Protesting the Party-State through Self-Racialisation

The tweet above was posted on 7 May 2022 by a Great Translation Movement (GTM) verified account on X (formerly known as Twitter) under the handle @TGTM_Official. It was shared against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which had begun a few months earlier. The tweet includes a screenshot of a news story from Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) about the Chinese Embassy’s hostile response to remarks by the US Department of State about Beijing’s perceived pro-Kremlin stance on Russia’s warfare against its southwestern neighbour. Highlighting popular reactions to the news on the Chinese-language internet, the tweet notes that more than 59,000 netizens had flooded the commentary section, with most expressing support for both the Chinese Embassy and the Russian regime. Typical of a large barrage of GTM X postings within the first few months of the military conflict, the tweet provides English translations of selected comments to engage international audiences. This effort showcases how the collective behind the GTM account exposes twisted narratives of the war from within China to challenge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In a separate journal article (Peng et al. 2024), my co-authors and I analysed the GTM as an activist-journalistic initiative that highlights the alignment of digital activism and citizen journalism within the cross-border landscape of resistance against the CCP. However, while affirming the challenges the GTM poses to the Party-State’s nationalist politics, the paper did not fully foreground the issues of the movement’s coordination, despite noting its potential to incite anti-Chinese racism on X by portraying grassroots pro-regime actors as representative of the entire Chinese population. In this essay, I aim to revisit the case by further examining some problematic aspects of the GTM that were left in the margins of our original analysis. Situating the discussion within the context of China’s unique path to modern nation-building and its dynamic intersection with the resurgence of right-wing populism in Euro-American societies, I advocate a critical reflection on dissent to account for the complexity of China’s current political landscape. This reflection seeks to both maximise the potential for fostering cross-border progressive mobilisations and remain vigilant against reactionary politics that takes an anti-authoritarian veneer.

Lumping Together the Regime and the People

Orchestrated by a group of overseas Chinese dissidents to defy the Chinese Party-State’s pro-Kremlin domestic propaganda in the Russo-Ukrainian war, the GTM is characterised by its redefinition of journalistic reporting as an activist repertoire. This repertoire is performed by administrators of the GTM account, who assume a twofold role by simultaneously acting as citizen journalists and political activists (Peng et al. 2024). Purposively covering sensational events that expose China’s official propaganda and its ramifications on the nation’s domestic opinion through X postings, these dissidents pick their fights on an international digital platform. By contributing to the cross-border information flows to circumvent state censorship and surveillance, while inciting international public outrage against the Party-State, the initiative challenges the CCP’s authority on a playing field beyond its imminent reach. However, while acknowledging the capacity of the initiative to counter China’s nationalist politics, we should not overlook its coordinators’ manifest internalisation of anti-Chinese racism, which exacerbates Sinophobia on international digital platforms.

A review of GTM tweets posted between 7 March and 31 December 2022 reveals that ‘Chinese’ and ‘people’, respectively, were the second and fourth most-used words in their textual content. Most of this usage is devised to form a complete phrase—namely, ‘Chinese people’ (see Figure 2). This lexical choice reflects a stylised pattern that carries the potential to indiscriminately categorise all grassroots regime supporters as a homogeneous group representing the entire Chinese population.

The tweet in Figure 3 illustrates how this stylised lexical choice plays out in specific instances. It was posted in response to an X user who questioned the GTM’s overwhelming focus on exposing the extremist views of individual Chinese netizens. Characterised by its usage of the term ‘the Chinese people’ with the definite article, the GTM’s reply justifies its stance by citing the presence and endorsement of extremist opinions on the Chinese-language internet as evidence of alignment between the regime and the population at large. However, this generalisation overlooks the complexities of political expression within a heavily controlled public sphere governed by the CCP’s censorship and surveillance apparatus. By disregarding the diversity of public opinion in China about the Russo-Ukrainian war and other issues, the GTM’s framing implicates all Chinese citizens, irrespective of their political views, as complicit in the authoritarian regime’s rhetoric and actions.

