The final paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhangyan Li, Xinrui Wang, and Xingye Yao. Their focus is on reactive environmentalism in China. China has faced several recent environmental challenges, and documentaries have tried to call attention to these issues, but were sometimes banned by the government for ‘defaming China’; this indicates a tension between such discussions of environmental challenges and the state promotion of robust Chinese nationalism.
Environmental nationalism is a concept that seeks to address this, and to shift public debate especially on social media platforms in China. Nationalism can take multiple forms: anti-environmental nationalism which sees environmental concerns as threats to the nation (as also seen in examples from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro), and pro-environmental nationalism which positions environmental action as an inherent part of protecting the nation from the threats it faces.
This study explores the discussion around the documentary Under the Dome, released in the mid-2010s, which highlighted the issue of environmental pollution. Public opinion towards the documentary has evolved over time; it is seen as criticising the government, but also as highlighting a key issue that China needs to address. The study examined debates on Weibo about the documentary, gathering data through Web crawling and using Large Language Models to analyse the themes of the social media debate.
Such themes included negative accusations claiming that the BBC-sponsored documentary was engaging in data fraud, and promoting pro-western views, and presented conspiracy theories about the US-Chinese documentary maker and supposedly out-of-context information; and positive appreciation for its highlighting of real environmental problems, government policy issues, conscientious journalism, and environmental concerns.
A key turning point from more positive to more negative views is 2020, when the Trump government sanctioned Chinese environmental scholars, and generally vilified China on environmental and other issues; this caused a surge in anti-western sentiment that also resulted in a rejection of foreign environmental narratives and an embrace of domestic policies and national pride. The discourse changed from a critique of Chinese national policies to a nationalist defence of the Chinese government.
This can be understood as a kind of reactive nationalism, activated by such external pressure. Environmental discourse in China is thus deeply tied to geopolitical contexts; nationalism emerged not from inherent ideology, but perceived external threats; and this political confrontation reshaped people’s understandings environmental concerns.
