Onthe morning of April 15th, a short video entitled “2008 China StandUp!” appeared on Sina, a Chinese Web site. The video’s origin was amystery: unlike the usual YouTube-style clips, it had no host, nonarrator, and no signature except the initials “CTGZ.”

It was ahomespun documentary, and it opened with a Technicolor portrait ofChairman Mao, sunbeams radiating from his head. Out of silence came anorchestral piece, thundering with drums, as a black screen flashed, inboth Chinese and English, one of Mao’s mantras: “Imperialism will neverabandon its intention to destroy us.” Then a cut to present-dayphotographs and news footage, and a fevered sprint through conspiraciesand betrayals—the “farces, schemes, and disasters” confronting Chinatoday. The sinking Chinese stock market (the work of foreignspeculators who “wildly manipulated” Chinese stock prices and luredrookie investors to lose their fortunes). Shoppers beset by inflation,a butcher counter where “even pork has become a luxury.” And a warning:this is the dawn of a global “currency war,” and the West intends to“make Chinese people foot the bill” for America’s financial woes.

Acut, then, to another front: rioters looting stores and brawling inLhasa, the Tibetan capital. The music crescendos as words flash acrossthe scenes: “So-called peaceful protest!” A montage of foreign pressclippings critical of China—nothing but “rumors, all speaking with onedistorted voice.” The screen fills with the logos of CNN, the BBC, andother news organizations, which give way to a portrait of JosephGoebbels. The orchestra and the rhetoric climb toward a final sequence:“Obviously, there is a scheme behind the scenes to encircle China. Anew Cold War!” The music turns triumphant with images of China’sOlympic hurdler Liu Xiang standing in Tiananmen Square, raising theOlympic torch, “a symbol of Peace and Friendship!” But, first, onefinal act of treachery: in Paris, protesters attempt to wrest theOlympic torch from its official carrier, forcing guards to fend themoff—a “long march” for a new era. The film ends with the image of aChinese flag, aglow in the sunlight, and a solemn promise: “We willstand up and hold together always as one family in harmony!”

Thevideo, which was just over six minutes long and is now on YouTube,captured the mood of nationalism that surged through China after theTibetan uprising, in March, sparked foreign criticism of China’shosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Citizens were greeting thecriticism with rare fury. Thousands demonstrated in front of Chineseoutlets of Carrefour, a French supermarket chain, in retaliation forwhat they considered France’s sympathy for pro-Tibetan activists.Charles Zhang, who holds a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and is the founder andC.E.O. of Sohu, a leading Chinese Web portal along the lines of Yahoo,called online for a boycott of French products “to make the thoroughlybiased French media and public feel losses and pain.” When Speaker ofthe House Nancy Pelosi denounced China’s handling of Tibet, Xinhua,China’s official news service, called her “disgusting.” State-run mediarevived language from another age: the magazine Outlook Weeklywarned that “domestic and foreign hostile forces have made the BeijingOlympics a focus for infiltration and sabotage.” In the anonymity ofthe Web, decorum deteriorated. “People who fart through the mouth willget shit stuffed down their throats by me!” one commentator wrote, in aforum hosted by a semi-official newspaper. “Someone give me a gun!Don’t show mercy to the enemy!” wrote another. The comments were anembarrassment to many Chinese, but they were difficult to ignore amongforeign journalists who had begun receiving threats. (An anonymousletter to my fax machine in Beijing warned, “Clarify the facts on China. . . or you and your loved ones will wish you were dead.”)

Inits first week and a half, the video by CTGZ drew more than a millionhits and tens of thousands of favorable comments. It rose to the site’sfourth-most-popular rating. (A television blooper clip of a yawningnews anchor was No. 1.) On average, the film attracted nearly twoclicks per second. It became a manifesto for a self-styled vanguard indefense of China’s honor, a patriotic swath of society that the Chinesecall the fen qing, the angry youth.

Nineteen years afterthe crackdown on student-led protests in Tiananmen Square, China’syoung élite rose again this spring—not in pursuit of liberal democracybut in defense of sovereignty and prosperity. Nicholas Negroponte, thefounder of M.I.T.’s Media Laboratory and one of the early ideologistsof the Internet, once predicted that the global reach of the Web wouldtransform the way we think about ourselves as countries. The state, hepredicted, will evaporate “like a mothball, which goes from solid togas directly,” and “there will be no more room for nationalism thanthere is for smallpox.” In China, things have gone differently.

