In practice it just means the hundreds of millions of CCP zerglings who populate the internet, though ironically, like with the whole “semitic antisemitism” thing we see happening in gaza, one could equally describe the Taiwanese as “Chinese Nationalists” right?

But it’s those people who DDoS’d blizzard over Blitzchung and a million other of these “Chinese Justice Warrior” events. I remember when that Genshin Impact game came out I’d see stories leaking out about this or that decision by the devs which had sent 6 gorillion “Chinese nationalists” into overdrive, but it’s happening constantly and all over the place, so often that we end up just forgetting or ignoring a lot of it (another winning tactic for China, the death by 1,000 cuts)

Nationalist is a word for bad guy.A normal not brainwashed westerner would just assume that everyone is a nationalist for their home country but to the anointed it means bad guy.

They can't just call them the Chinese period, as that sounds racist, so they use a vaguely close enough word to describe the phenomenon of the Chinese basically buying anything made in China.

They can't acknowledge the collectivism and hivemind actions of the Chinese openly, even though we all know it, so they attempt to shove it into a Western Culture War box.