Kevin Rudd, the former Australian Prime Minister, and a noted China expert, recently argued that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s political fortunes rest on three legs: the continued legitimacy of the CCP’s specific brand of Marxist-Leninism as a shared social system supporting China’s economy, the continued success of said economy, and popular nationalism.
As both the economy and Party legitimacy take a hit because of controversial measures like Shanghai’s current COVID lockdown, keeping China’s crowds of online nationalists on board becomes more and more crucial.