, feminism, the so-called ‘liberal elites’ and progressive values in general. This article examines how, in debating global political events such as the European refugee crisis and the American presidential election, well-educated and well-informed Chinese Internet users appropriate the rhetoric of ‘Western-style’ right-wing populism to paradoxically criticise Western hegemony and discursively construct China’s ethno-racial and political identities. Through qualitative analysis of 1038 postings retrieved from a popular social media website, this research shows that by criticising Western ‘liberal elites’, the discourse constructs China’s ethno-racial identity against the ‘inferior’ non-Western other, exemplified by non-white immigrants and Muslims, with racial nationalism on the one hand; and formulates China’s political identity against the ‘declining’ Western other with realist authoritarianism on the other. The popular narratives of global order protest against Western hegemony while reinforcing a state-centric and hierarchical imaginary of global racial and civilisational order. We conclude by suggesting that the discourse embodies the logics of anti-Western Eurocentrism and anti-hegemonic hegemonies. This article: (1) provides critical insights into the changing ways in which self–other relations are imagined in Chinese popular geopolitical discourse; (2) sheds light on the global circulation of extremist discourses facilitated by the Internet; and (3) contributes to the ongoing debate on right-wing populism and the ‘crisis’ of the liberal world order. [Article link]