Ayoung Chinese friend of mine, who spends most of his time online,traced the screen name CTGZ to an e-mail address. It belonged to atwenty-eight-year-old graduate student in Shanghai named Tang Jie, andit was his first video. A couple of weeks later, I met Tang Jie at thegate of Fudan University, a top Chinese school, situated on a moderncampus that radiates from a pair of thirty-story steel-and-glass towersthat could pass for a corporate headquarters. He wore a crisppowder-blue oxford shirt, khakis, and black dress shoes. He had brighthazel eyes and rounded features—a baby face, everyone tells him—and adusting of goatee and mustache on his chin and upper lip. He boundedover to welcome me as I stepped out of a cab, and he tried to pay myfare.

Tang spends most of his time working on his dissertation,which is on Western philosophy. He specializes in phenomenology;specifically, in the concept of “intersubjectivity,” as theorized byEdmund Husserl, the German philosopher who influenced Sartre, amongothers. In addition to Chinese, Tang reads English and German easily,but he speaks them infrequently, so at times he swerves,apologetically, among languages. He is working on his Latin and AncientGreek. He is so self-effacing and soft-spoken that his voice may dropto a whisper. He laughs sparingly, as if he were conserving energy. Forfun, he listens to classical Chinese music, though he also enjoysscrewball comedies by the Hong Kong star Stephen Chow. He is proudlyunhip. The screen name CTGZ is an adaptation of two obscure terms fromclassical poetry: changting and gongzi, which togethertranslate as “the noble son of the pavilion.” Unlike some élite Chinesestudents, Tang has never joined the Communist Party, for fear that itwould impugn his objectivity as a scholar.

Tang had invited somefriends to join us for lunch, at Fat Brothers Sichuan Restaurant, andafterward we all climbed the stairs to his room. He lives alone in asixth-floor walkup, a studio of less than seventy-five square feet,which could be mistaken for a library storage room occupied by afastidious squatter. Books cover every surface, and great mounds listfrom the shelves above his desk. His collections encompass, more orless, the span of human thought: Plato leans against Lao-tzu,Wittgenstein, Bacon, Fustel de Coulanges, Heidegger, the Koran. WhenTang wanted to widen his bed by a few inches, he laid plywood acrossthe frame and propped up the edges with piles of books. Eventually,volumes overflowed the room, and they now stand outside his front doorin a wall of cardboard boxes.

Tang slumped into his desk chair.We talked for a while, and I asked if he had any idea that his videowould be so popular. He smiled. “It appears I have expressed a commonfeeling, a shared view,” he said.

Next to him sat LiuChengguang, a cheerful, broad-faced Ph.D. student in political sciencewho recently translated into Chinese a lecture on the subject of“Manliness” by the conservative Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield.Sprawled on the bed, wearing a gray sweatshirt, was Xiong Wenchi, whoearned a Ph.D. in political science before taking a teaching job lastyear. And to Tang’s left sat Zeng Kewei, a lean and stylish banker, whopicked up a master’s degree in Western philosophy before going intofinance. Like Tang, each of his friends was in his twenties, was thefirst in his family to go to college, and had been drawn to the studyof Western thought.

“China was backward throughout its modernhistory, so we were always seeking the reasons for why the West grewstrong,” Liu said. “We learned from the West. All of us who areeducated have this dream: Grow strong by learning from the West.”

Tangand his friends were so gracious, so thankful that I’d come to listento them, that I began to wonder if China’s anger of last spring shouldbe viewed as an aberration. They implored me not to make that mistake.

“We’vebeen studying Western history for so long, we understand it well,” Zengsaid. “We think our love for China, our support for the government andthe benefits of this country, is not a spontaneous reaction. It hasdeveloped after giving the matter much thought.”

In fact, theirview of China’s direction, if not their vitriol, is consistent with theChinese mainstream. Almost nine out of ten Chinese approve of the waythings are going in the country—the highest share of any of thetwenty-four countries surveyed this spring by the Pew Research Center.(In the United States, by comparison, just two out of ten voicedapproval.) As for the more assertive strain of patriotism, scholarspoint to a Chinese petition against Japan’s membership in the U.N.Security Council. At last count, it had attracted more than fortymillion signatures, roughly the population of Spain. I asked Tang toshow me how he made his film. He turned to face the screen of hisLenovo desktop P.C., which has a Pentium 4 Processor and one gigabyteof memory. “Do you know Movie Maker?” he said, referring to avideo-editing program. I pleaded ignorance and asked if he’d learnedfrom a book. He glanced at me pityingly. He’d learned it on the flyfrom the help menu. “We must thank Bill Gates,” he said.

