The Tyranny of Meritocratic Nationalism: Unpacking the Online Backlash Against a Tibetan Cyberstar

Abstract This article develops the concept of meritocratic nationalism to unpack the online backlash surrounding the rise to fame of a Tibetan cyberstar, Tenzing Tsondu (Ding Zhen), on Chinese social media. Meritocratic nationalism not only embeds ideals of individual achievement, education attainment, and productivity within narratives of national identity and regime legitimacy, but also sustains structural inequalities through racialized and gendered assumptions about who is capable of merit and whose success is ‘deserved’. First, critics frame state media’s endorsement of the internet celebrity as a betrayal to the meritocratic ideal the state is supposed to safeguard. However, this does not lead to a critique of meritocratic legitimacy itself but rather its reaffirmation. Secondly, the reproduction of a Han-centric and masculine-coded ideal of merit is integral to the construction of majority male victimhood, which denies and normalizes structural violence. Thirdly, we note the multifaceted representation of the international in the backlash, where users deploy the figure of ‘white American men’ as fellow victims of ‘political correctness’ to animate a racialized imagination of shared majoritarian grievance. The article contributes to nationalism studies and broader debates on meritocracy, racism, and the grievance politics of ethnic majority men.