Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in Chinese Foreign Relations

Abstract

Jessica Chen Weiss is assistant professor of political science and research fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. Her research interests include Chinese politics and international relations, nationalism, and social protest. She teaches courses on anti-Americanism in world politics, Chinese foreign policy, and state-society relations in post-Mao China. In her presentation, Weiss will provide an analysis of why the Chinese government sometimes allows and sometimes suppresses nationalist anti-foreign demonstrations and explore the consequences of this choice for China’s international relations. Her research presents a mechanism by which authoritarian regimes can utilize domestic public opinion to gain international leverage. Like audience costs in democratic societies, anti-foreign street protests enable authoritarian leaders to signal resolve and tie hands. Because nationalist protests may spin out of control and are increasingly costly to curtail, the decision to allow protests demonstrates a willingness to "leave something to chance" and makes diplomatic concessions difficult. Weiss will illustrate this logic with a case study of the 2005 anti-Japanese protests in China and the negotiations over U.N. Security Council reform. Her collected evidence suggests that the Chinese government gave tacit consent to anti-Japanese protests in order to undermine Japan's bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and obviate a Chinese veto. The protests were instrumental in shifting the negotiations in China's favor and eliciting symbolic concessions from Japan and the United States. Weiss has received awards from the National Science Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Fulbright-Hays program, and the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Before joining the Yale faculty, she founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford as an undergraduate. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego and her B.A. in political science from Stanford.