Whenpeople began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely.As usual, he was receiving his information from American and Europeannews sites, in addition to China’s official media. Like others his age,he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, avast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blockspolitically objectionable content from reaching computers in China.Younger Chinese friends of mine regard the firewall as they would anofficious lifeguard at a swimming pool—an occasional, largelyirrelevant, intrusion.

To get around it, Tang detours through aproxy server—a digital way station overseas that connects a user with ablocked Web site. He watches television exclusively online, because hedoesn’t have a TV in his room. Tang also receives foreign news clipsfrom Chinese students abroad. (According to the Institute ofInternational Education, the number of Chinese students in the UnitedStates—some sixty-seven thousand—has grown by nearly two-thirds in thepast decade.) He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people ofhis generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

“Becausewe are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we arebrainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other informationfrom different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in aso-called free system you never think about whether you arebrainwashed.”

At the time, news and opinion about Tibet wasswirling on Fudan’s electronic bulletin board, or B.B.S. The board wasalive with criticism of foreign coverage of Tibet. Tang had seen arange of foreign press clippings deemed by Chinese Web users to bemisleading or unfair. A photograph on CNN.com, for instance, had beencropped around military trucks bearing down on unarmed protesters. Butan uncropped version showed a crowd of demonstrators lurking nearby,including someone with an arm cocked, hurling something at the trucks.To Tang, the cropping looked like a deliberate distortion. (CNNdisputed this and said that the caption fairly describes the scene.)

“Itwas a joke,” he said bitterly. That photograph and others crisscrossedChina by e-mail, scrawled with criticism, while people added moreexamples from the Times of London, Fox News, German television,and French radio. It was a range of news organizations, and, to thoseinclined to see it as such, it smacked of a conspiracy. It shockedpeople like Tang, who put faith in the Western press, but, moreimportant, it offended them: Tang thought that he was living in themoment of greatest prosperity and openness in his country’s modernhistory, and yet the world still seemed to view China with suspicion.As if he needed confirmation, Jack Cafferty, a CNN commentator, calledChina “the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the lastfifty years,” a quote that rippled across the front pages in China andfor which CNN later apologized. Like many of his peers, Tang couldn’tfigure out why foreigners were so agitated about Tibet—an impoverishedbackwater, as he saw it, that China had tried for decades to civilize.Boycotting the Beijing Games in the name of Tibet seemed as logical tohim as shunning the Salt Lake City Olympics to protest America’streatment of the Cherokee.

He scoured YouTube in search of arebuttal, a clarification of the Chinese perspective, but he foundnothing in English except pro-Tibet videos. He was already busy—undercontract from a publisher for a Chinese translation of Leibniz’s“Discourse on Metaphysics” and other essays—but he couldn’t shake theidea of speaking up on China’s behalf.

“I thought, O.K., I’ll make something,” he said.

BeforeTang could start, however, he was obligated to go home for a few days.His mother had told him to be back for the harvest season. She neededhis help in the fields, digging up bamboo shoots.

Tangis the youngest of four siblings from a farming family near the easterncity of Hangzhou. For breaking China’s one-child policy, his parentspaid fines measured in grain. Tang’s birth cost them two hundred kilosof unmilled rice. (“I’m not very expensive,” he says.)

Neitherhis mother nor his father could read or write. Until the fourth grade,Tang had no name. He went by Little Four, after his place in the familyorder. When that became impractical, his father began calling him TangJie, an abbreviated homage to his favorite comedian, Tang Jiezhong,half of a popular act in the style of Abbott and Costello.

Tangwas bookish and, in a large, boisterous household, he said little. Hetook to science fiction. “I can tell you everything about all thosemovies, like ‘Star Wars,’ ” he told me. He was a good, though not aspectacular, student, but he showed a precocious interest in ideas. “Hewasn’t like other kids, who spent their pocket money on food—he savedall his money to buy books,” said his sister Tang Xiaoling, who isseven years older. None of his siblings had studied past the eighthgrade, and they regarded him as an admirable oddity. “If he hadquestions that he couldn’t figure out, then he couldn’t sleep,” hissister said. “For us, if we didn’t get it we just gave up.”

Inhigh school, Tang improved his grades and had some success at sciencefairs as an inventor. But he was frustrated. “I discovered that sciencecan’t help your life,” he said. He happened upon a Chinese translationof a fanciful Norwegian novel, “Sophie’s World,” by the philosophyteacher Jostein Gaarder, in which a teen-age girl encounters thehistory of great thinkers. “It was then that I discovered philosophy,”Tang said.

