Watching television coverage of the ¡°Quad¡± (Australia, India, Japan and the United States) leaders virtual meeting from the Chinese media last week, you would have been exposed to a host of expressions frequently used by television readers and commentators. For example, ¡°Cold War mentality,¡± ¡°anti-Chinese alliance,¡± ¡°clique of countries aimed at China¡± are common phrases.
They typically describe states like Japan and Australia as having no strategic autonomy vis-a-vis the United States and that somehow, they are strong-armed into taking an anti-China stance. Depictions of India are even more condescending, despite India¡¯s strong working relationships with many states and its soft power.
The fact that some Western media sources also used the terminology of an anti-Chinese alliance to describe the Quad is also problematic. It re-enforces a Chinese narrative propagated by the Communist Party that the West is out to get China and prevent its peaceful development. These are ideas that strongly elicit memories of the ¡°century of humiliation,¡± an ethno-nationalist lodestone that most ordinary Chinese can relate to, for real and cultivated reasons.
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