In another instance, in commenting on the recent influx of American influencers on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小红书, known as RedNote or, more precisely, Little Red Book), following the US Government’s attempted TikTok ban in January 2025, the GTM account even posted a tweet mockingly reminding its followers of the dog-eating tradition in certain regions (The Great Translation Movement 2025). Resorting to a highly visible racist trope that permeates global digital platforms, the tweet blatantly sought to demonise the Chinese people as a collective incompatible with modern lifestyles and ethics.

There is no doubt that pro-Kremlin commentaries remain a prominent feature of Chinese public opinion on the Russo-Ukrainian war (Wang 2024). However, pro-Kyiv voices not only are increasingly evident (Zhou and Repnikova 2024) but also have been progressively amplified on the Chinese-language internet, amid growing public distrust of Russian propaganda (Yan 2024). Beyond this specific military conflict, the Chinese-language internet is typically dominated by nationalist sentiments, with netizens frequently engaging in self-organised, pro-regime mobilisations on domestic digital platforms (Wang and Tan 2023). Within the context of an activist-journalistic initiative, this situation legitimises criticisms of individual regime supporters for their role in fuelling China’s nationalist politics. Still, conflating such criticism with a racially biased indictment of the entire Chinese population emerges as the other side of the same coin of pro-regime grassroots mobilisations, as it risks aligning with the longstanding racist tradition in Chinese political discourse.

Crafting Internalised Racism Out of Self-Racialisation

Traces of premodern forms of racism can be found in China’s historical archives, but a fully developed racial framework did not emerge in Chinese political discourse until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, Han intellectuals sought to overthrow the minority-led Qing Dynasty in response to foreign military and economic invasions, which shattered their perception of China as a dominant and revered power (Zhao 2006). Informed by nationalist ideologies originating from Europe, this racial framework facilitated the aggressive growth of Han supremacism in China, serving as an ideological tool to rationalise revolutionary initiatives. Racist sentiments typically idealise in-group membership of the ethnic majority within a nation-state, while justifying discrimination against such out-group members as minorities, immigrants, and foreign nationals. However, given China’s significant economic and military disadvantages compared with Western powers throughout its modern history, racism in Chinese political discourse is multi-trajectorial, simultaneously involving the essentialisation and criticism of a Chinese national character (國民性) that ultimately risks resulting in internalised racism (Sun 2016).

Contemporary mobilisations of the national character trope are preceded by the anti-traditionalist approaches to China’s modernisation of early revolutionary intellectuals. These approaches were rooted in Eurocentric anthropological knowledge production at the turn of the twentieth century, which promoted a hierarchical categorisation of humankind that framed the ‘Yellow’ races to which East Asian peoples belong as inherently inferior to white Caucasians (Cheng 2011). In the meantime, they also followed Gustave Le Bon’s theorisation of the ‘racial mind’, which is defined as an exhibition of collective behaviours, thoughts, and emotions that are latent within individuals belonging to a certain race and can manifest in group settings. Informed by social Darwinism that combines both pseudoscientific and sociopolitical observations, revolutionary intellectuals of the May Fourth generation often firmly believed in the imperative to repudiate Chineseness (Zhao 2000). Based on a diagnosis of the backwardness of the nation’s indigenous sociocultural traditions, they prescribed the emulation of white Euro-American civilisations as a solution to rebuild China into a modern nation-state and enable it to navigate the geopolitical order under Western domination (Li 2021). It is one such national character discourse that provides the historical grounds for internalised racism to manifest in much of China’s political dissent today.

Translating National Character Discourse from Residence into Exile

It is worth noting that national character discourse did not necessarily pertain to political dissent during the early years of CCP rule. Many founding members of the Party either played pivotal roles in the May Fourth movement or were influenced by the social ethos it created (Li 2021). This embedded an anti-traditionalist tendency in the CCP’s governance doctrines in the socialist construction era. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, the leadership even mobilised Red Guards to eliminate the so-called four olds (四旧, that is—old ideas, culture, customs, and habits) and eradicate any perceived traces of Confucianism (Zhao 2000: 8). However, the CCP’s anti-traditionalist governance of that era avoided aligning with the wholesale Westernisation advocated by its founding members during the May Fourth movement. This shift occurred against the backdrop of Euro-American democracies, once China’s allies in World War II, assuming the role of capitalist enemies of the then newly founded communist regime. The prominence of national character discourse was further diminished by the leadership’s focus on class struggle, which sidelined state modernisation projects during Mao’s tenure (Zhao 2000). It was not until the social liberalisation of the 1980s that the repudiation of Chineseness returned to the forefront of Chinese political discourse.