Patriotism was not a particularly strong presence inhis house, but landmarks of national progress became the backdrop ofhis adolescence. When Tang was in junior high, the Chinese were stillcelebrating the country’s first major freeway, completed a few yearsbefore. “It was famous. We were proud of this. At last we had ahighway!” he recalled one day, with a laugh, as we whizzed down anexpressway in Shanghai. “Now we have highways everywhere, even inTibet.”

Supermarkets opened in his home town, and, eventually,so did an Internet café. (Tang, who was eighteen at the time, wasparticularly fond of the Web sites for the White House and NASA,because they had kids’ sections that used simpler English sentences.)Tang enrolled at Hangzhou Normal University. He came to credit hiscountry and his family for opportunities that his siblings had neverhad. By the time he reached Fudan, in 2003, he lived in a world ofideas. “He had a pure passion for philosophy,” Ma Jun, a fellowphilosophy student who met him early on, said. “A kind of religiouspassion.”

The Internet had barely taken root inChina before it became a vessel for nationalism. At the AtlantaOlympics, in 1996, as the Chinese delegation marched into the stadium,the NBC announcer Bob Costas riffed on China’s “problems with humanrights, property right disputes, the threat posed to Taiwan.” Then hementioned “suspicions” that Chinese athletes used performance-enhancingdrugs. Even though the Web in China was in its infancy (there were justfive telephone lines for every hundred people), comments spreadinstantly among Chinese living abroad. The timing couldn’t have beenmore opportune: after more than fifteen years of reform andWesternization, Chinese writers were pushing back against Hollywood,McDonald’s, and American values. An impassioned book titled “China CanSay No” came out that spring and sold more than a hundred thousandcopies in its first month. Written by a group of young intellectuals,it decried China’s “infatuation with America,” which had suppressed thenational imagination with a diet of visas, foreign aid, andadvertising. If China didn’t resist this “cultural strangulation,” itwould become “a slave,” extending a history of humiliating foreignincursions that stretched back to China’s defeat in the first Opium Warand the British acquisition of Hong Kong, in 1842. The Chinesegovernment, which is wary of fast-spreading new ideas, eventuallypulled the book off the shelves, but not before a raft of knockoffssought to exploit the same mood (“Why China Can Say No,” “China StillCan Say No,” and “China Always Say No”).

Xu Wu, a formerjournalist in China who is now a professor at Arizona State University,says in his 2007 book “Chinese Cyber Nationalism” that groups claimingto represent more than seventy thousand overseas Chinese wrote to NBCasking for an apology for the Costas remarks. They collected donationsonline and bought an ad in the Washington Post, accusing Costasand the network of “ignominious prejudice and inhospitality.” NBCapologized, and Chinese online activism was born.

Each day, somethirty-five hundred Chinese citizens were going online for the firsttime. In 1998, Charles Zhang’s Sohu launched China’s first major searchengine. The following spring, when a NATOaircraft, using American intelligence, mistakenly dropped three bombson the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the Chinese Web found its voice.The United States apologized, blaming outdated maps and inaccuratedatabases, but Chinese patriotic hackers—calling themselves “honkers,”to capture the sound of hong, which is Chinese for the colorred—attacked. As Peter Hays Gries, a China scholar at the University ofOklahoma, details in “China’s New Nationalism,” they plastered the homepage of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing with the slogan “Down with theBarbarians!,” and they caused the White House Web site to crash under adeluge of angry e-mail. “The Internet is Western,” one commentatorwrote, “but . . . we Chinese can use it to tell the people of the worldthat China cannot be insulted!”

The government treated onlinepatriots warily. They placed their pride in the Chinese nation, notnecessarily in the Party, and leaders rightly sensed that the passioncould swerve against them. After a nationalist Web site was shut downby censors in 2004, one commentator wrote, “Our government is as weakas sheep!” The government permitted nationalism to grow at some momentsbut strained to control it at others. The following spring, when Japanapproved a new textbook that critics claimed glossed over wartimeatrocities, patriots in Beijing drafted protest plans and broadcastthem via chat rooms, bulletin boards, and text messages. As many as tenthousand demonstrators took to the streets, hurling paint and bottlesat the Japanese Embassy. Despite government warnings to cease theseactivities, thousands more marched in Shanghai the following week—oneof China’s largest demonstrations in years—and vandalized the Japaneseconsulate. At one point, Shanghai police cut off cell-phone service indowntown Shanghai.

