Interesting piece over here based on research by Andrew Chubb of the excellent South Sea Conversations to the effect that China is not being driven to expansionism because it has to respond to nationalist domestic opinion, itself a product of a highly propagandised education and media system:
Chubb’s survey data provides a very different perspective on the narrative that often emerges in meetings in Beijing. Chinese analysts and officials are willing to encourage and cultivate—or at least not contradict—the notion that nationalist sentiments are strong enough to constrain China’s foreign-policy options. One prominent example of the nationalist-constraints narrative appears in Susan Shirk’s Fragile Superpower, where many of her footnotes indicate interviews with Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials as the source for this narrative.
I suspect that a major source of this narrative is the fact that the idea of a regime in thrall to the demons it has unleashed and the idea of a China threat generally is politically and journalistically useful and appealing right now: it appeals to what many foreign observers want to believe about China and it's an excellent pretext for exciting landfill analysis like this. It's the Chinabollocks version of Britain's own Faragebollocks problem. Of course, it's easier to imply, as the above does, that the whole thing is basically a product of oriental cunning and manipulation rather than admit that wishful thinking might have substituted for an analytical framework.
So why are there so many Chinese wingnuts frothing away in the local media? For the same reason there are so many frothing away in ours. Shouting gets you noticed, especially shouting for the home team. Part of the takeout here is that a commentariat is not an adornment of democracy. It's perfectly compatible with dictatorship, at least of the Chinese type.