“China was backward throughout its modern history, so we were always seeking the reasons for why the West grew strong,” Liu said. “We learned from the West. All of us who are educated have this dream: Grow strong by learning from the West.”

Tang and his friends were so gracious, so thankful that I’d come to listen to them, that I began to wonder if China’s anger of last spring should be viewed as an aberration. They implored me not to make that mistake.

“We’ve been studying Western history for so long, we understand it well,” Zeng said. “We think our love for China, our support for the government and the benefits of this country, is not a spontaneous reaction. It has developed after giving the matter much thought.”

In fact, their view of China’s direction, if not their vitriol, is consistent with the Chinese mainstream. Almost nine out of ten Chinese approve of the way things are going in the country—the highest share of any of the twenty-four countries surveyed this spring by the Pew Research Center. (In the United States, by comparison, just two out of ten voiced approval.) As for the more assertive strain of patriotism, scholars point to a Chinese petition against Japan’s membership in the U.N. Security Council. At last count, it had attracted more than forty million signatures, roughly the population of Spain. I asked Tang to show me how he made his film. He turned to face the screen of his Lenovo desktop P.C., which has a Pentium 4 Processor and one gigabyte of memory. “Do you know Movie Maker?” he said, referring to a video-editing program. I pleaded ignorance and asked if he’d learned from a book. He glanced at me pityingly. He’d learned it on the fly from the help menu. “We must thank Bill Gates,” he said.

When people began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely. As usual, he was receiving his information from American and European news sites, in addition to China’s official media. Like others his age, he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, a vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blocks politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. Younger Chinese friends of mine regard the firewall as they would an officious lifeguard at a swimming pool—an occasional, largely irrelevant, intrusion.

To get around it, Tang detours through a proxy server—a digital way station overseas that connects a user with a blocked Web site. He watches television exclusively online, because he doesn’t have a TV in his room. Tang also receives foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad. (According to the Institute of International Education, the number of Chinese students in the United States—some sixty-seven thousand—has grown by nearly two-thirds in the past decade.) He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

“Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

At the time, news and opinion about Tibet was swirling on Fudan’s electronic bulletin board, or B.B.S. The board was alive with criticism of foreign coverage of Tibet. Tang had seen a range of foreign press clippings deemed by Chinese Web users to be misleading or unfair. A photograph on CNN.com, for instance, had been cropped around military trucks bearing down on unarmed protesters. But an uncropped version showed a crowd of demonstrators lurking nearby, including someone with an arm cocked, hurling something at the trucks. To Tang, the cropping looked like a deliberate distortion. (CNN disputed this and said that the caption fairly describes the scene.)

“It was a joke,” he said bitterly. That photograph and others crisscrossed China by e-mail, scrawled with criticism, while people added more examples from the Times of London, Fox News, German television, and French radio. It was a range of news organizations, and, to those inclined to see it as such, it smacked of a conspiracy. It shocked people like Tang, who put faith in the Western press, but, more important, it offended them: Tang thought that he was living in the moment of greatest prosperity and openness in his country’s modern history, and yet the world still seemed to view China with suspicion. As if he needed confirmation, Jack Cafferty, a CNN commentator, called China “the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last fifty years,” a quote that rippled across the front pages in China and for which CNN later apologized. Like many of his peers, Tang couldn’t figure out why foreigners were so agitated about Tibet—an impoverished backwater, as he saw it, that China had tried for decades to civilize. Boycotting the Beijing Games in the name of Tibet seemed as logical to him as shunning the Salt Lake City Olympics to protest America’s treatment of the Cherokee.

He scoured YouTube in search of a rebuttal, a clarification of the Chinese perspective, but he found nothing in English except pro-Tibet videos. He was already busy—under contract from a publisher for a Chinese translation of Leibniz’s “Discourse on Metaphysics” and other essays—but he couldn’t shake the idea of speaking up on China’s behalf.

“I thought, O.K., I’ll make something,” he said.

Before Tang could start, however, he was obligated to go home for a few days. His mother had told him to be back for the harvest season. She needed his help in the fields, digging up bamboo shoots.

Tang is the youngest of four siblings from a farming family near the eastern city of Hangzhou. For breaking China’s one-child policy, his parents paid fines measured in grain. Tang’s birth cost them two hundred kilos of unmilled rice. (“I’m not very expensive,” he says.)

Neither his mother nor his father could read or write. Until the fourth grade, Tang had no name. He went by Little Four, after his place in the family order. When that became impractical, his father began calling him Tang Jie, an abbreviated homage to his favorite comedian, Tang Jiezhong, half of a popular act in the style of Abbott and Costello.

Tang was bookish and, in a large, boisterous household, he said little. He took to science fiction. “I can tell you everything about all those movies, like ‘Star Wars,’ ” he told me. He was a good, though not a spectacular, student, but he showed a precocious interest in ideas. “He wasn’t like other kids, who spent their pocket money on food—he saved all his money to buy books,” said his sister Tang Xiaoling, who is seven years older. None of his siblings had studied past the eighth grade, and they regarded him as an admirable oddity. “If he had questions that he couldn’t figure out, then he couldn’t sleep,” his sister said. “For us, if we didn’t get it we just gave up.”

In high school, Tang improved his grades and had some success at science fairs as an inventor. But he was frustrated. “I discovered that science can’t help your life,” he said. He happened upon a Chinese translation of a fanciful Norwegian novel, “Sophie’s World,” by the philosophy teacher Jostein Gaarder, in which a teen-age girl encounters the history of great thinkers. “It was then that I discovered philosophy,” Tang said.