“Up to now, the Chinese government has beenable to keep a grip on it,” Xu Wu told me. “But I call it the ‘virtualTiananmen Square.’ They don’t need to go there. They can do the samething online and sometimes be even more damaging.”

Tangwas at dinner with friends one night in 2004 when he met Wan Manlu, anelegantly reserved Ph.D. student in Chinese literature and linguistics.Her delicate features suited her name, which includes the character forthe finest jade. They sat side by side, but barely spoke. Later, Tanghunted down her screen name—gracelittle—and sent her a private messageon Fudan’s bulletin board. They worked up to a first date: anexperimental opera based on “Regret for the Past,” a Chinese story.

Theydiscovered that they shared a frustration with China’s unbridledWesternization. “Chinese tradition has many good things, but we’veditched them,” Wan told me. “I feel there have to be people to carrythem on.” She came from a middle-class home, and Tang’s humble rootsand old-fashioned values impressed her. “Most of my generation has asmooth, happy life, including me,” she said. “I feel like our characterlacks something. For example, love for the country or the perseveranceyou get from conquering hardships. Those virtues, I don’t see them inmyself and many people my age.”

She added, “For him, from thatkind of background, with nobody educated in his family, nobody helpinghim with schoolwork, with great family pressure, it’s not easy to getwhere he is today.”

They were engaged this spring. In theiryears together, Wan watched Tang fall in with a group of studentsdevoted to a charismatic thirty-nine-year-old Fudan philosophyprofessor named Ding Yun. He is a translator of Leo Strauss, thepolitical philosopher whose admirers include Harvey Mansfield and otherneoconservatives. A Strauss student, Abram Shulsky, who co-authored a1999 essay titled “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By WhichWe Do Not Mean Nous),” ran the Pentagon’s Office of SpecialPlans before the invasion of Iraq. Since then, other Strauss discipleshave vigorously ridiculed suggestions of a connection between Strauss’sthought and Bush-era foreign policy.

I saw Mansfield inShanghai in May, during his first visit to China, at a dinner with asmall group of conservative scholars. He was wearing a honey-coloredpanama and was in good spirits, though he seemed a bit puzzled by allthe fuss they were making about him. His first question to the table:“Why would Chinese scholars be interested in Leo Strauss?”

ProfessorDing teaches a Straussian regard for the universality of the classicsand encourages his students to revive ancient Chinese thought. “Duringthe nineteen-eighties and nineties, most intellectuals had a negativeopinion of China’s traditional culture,” he told me recently. He hasclose-cropped hair and stylish rectangular glasses, and favors theconspicuously retro loose-fitting shirts of a Tang-dynasty scholar.When Ding grew up, in the early years of reform, “conservative” was aderogatory term, just like “reactionary,” he said.

But Ding andothers have thrived in recent years amid a new vein of conservatismwhich runs counter to China’s drive for integration with the world.Just as America’s conservative movement in the nineteen-sixtiescapitalized on the yearning for a post-liberal retreat to morality andnobility, China’s classical revival draws on a nostalgic image of whatit means to be Chinese. The biggest surprise best-seller of recentyears is, arguably, “Yu Dan’s Reflections on the Analects,” acollection of Confucian lectures delivered by Yu, a telegenic Beijingprofessor of media studies. She writes, “To assess a country’s truestrength and prosperity, you can’t simply look at GNP growth and notlook at the inner experience of each ordinary person: Does he feelsafe? Is he happy?” (Skeptics argue that it’s simply “Chicken Soup forthe Confucian Soul.”)

Professor Ding met Tang in 2003, at theentrance interview for graduate students. “I was the person in chargeof the exam,” Ding recalled. “I sensed that this kid is very smart anddiligent.” He admitted Tang to the program, and watched withsatisfaction as Tang and other students pushed back against theonslaught of Westernization. Tang developed an appetite for theclassics. “The fact is we are very Westernized,” he said. “Now westarted reading ancient Chinese books and we rediscovered the ancientChina.”

This renewed pride has also affected the way Tang and hispeers view the economy. They took to a theory that the world profitsfrom China but blocks its attempts to invest abroad. Tang’s friend Zengsmiled disdainfully as he ticked off examples of Chinese companies thathave tried to invest in America.

