I recently came across the term “fighting nation” in a video. Several people who were asked on the street in China what they associated with Russia used this term (战斗民族 zhàndòu mínzú).
The video is not representative of Chinese society, but the term seems to originate from the state media machine, which apparently paints a very friendly picture of the Russian regime.
The term appears to be quite popular in Chinese-language media. But if you translate it into Russian (Воюющая нация – voyuyushchaya natsiya) and search for it online, you’ll find that it is hardly used by Russian media.
The slogan is associated with a heroic resistance against an overpowering and supposedly aggressive NATO, and that this resistance, as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán put it, was already directed against Hitler and, before that, against Napoleon.
Whatever one may think of this, the concept of Russia as a „fighting nation“ crystallizes a fundamentally different understanding of the war in Ukraine, insofar as it aims at historical analogies – and not at the question of who started the war and for what purpose.
Perhaps no one dared to take a different line from the government’s on camera. But that wasn’t what it looked like. Rather, none of the respondents seemed to be aware that Russia, the „fighting nation,“ started this war. Of course, that should come as no surprise to anyone in the West.