“The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this isn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think—Should we really follow a Western model? Look what’s happened. That’s when you start to hear more about a Chinese model. So the nationalism movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model.”