“Huawei’s bid to buy 3Com wasrejected,” he said. “C.N.O.O.C.’s bid to buy into Unocal and Lenovo’spurchase of part of I.B.M. caused political repercussions. If it’s nota market argument, it’s a political argument. We think the world is afree market—”

Before he could finish, Tang jumped in. “This iswhat you—America—taught us,” he said. “We opened our market, but whenwe try to buy your companies we hit political obstacles. It’s notfair.”

Their view, which is popular in China across ideologicallines, has validity: American politicians have invokednational-security concerns, with varying degrees of credibility, tooppose Chinese direct investment. But Tang’s view, infused with a senseof victimhood, also obscures some evidence to the contrary: China hassucceeded in other deals abroad (its sovereign-wealth fund has stakesin the Blackstone Group and in Morgan Stanley), and though China hastaken steps to open its markets to foreigners, it remains equallyinclined to reject an American attempt to buy an asset as sensitive asa Chinese oil company.

Tang’s belief that the United States willseek to obstruct China’s rise—“a new Cold War”— extends beyondeconomics to broader American policy. Disparate issues of relativelyminor importance to Americans, such as support for Taiwan andWashington’s calls to raise the value of the yuan, have metastasized inChina into a feeling of strategic containment. In polls, the Chinesepublic has not demonstrated a significant preference for either BarackObama or John McCain, though Obama has attracted negative attention forsaying that, were he President, he might boycott the opening ceremonyof the Olympics. Tang and his friends have watched some debates online,but the young patriots tend to see the race in broader terms. “Nomatter who is elected, China is still China and will go the way itgoes,” one recent posting in a discussion about Obama said. “Who canstand in the way of the march of history?”

Thisspring, Tang stayed at his family’s farm for five days before he couldreturn to Shanghai and finish his movie. He scoured the Web forphotographs on the subjects that bother him and his friends, everythingfrom inflation to Taiwan’s threats of independence. He selected some ofthe pictures because they were evocative—a man raising his arm in a seaof Chinese flags reminded him of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading thePeople”—and chose others because they embodied the political moment: awheelchair-bound Chinese amputee carrying the Olympic flame in Paris,for instance, fending off a protester who was trying to snatch it away.

For a soundtrack, he typed “solemn music” into Baidu, a Chinesesearch engine, and scanned the results. He landed on a piece byVangelis, a Yanni-style pop composer from Greece who is best known forhis score for the movie “Chariots of Fire.” Tang’s favorite Vangelistrack was from a Gérard Depardieu film about Christopher Columbuscalled “1492: Conquest of Paradise.” He watched a few seconds ofDepardieu standing manfully on the deck of a tall ship, coursing acrossthe Atlantic. Perfect, Tang thought: “It was a time of globalization.”

Tangadded scenes of Chairman Mao and the Olympic track star Liu Xiang, bothicons of their eras. The film was six minutes and sixteen seconds long.Some title screens in English were full of mistakes, because he washurrying, but he was anxious to release it. He posted the film to Sinaand sent a note to the Fudan bulletin board. As the film climbed inpopularity, Professor Ding rejoiced. “We used to think they were just apostmodern, Occidentalized generation,” Ding said. “Of course, Ithought the students I knew were very good, but the wider generation? Iwas not very pleased. To see the content of Tang Jie’s video, and thescale of its popularity among the youth, made me very happy. Veryhappy.”

Not everyone was pleased. Youngpatriots are so polarizing in China that some people, by changing theintonation in Chinese, pronounce “angry youth” as “shit youth.”

“Howcan our national self-respect be so fragile and shallow?” Han Han, oneof China’s most popular young writers, wrote on his blog, in an essayabout nationalism. “Somebody says you’re a mob, so you curse him, evenwant to beat him, and then you say, We’re not a mob. This is as ifsomeone said you were a fool, so you held up a big sign in front of hisgirlfriend’s brother’s dog, saying ‘I Am Not a Fool.’ The message willget to him, but he’ll still think you’re a fool.”

If theactivists thought that they were defending China’s image abroad, therewas little sign of success. After weeks of patriotic rhetoric emanatingfrom China, a poll sponsored by the Financial Times showed that Europeans now ranked China as the greatest threat to global stability, surpassing America.

Butthe eruption of the angry youth has been even more disconcerting tothose interested in furthering democracy. By age and education, Tangand his peers inherit a long legacy of activism that stretches from1919, when nationalist demonstrators demanded “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr.Science,” to 1989, when students flooded Tiananmen Square, challengingthe government and erecting a sculpture inspired by the Statue ofLiberty. Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of thatmovement, but the events of this spring suggest that prosperity,computers, and Westernization have not driven China’s young élitetoward tolerance but, rather, persuaded more than a few of them topostpone idealism as long as life keeps improving. The students in 1989were rebelling against corruption and abuses of power. “Nowadays, theseissues haven’t disappeared but have worsened,” Li Datong, an outspokennewspaper editor and reform advocate, told me. “However, the currentyoung generation turns a blind eye to it. I’ve never seen them respondto those major domestic issues. Rather, they take a utilitarian,opportunistic approach.”