As an aftermath of the widespread despair towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, the second-generation leadership of the CCP sought reform measures to prevent the possible collapse of the Party-State in the 1980s. Led by the liberal-leaning factions within the political establishment, the trend of social liberalisation was notably revealed by the state television station’s production of the then hotly debated documentary series River Elegy (河殇). This series harshly criticised various symbols of traditional Chinese culture to try to bolster government-led reform projects by ‘enlightening’ the populace about sociocultural and political modernity (Xu 1992). However, while these anti-traditionalist critiques were echoed by a large cohort of liberal intellectuals, they were deemed insufficient by more ‘radical’ voices, including the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who argued that they did not promote Westernisation enough (Li 2021: 50). Behind the scenes, this reflects how these liberal intellectuals envisioned Western-style democratic systems as the ideal form of government, contributing to the development of a ‘beacon complex’ within China’s intelligentsia, which manifested as many of its members’ ideological and strategic recognition of white Euro-American civilisations (Lin 2021).

After a brief period of prominence during the social liberalisation of the 1980s, the repudiation of Chineseness was gradually eradicated from state propaganda in the following decade, although it remained widespread in popular discourse until the early 2010s. After the Tiananmen protests and subsequent massacre, the CCP restored nationalism as a principal ideological tool to revamp its propaganda in an era of intensified social stratification and structural injustice, breaking its past communist promises. With the regime increasingly promoting itself as a defender of traditional Chinese culture, critiques of the Chinese national character have evolved into a less confrontational approach to subtly defy the Party-State’s authority within a social milieu where ‘open criticism of the communist system’ is strictly forbidden, but alternative opinions are tolerated to a certain extent (Zhao 2000: 8).

Particularly after 1992, the leadership resumed reform programs on the economic front, giving rise to a large cohort of economic liberals whose discontent with the Party-State’s oppressive rule is often predicated on a pro-market logic (Lin 2021). Advocating economic liberalisation as a necessary pathway to the nation’s future political transformation, these intellectuals often mobilise self-racialising tropes to provide a seemingly plausible explanation for the current state of China’s political system. They interpret its perpetuation of authoritarianism being a result of the people’s shared backward qualities, which have rendered them vulnerable to power and authority.

This creates an opportunity for dissent against the Party-State to incorporate racist rhetoric popularised by Euro-American right-wing populism. This alignment is rooted in the transnational influence of Western right-wing ideologies, which have a long history of promoting racist resentment against communities of colour to legitimise white de facto hegemony. In particular, populist politicians who build their support bases on such ideologies have increasingly targeted Chinese people in response to China’s growing international influence, fuelling a renewed wave of Sinophobia across Euro-American societies. This narrative paradoxically resonates with many Chinese dissidents who subscribe to the national character trope and embrace an idealised vision of Western-style democracy.

Alignments

The landscape of China’s political dissent has experienced notable paradigm shifts over the past two decades because of sociopolitical changes and technological advancements. Given the state’s direct control over the traditional media sector, during the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao era (2002–12), it was the once loosely regulated digital sphere that took the lead in facilitating China’s civic engagement (Yang 2011). Faith in a promising future remained unshaken until Xi Jinping assumed office in 2012, marking the leadership’s blatant return to hardline dictatorial doctrines. With the Party-State tightening its grip on domestic social media as part of holistic crackdowns on civil liberties, an increasing number of regime critics have migrated to international digital platforms to circumvent state censorship and surveillance. This situation, coupled with the growing size of the Chinese diaspora through increased mobility in the era of globalisation, has allowed dissent momentum to build in the international digital sphere, creating a level playing field for grassroots anti-regime struggles beyond the CCP’s immediate reach.

