Does economic status affect nationalism fostering within a nation? : evidence from secondary school students in three cities of China

Nationalism has been seen as a social construction by the state through various agents, among which school education is a major one. But could the government effectively construct the “imagined community” among people within a nation with great economic inequality? This study proposed hypotheses on different relationships between people's economic status and nationalistic sentiments. Using survey data collected from over 700 high school students in three Chinese cities---Beijing, Shenzhen and Jingzhou (Hubei Province), the research provides empirical tests of whether individual/regional economic status will account for varied level of nationalism. With OLS regression, the researcher finds that people with lower income/from less-developed region generally have higher level of nationalism, indicating the strong constructive power of patriotic education which discourages people's recognition of the actual inequality with a diversionary effect. Furthermore, this study examined multi-dimensions of nationalism instead of a single measurement of this concept, finding that in dimensions relevant to primordial nationalistic attachment, classified as 'general identities', high consensus is reached among the respondents, while for 'individual-sensitive identities' which are more likely to change with the situation, respondents from lower-income families also turn to identify to a higher degree