One caricature of young Chinese holdsthat they know virtually nothing about the crackdown at TiananmenSquare—known in Chinese as “the June 4th incident”—because theauthorities have purged it from the nation’s official history. It’s notthat simple, however. Anyone who can click on a proxy server candiscover as much about Tiananmen as he chooses to learn. And yet manyChinese have concluded that the movement was misguided and naïve.

“We accept all the values of human rights, of democracy,” Tang told me. “We accept that. The issue is how to realize it.”

Imet dozens of urbane students and young professionals this spring, andwe often got to talking about Tiananmen Square. In a typicalconversation, one college senior asked whether she should interpret thekilling of protesters at Kent State in 1970 as a fair measure ofAmerican freedom. Liu Yang, a graduate student in environmentalengineering, said, “June 4th could not and should not succeed at thattime. If June 4th had succeeded, China would be worse and worse, notbetter.”

Liu, who is twenty-six, once considered himself aliberal. As a teen-ager, he and his friends happily criticized theCommunist Party. “In the nineteen-nineties, I thought that the Chinesegovernment is not good enough. Maybe we need to set up a bettergovernment,” he told me. “The problem is that we didn’t know what agood government would be. So we let the Chinese Communist Party stay inplace. The other problem is we didn’t have the power to get them out.They have the Army!”

When Liu got out of college, he found a goodjob as an engineer at an oil-services company. He was earning moremoney in a month than his parents—retired laborers living on apension—earned in a year. Eventually, he saved enough money that, withscholarships, he was able to enroll in a Ph.D. program at Stanford. Hehad little interest in the patriotic pageantry of the Olympics until hesaw the fracas around the torch in Paris. “We were furious,” he said,and when the torch came to San Francisco he and other Chinese studentssurged toward the relay route to support it. I was in San Francisco notlong ago, and we arranged to meet at a Starbucks near his dorm, in PaloAlto. He arrived on his mountain bike, wearing a Nautica fleecepullover and jeans.

The date, we both knew, was June 4th,nineteen years since soldiers put down the Tiananmen uprising. Theoverseas Chinese students’ bulletin board had been alive all afternoonwith discussions of the anniversary. Liu mentioned the famousphotograph of an unknown man standing in front of a tank—perhaps themost provocative image in modern Chinese history.

“We reallyacknowledge him. We really think he was brave,” Liu told me. But, ofthat generation, he said, “They fought for China, to make the countrybetter. And there were some faults of the government. But, finally, wemust admit that the Chinese government had to use any way it could toput down that event.”

Sitting in the cool quiet of a Californianight, sipping his coffee, Liu said that he is not willing to risk allthat his generation enjoys at home in order to hasten the liberties hehas come to know in America. “Do you live on democracy?” he asked me.“You eat bread, you drink coffee. All of these are not brought bydemocracy. Indian guys have democracy, and some African countries havedemocracy, but they can’t feed their own people.

“Chinesepeople have begun to think, One part is the good life, another part isdemocracy,” Liu went on. “If democracy can really give you the goodlife, that’s good. But, without democracy, if we can still have thegood life why should we choose democracy?”

Whenthe Olympic torch returned to China, in May, for the final journey toBeijing, the Chinese seemed determined to make up for its woes abroad.Crowds overflowed along the torch’s route. One afternoon, Tang and Iset off to watch the torch traverse a suburb of Shanghai.

At thetime, the country was still in a state of shock following the May 12thearthquake in the mountains of Sichuan Province, which killed more thansixty-nine thousand people and left millions homeless. It was the worstdisaster in three decades, but it also produced a rare moment ofnational unity. Donations poured in, revealing the positive side of thepatriotism that had erupted weeks earlier.

