The Chinese Embassy in India recently did something unusual – it reproduced a commentary from a state-backed news outlet urging Chinese netizens to approach India “rationally”.

This came after a spate of xenophobic videos portraying Indians as uncivilised swept across the Chinese internet, coincidentally around the same time that videos falsely claiming Singapore had been overrun by Indians surfaced on the same platforms.

The videos, some of which were manipulated, portrayed Indians as arriving in large numbers and behaving badly in public, reinforcing longstanding stereotypes of them as uncivilised.

It wasn’t just videos. Chinese Ambassador to India Xu Feihong also came under attack, with some netizens branding him a traitor for supposedly making it easier for Indians to obtain Chinese visas and enter China.

In China’s diplomatic system, embassies do not typically amplify opinion pieces casually, and the mission in New Delhi has not reposted external commentaries in recent years. By choosing to highlight an article warning against xenophobic and emotionally charged discussions about India, it strongly suggested that the message was consistent with Beijing’s broader effort to stabilise relations with New Delhi.

The commentary from news outlet The Paper, titled “How Should We View Recent Discussions Regarding India?”, argued that the seemingly “patriotic pronouncements” on social media were little more than clickbait masquerading as patriotism, promoting xenophobia while “polluting a healthy online environment and contradicting the open and confident mindset of a major power”.

It was written under the pseudonym Xin Ping, a collective byline commonly used in Chinese state media for commentary reflecting official positions.

The embassy’s intervention raises a broader question: If Beijing has spent years encouraging patriotic content, why is it now trying to tamp it down?

For years, China’s information environment has fostered a political culture in which criticism of foreign countries has become a genre in itself. Entire “self-media” accounts now specialise in mocking countries such as India, Japan and the United States because patriotic outrage reliably attracts clicks.

Much of it is driven by recommendation algorithms, commercial incentives and independent creators. But together, they have created a digital culture that conditions audiences to consume – and increasingly expect – this kind of content. But has Beijing become a victim of its own success?

When nationalism outruns diplomacy

Just as it has been trying to repair ties with India after a deadly border clash in 2020, China is discovering that parts of its own online ecosystem are making that task harder.

There has been tangible progress made to once-thorny bilateral ties. Direct flights are gradually being restored and the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage to Tibet has resumed after several years.

India has even relaxed some post-2020 restrictions by allowing four Chinese-owned manufacturers with factories in India to bid for certain government power projects – a sign that both governments see practical cooperation as outweighing perpetual confrontation.

When Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited New Delhi recently and met India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, he described the two countries as “partners rather than rivals” and called on both governments to “actively guide all sectors of society to form correct perceptions” to build support for better relations. Yet the nationalist mood online is pulling in the opposite direction.

Patriotism as a business

Why have these videos surged in recent weeks?

China has not published recent arrival figures for Indian nationals. But according to The Paper, people-to-people exchanges have increased since direct flights gradually resumed in 2025, with more than 80 per cent of visas issued to Indians being for business and trade rather than tourism.

The timing also coincides with a broader debate in India itself over tourist etiquette. Viral incidents involving Indian travellers in Nepal, Vietnam and elsewhere have prompted commentators, including public officials, to worry that social media stunts are damaging the country’s international reputation.

Chinese content creators have drawn on this material while adding their own examples – some genuine, others fabricated. AFP Fact Check found that several widely shared videos purporting to show Indian tourists sitting on the streets of Shanghai were AI-generated or digitally manipulated.

Recommendation algorithms appear to have discovered that anti-India content generates exceptional engagement. Many of the clips on Xiaohongshu, Douyin and Weibo recycle the same basic narrative: “Look how uncivilised Indian tourists are.”

The narrative has even begun feeding into Xiaohongshu’s AI feature. A search for “the real situation of Indians coming to China” produced a tidy summary of complaints about Indians, from unsavoury behaviour and illegal work to job competition. Labelled as an artificial intelligence summary of Xiaohongshu notes and accounts, it read less like a balanced overview than a snapshot of the platform’s dominant discourse.

Governments may benefit from nationalist sentiment when bargaining with rivals, but they can also become constrained by it. Once public opinion hardens, compromise becomes politically costly.

China has experienced this before. During the 2000s, Beijing sometimes tolerated anti-Japanese protests over wartime history. But when it later sought to stabilise ties with Tokyo, those same nationalist sentiments proved harder to contain.

After the 2012 Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute, anti-Japanese protests escalated, with demonstrators vandalising Japanese cars and businesses. The authorities responded with calls for “rational patriotism”, deploying large numbers of police and detaining vandals as the protests began threatening economic interests and diplomatic stability.

In the age of social media, Beijing has also shown it can act decisively when it chooses.

After a 2024 knife attack on Japanese nationals in Suzhou, Chinese social media platforms, tech companies and state media launched a coordinated crackdown on extreme nationalism and anti-Japanese hate speech by taking down thousands of violating posts and shutting accounts. That episode showed the machinery exists when Beijing wants to draw a line.

Why has it not done so this time? Anti-India sentiment still serves a purpose: It reinforces a comforting narrative of China as modern, orderly and civilised, while casting India as less so. Compared with anti-American or anti-Japanese nationalism, it also carries fewer diplomatic and economic risks.

The problem is not anti-India sentiment itself, but when it becomes so crude, racist or inflammatory that it complicates Beijing’s efforts to stabilise ties with New Delhi.

For years, analysts assumed some governments with strong centralised control could manufacture nationalism whenever they needed it and switch it off when they didn’t. China is discovering that reality is more complicated as algorithms reward outrage and influencers monetise it while audiences reinforce it.

Beijing still has immense power over what Chinese citizens can and cannot see. What it increasingly lacks is the ability to determine what captures their attention.

The state may still set the boundaries of debate, but once patriotic outrage becomes profitable, Beijing may find it hard to tell its own nationalists when enough is enough.