However, uncritically glorifying dissent is counterproductive and blinds us to some fundamental realities. As seen in the examples shared at the beginning of this essay, this movement loosely adheres to a journalistic paradigm of activist intervention, staging the repertoire of witnessing events of sociopolitical significance from within China to challenge the CCP’s nationalist politics. However, in a March 2022 media interview with Deutsche Welle, a member of the GTM collective explicitly interpreted the initiative as a struggle to ‘make more foreigners aware of the true nature of Chinese people … as a community aggregating arrogant, crucial, and self-conceited members who subscribe to nationalist ideologies and are often lacking in empathy’ (Liu 2022). In line with the national character discourse, this type of narrative reinforces a racist diagnosis of China’s current sociopolitical problems, shifting blame onto the entire population rather than concentrating on structural issues.

Certainly, the Party-State’s mouthpieces have repeatedly attempted to discredit the initiative by cherry-picking extracts from GTM postings and taking them out of context (see, for instance, The Paper 2022), as part of wider campaigns to undermine any dissent. Furthermore, as a decentralised initiative, the words of a single GTM collective member cannot be taken at face value, as the team likely includes members who disagree with one another on specific matters and approaches. This is reflected in some GTM postings, in which efforts to build connections with progressive grassroots resistance from within China are manifest (for more details, see Peng et al. 2024). That said, the mere fact that the GTM poses a threat to regime stability does not automatically legitimise the entire initiative, nor does it justify attempts to sideline scrutiny of its problematic aspects in favour of illusory solidarity among regime critics. Further analysis reveals that the GTM collective has evidently planned its X postings with high-profile Euro-American right-wing populists in mind, with X accounts belonging to such controversial figures as Jack Posobiec (an American alt-right influencer) and Marco Rubio (then a US senator and Trump administration ally), among others, frequently appearing in their tags (see Figure 4). In so doing, the GTM has effectively highlighted the compatibility between anti-CCP endeavours and Euro-American right-wing populist politics at an operational level.

To further establish an operational alignment with the Western far right, a core member of the collective behind the GTM’s X account even posted a tweet vocally calling for the deportation of pro-regime Chinese immigrants from the United States, not through the official channel but via their own account operating under the GTM banner. In it, the GTM coordinator defines pro-regime immigrants’ political opinions as a violation of ‘the oath they took in front of [the] American flag’. On the surface, the statement emphasises opposition to the CCP’s interference in American domestic politics. However, it simultaneously and blatantly legitimises a long-established right-wing ideology in Euro-American societies, vindicating anti-immigrant rhetoric on national security grounds. Posted shortly after the 2024 US presidential election results were called, the tweet clearly throws the GTM coordinator’s support behind Donald Trump and his hawkish agenda on both China and immigration-related issues.

Western democratic processes consistently display that such right-wing populist politicians as Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump enjoy(ed) widespread support among anti-CCP members of the Chinese diaspora during their terms in office. At an epistemological level, such support is predicated on the ‘beacon complex’ of these overseas dissidents who recognise Western liberal democracies in their orthodox shapes as both political systems and civilisations superior to the rest of the world. Seizing the opportunity presented by the current failures of the neoliberal market, right-wing populist leaders shift the blame for the current crises facing Euro-American societies onto their progressive opponents, blaming them for deviating from white Western traditionist values, which they claim is the cause of the crises. In line with the historical evolution of national character discourse, which is compatible with Euro-American right-wing populism, this world view primes these Chinese dissidents’ voluntary investment in the reactionary causes promoted by these far-right leaders aimed at restoring the ‘past glories’ of Western democracies and civilisations (Zhang 2024).

Beyond ideological compatibility, these Chinese dissidents’ involvement in Euro-American right-wing causes is evidently strategic as well. Indeed, the Party-State must be held accountable for its crackdowns on civil liberties and mistreatment of minorities and marginalised groups. However, seizing the opportunity to veneer their anti-globalisation posture, contemporary right-wing populist politicians are typically frontrunners in mobilising anti-China tropes to consolidate their political bases, as evidenced by the Sino-US trade war during Donald Trump’s first presidential term (Ha and Willnat 2022) and the imposition of sanctions on China’s high-tech firms by Western allies (Christie et al. 2024), among others. It becomes apparent that many overseas Chinese dissidents, including those in the GTM, are lured in by these right-wing politicians’ hawkish stance against the Party-State in international geopolitics. ‘Relying on the construct of an idealised white Christian West as the embodiment of political modernity to oppose authoritarianism in China’ (Zhang 2024: 11), their self-identification with right-wing causes in Euro-American societies is, thus, strategic, reiterating their fantasy of a cross-border alliance with the anti-CCP faction of the Western political establishment. This phenomenon marks a twisted political coalition in the making, underlining the wider impacts of global reactionary politics beyond the Chinese context.