The initial rhetoricof that nationalist outcry contained a spirit of violence that anyoneold enough to remember the Red Guards—or the rise of skinheads inEurope—could not casually dismiss. And that spirit had materialized, inugly episodes: when the Olympic torch reached South Korea, Chinese andrival protesters fought in the streets. The Korean government said itwould deport Chinese agitators, though a Chinese Foreign Ministryspokeswoman stood by the demonstrators’ original intent to “safeguardthe dignity of the torch.” Chinese students overseas emerged as some ofthe most vocal patriots. According to the Times, at theUniversity of Southern California they marshalled statistics andphotographs to challenge a visiting Tibetan monk during a lecture. Thensomeone threw a plastic water bottle in the monk’s direction, andcampus security removed the man who tossed it. At Cornell, ananthropology professor who arranged for the screening of a film onTibet informed the crowd that, on a Web forum for Chinese students, shewas “told to ‘go die.’ ” At Duke University, Grace Wang, a Chinesefreshman, tried to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesterson campus. But online she was branded a “race traitor.” People ferretedout her mother’s address, in the seaside city of Qingdao, andvandalized their home. Her mother, an accountant, remains in hiding. Ofher mother, Grace Wang said, “I really don’t know where she is, and Ithink it’s better for me not to know.”

Now in summer school atDuke, Grace Wang does not regret speaking up, but she says that shemisjudged how others her age, online but frustrated in China, wouldresent her. “When people can’t express themselves in real life, whatcan they do? They definitely have to express their anger towardsomeone. I’m far away. They don’t know me, so they don’t feel sorryabout it. They say whatever they want.” She doesn’t know when she’llreturn home (she becomes uneasy when she is recognized in Chineserestaurants near campus), but she takes comfort in the fact thathistory is filled with names once vilified, later rehabilitated. “Thisis just like what happened in the Cultural Revolution,” she said.“Think about how Deng Xiaoping was treated at that time, and then, injust ten years, things had changed completely.”

In the end,nothing came of the threats to foreign journalists. No blood was shed.After the chaos around the torch in Paris, the Chinese efforts toboycott Carrefour fizzled. China’s leaders, awakening to theirdeteriorating image abroad, ultimately reined in the students with acall for only “rational patriotism.”

“We do not want anyviolence,” Tang told me. He and his peers had merely been desperate forsomeone to hear them. They felt no connection to Tiananmen Square, but,in sending their voices out onto the Web, they, too, had spoken fortheir moment in time. Their fury, Li Datong, the newspaper editor, toldme, arose from “the accumulated desire for expression—just like when aflood suddenly races into a breach.” Because a flood moves in whateverdirection it chooses, the young conservatives are, to China’s rulingclass, an unnerving new force. They “are acutely aware that theircountry, whose resurgence they feel and admire, has no principle toguide it,” Harvey Mansfield wrote in an e-mail to me, after his visit.“Some of them see . . . that liberalism in the West has lost its beliefin itself, and they turn to Leo Strauss for conservatism that is basedon principle, on ‘natural right.’ This conservatism is distinct from astatus-quo conservatism, because they are not satisfied with a countrythat has only a status quo and not a principle.”

In the weeksafter Tang’s video went viral, he made a series of others, about youth,the earthquake, China’s leaders. None of his follow-ups generated morethan a flicker of the attention of the original. The Web had movedon—to newer nationalist films and other distractions.

As Tang and I approached the torch-relay route, he said, “Look at the people. Everyone thinks this is their own Olympics.”

Venderswere selling T-shirts, big Chinese flags, headbands, and mini-flags.Tang told me to wait until the torch passed, because hawkers would thencut prices by up to fifty per cent. He was carrying a plastic bag andfished around in it for a bright-red scarf of the kind that Chinesechildren wear to signal membership in the Young Pioneers, a kind ofSocialist Boy Scouts. He tied it around his neck and grinned. Heoffered one to a passing teen-ager, who politely declined.

Theair was stagnant and thick beneath a canopy of haze, but the mood wasexuberant. Time was ticking down to the torch’s arrival, and the townwas coming out for a look: a man in a dark suit, sweating and smoothinghis hair; a construction worker in an orange helmet and farmer’sgaloshes; a bellboy in a vaguely nautical getup.

Some youngerspectators were wearing T-shirts inspired by China’s recent troubles:“Love China, Oppose Divisions, Oppose Tibetan Independence,” read apopular one. All around us, people strained for a better perch. A womanhung off a lamppost. A young man in a red headband climbed a tree.

Thecrowd’s enthusiasm seemed to brighten Tang’s view of things, remindinghim that China’s future belongs to him and to those around him. “When Istand here, I can feel, deeply, the common emotion of Chinese youth,”he said. “We are self-confident.”

Police blocked the road. Afrisson swept through the crowd. People surged toward the curb,straining to see over one another’s heads. But Tang hung back. He is apatient man. ♦