NEWS
2026.07.16
【Report】 The 90th AJI Frontier Seminar was held! Dr. Zeying Wu presented “Truth or Trust?: Nationalism and Chinese Perceptions of Disinformation regarding Japan’s Discharge of Treated Nuclear Wastewater.”
The 90th AJI Frontier Seminar was held online on Tuesday, June 9, 2026. Dr. Zeying Wu, an Assistant Professor at the Asia-Japan Research Institute, Ritsumeikan University, Japan, delivered a presentation titled “Truth or Trust?: Nationalism and Chinese Perceptions of Disinformation regarding Japan’s Discharge of Treated Nuclear Wastewater.”
Dr. Wu began by explaining that she and her collaborator are presently investigating whether nationalism increases susceptibility to disinformation. Their work refines the prevailing assumption that greater factual knowledge inherently improves the detection of disinformation, introducing nationalism as a critical conditional factor. Focusing on mainland China, the research examines how nationalism shapes public perceptions of official disinformation concerning Japan’s discharge of treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.
Turning to her theoretical framework, Dr. Wu drew on Social Identity Theory to define nationalism as a competitive consciousness rooted in national identity and organized around an “Us” versus “Others” dynamic—one that combines insider favoritism with outsider derogation. In the Chinese context, she identified three measurable dimensions: insider favoritism rooted in self-contented national pride, insider favoritism centered on a sense of national superiority over others, and outsider derogation.
Grounded in the philosophy of information, Dr. Wu distinguished disinformation from misinformation and “fake news,” defining it as curated information—which may be true, false, or a mixture of both—that is intentionally designed to mislead recipients into drawing a false conclusion (Fallis, 2015). She noted that, in mainland China, the perception of disinformation involves more than the cognitive capacity to identify it; it also entails a layer of tolerance. Her study, therefore, measures disinformation perception along two dimensions: identification, the ability to accurately detect disinformation, and acquiescence, the willingness to tolerate or accept it even after it has been identified.
Methodologically, her research combines focus group discussions with online survey experiments conducted on a representative sample. Dr. Wu tests two primary hypotheses. The first holds that, controlling for factual knowledge, higher levels of nationalism among Chinese respondents are negatively associated with the accurate identification of disinformation unfavorable to Japan. The second holds that, again controlling for factual knowledge, higher levels of nationalism are positively associated with acquiescence to disinformation that has already been identified as unfavorable to Japan.
Although the project is ongoing, Dr. Wu shared two notable preliminary findings from four completed pilot rounds. First, levels of nationalism among Chinese respondents proved uniformly high; this lack of variance yielded statistically insignificant treatment effects across the four online survey experiments. Second, responses regarding disinformation were similarly uniform—a homogeneity she attributed to social desirability bias and to the ceiling effects also observed when measuring or manipulating Chinese nationalism.
Guided by these insights, Dr. Wu and her collaborator have adjusted their empirical strategy. Rather than treating nationalism as an independent variable, they will now analyze it as a moderator. They anticipate that, if nationalism exerts a significant moderating effect on the relationship between factual knowledge and disinformation perception, its causal role can still be robustly established.
Please visit the following link for previous AJI Frontier Seminars:
https://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/research/aji/young_researcher/seminar/archive/