In his Washington Post blog, John Pomfret writes about Chinese nationalism based on his experiences as a former foreign correspondent in Beijing:

Just how scary is Chinese nationalism? Just how serious are the thousands of Chinese about boycotting Carrefour – France’s version of a big box store with more than 100 outlets in China?

… To be sure, China’s government ginned up nationalism in the years following the Tiananmen Square crackdown with its various “Patriotic Education Campaigns” and its relentlessly anti-Western media campaigns. Nationalism was a natural safe-harbor for the party. With Communist ideology dead, the party turned to nationalism – and that big old growth rate – as the foundations of its legitimacy.
But by sanctioning nationalism and nationalist demonstrations, China’s party-state has created a potent potential enemy.

…China’s nationalist movement has already broached the question of whether the current government is sufficiently standing up for China – because of its slow response in Lhasa against marauding Tibetan rioters; that’s just one step away from the broader question of whether the current government possesses the legitimacy to rule China.

So to answer the question up top. China’s nationalism doesn’t scare me and shouldn’t scare the West, even though it may cost Carrefour a few customers. But it definitely should scare the Mandarins in Beijing.

In another op-ed in the Washington Post, “An Olympic Force for Change,” Sue Meng, a student at Yale Law School, looks at this issue from a quite different perspective:

… the Chinese government is one thing; 1.3 billion Chinese people are another.

It is important not to conflate China with the Chinese government. The Olympics have stirred an enormous outpouring of nationalism within China and among Chinese abroad. We should not dismiss Chinese nationalism as part and parcel of the Communist machine. Nationalism has forged civic engagement, cutting across groups normally divided by age, class and geography. This engagement leads to greater awareness of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Far from legitimizing an authoritarian regime, the Olympics foster the kind of nationalism that will help the Chinese carve out a civil society, which may be the best antidote.