The development of distorted dissent against the Party-State within the orbit of Euro-American right-wing populism is not unique to the GTM. Across the Sinophone world, this is evident in the idolisation of Trump by many prominent liberal intellectuals in mainland China (Lin 2021), the appropriation of Euro-American right-wing conspiracy theories by grassroots critics of the CCP on the Chinese-language internet (Yang and Fang 2023), as well as calls for support from Western right-wing politicians by prodemocracy activists protesting China’s interference in local affairs in Hong Kong and Taiwan (Li 2021). While ostensibly sponsoring an overarching anti-regime endeavour, this alignment contributes to nothing more than the perpetuation of self-racialisation and internalised racism, which shore up reactionary movements both within and beyond the Chinese context (Zhang 2024). This constitutes a concerning development that demands urgent scholarly intervention.

Going Beyond a Regime–Dissent Dichotomy

In this essay, I have revisited the GTM as an activist-journalistic initiative aimed at undermining the CCP’s authority by holding the Party-State accountable for its strategic partner’s aggression in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Challenging some of my earlier, insufficient assessments of the initiative on this matter (Peng et al. 2024), I argue that, while aiming to critique China’s nationalist politics, the GTM has severely overlooked the complex processes through which nationalist sentiments and toxic popular opinions are engineered on the Chinese-language internet. Without adequate scrutiny of the sociopolitical conditions, the oversimplified takeaways presented in GTM tweets often end up reiterating the thesis of national character discourse, attributing a wide range of societal issues faced by the nation to imagined shared qualities of the Chinese people. This aligns with a racially charged axis of distorted dissent in the Chinese context, characterised by unreflective self-racialisation deeply intertwined with internalised racism. In particular, a notable feature of this racist undertone revolves around idealised imaginaries of Western democratic politics and white Euro-American civilisations. This has provided the ideological and strategic grounds for a troubling cross-border alliance between Chinese grassroots reactionary forces and Western reactionary establishments, as manifested in the GTM itself.

Today, China has repositioned itself as an emerging superpower alternative to US hegemony. The specifics of China’s domestic sociopolitical context, along with its dynamic interactions with the outside world, present a complex challenge for both critical scholars and progressive activists. Indeed, criticisms of the CCP’s human rights abuses and its threats to regional geopolitical stability reflect legitimate international concerns about the Party-State’s authoritarian rule. However, while it is essential to counter the oppressive regime, one should avoid uncritically glorifying dissent against it. At times, the self-racialisation, essentialisation, and dehumanisation of Chinese people, framed through the prism of national character, are evident in dissident activist-journalistic initiatives against the Party-State, such as the GTM, as well as in anti-CCP disinformation campaigns across international digital platforms, as has been noted in previous literature (Bolsover and Howard 2019).

Amid the global resurgence of right-wing populism, Cold War mentalities have regained traction across Western nations, fostering the formation of an anti-China axis in their state policymaking and public opinion. In this process, the alignment between dissent in the Chinese context and right-wing populism in Euro-American societies has emerged as an alarming development. By fuelling the momentum of global reactionary politics, it hampers the pursuit of equality, diversity, and inclusion in democratic processes across the board. With Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, the vibrancy of reactionary voices is expected to continue growing on the world stage. This situation underscores the urgency for contemporary critical scholarship to move beyond a regime–grassroots dichotomy to account for the complexity of political dissent in Global South authoritarian contexts and beyond to scaffold cross-border progressive movements.

Fearued Image: Detail from Zhao Yannian’s The True Story of Ah Q, woodblock print, 1980. Source: The Met

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