Patriotism was not a particularly strong presence in his house, but landmarks of national progress became the backdrop of his adolescence. When Tang was in junior high, the Chinese were still celebrating the country’s first major freeway, completed a few years before. “It was famous. We were proud of this. At last we had a highway!” he recalled one day, with a laugh, as we whizzed down an expressway in Shanghai. “Now we have highways everywhere, even in Tibet.”

Supermarkets opened in his home town, and, eventually, so did an Internet café. (Tang, who was eighteen at the time, was particularly fond of the Web sites for the White House and NASA, because they had kids’ sections that used simpler English sentences.) Tang enrolled at Hangzhou Normal University. He came to credit his country and his family for opportunities that his siblings had never had. By the time he reached Fudan, in 2003, he lived in a world of ideas. “He had a pure passion for philosophy,” Ma Jun, a fellow philosophy student who met him early on, said. “A kind of religious passion.”

The Internet had barely taken root in China before it became a vessel for nationalism. At the Atlanta Olympics, in 1996, as the Chinese delegation marched into the stadium, the NBC announcer Bob Costas riffed on China’s “problems with human rights, property right disputes, the threat posed to Taiwan.” Then he mentioned “suspicions” that Chinese athletes used performance-enhancing drugs. Even though the Web in China was in its infancy (there were just five telephone lines for every hundred people), comments spread instantly among Chinese living abroad. The timing couldn’t have been more opportune: after more than fifteen years of reform and Westernization, Chinese writers were pushing back against Hollywood, McDonald’s, and American values. An impassioned book titled “China Can Say No” came out that spring and sold more than a hundred thousand copies in its first month. Written by a group of young intellectuals, it decried China’s “infatuation with America,” which had suppressed the national imagination with a diet of visas, foreign aid, and advertising. If China didn’t resist this “cultural strangulation,” it would become “a slave,” extending a history of humiliating foreign incursions that stretched back to China’s defeat in the first Opium War and the British acquisition of Hong Kong, in 1842. The Chinese government, which is wary of fast-spreading new ideas, eventually pulled the book off the shelves, but not before a raft of knockoffs sought to exploit the same mood (“Why China Can Say No,” “China Still Can Say No,” and “China Always Say No”).

Xu Wu, a former journalist in China who is now a professor at Arizona State University, says in his 2007 book “Chinese Cyber Nationalism” that groups claiming to represent more than seventy thousand overseas Chinese wrote to NBC asking for an apology for the Costas remarks. They collected donations online and bought an ad in the Washington Post, accusing Costas and the network of “ignominious prejudice and inhospitality.” NBC apologized, and Chinese online activism was born.

Each day, some thirty-five hundred Chinese citizens were going online for the first time. In 1998, Charles Zhang’s Sohu launched China’s first major search engine. The following spring, when a NATO aircraft, using American intelligence, mistakenly dropped three bombs on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the Chinese Web found its voice. The United States apologized, blaming outdated maps and inaccurate databases, but Chinese patriotic hackers—calling themselves “honkers,” to capture the sound of hong, which is Chinese for the color red—attacked. As Peter Hays Gries, a China scholar at the University of Oklahoma, details in “China’s New Nationalism,” they plastered the home page of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing with the slogan “Down with the Barbarians!,” and they caused the White House Web site to crash under a deluge of angry e-mail. “The Internet is Western,” one commentator wrote, “but . . . we Chinese can use it to tell the people of the world that China cannot be insulted!”

The government treated online patriots warily. They placed their pride in the Chinese nation, not necessarily in the Party, and leaders rightly sensed that the passion could swerve against them. After a nationalist Web site was shut down by censors in 2004, one commentator wrote, “Our government is as weak as sheep!” The government permitted nationalism to grow at some moments but strained to control it at others. The following spring, when Japan approved a new textbook that critics claimed glossed over wartime atrocities, patriots in Beijing drafted protest plans and broadcast them via chat rooms, bulletin boards, and text messages. As many as ten thousand demonstrators took to the streets, hurling paint and bottles at the Japanese Embassy. Despite government warnings to cease these activities, thousands more marched in Shanghai the following week—one of China’s largest demonstrations in years—and vandalized the Japanese consulate. At one point, Shanghai police cut off cell-phone service in downtown Shanghai.

“Up to now, the Chinese government has been able to keep a grip on it,” Xu Wu told me. “But I call it the ‘virtual Tiananmen Square.’ They don’t need to go there. They can do the same thing online and sometimes be even more damaging.”

Tang was at dinner with friends one night in 2004 when he met Wan Manlu, an elegantly reserved Ph.D. student in Chinese literature and linguistics. Her delicate features suited her name, which includes the character for the finest jade. They sat side by side, but barely spoke. Later, Tang hunted down her screen name—gracelittle—and sent her a private message on Fudan’s bulletin board. They worked up to a first date: an experimental opera based on “Regret for the Past,” a Chinese story.

They discovered that they shared a frustration with China’s unbridled Westernization. “Chinese tradition has many good things, but we’ve ditched them,” Wan told me. “I feel there have to be people to carry them on.” She came from a middle-class home, and Tang’s humble roots and old-fashioned values impressed her. “Most of my generation has a smooth, happy life, including me,” she said. “I feel like our character lacks something. For example, love for the country or the perseverance you get from conquering hardships. Those virtues, I don’t see them in myself and many people my age.”

She added, “For him, from that kind of background, with nobody educated in his family, nobody helping him with schoolwork, with great family pressure, it’s not easy to get where he is today.”

They were engaged this spring. In their years together, Wan watched Tang fall in with a group of students devoted to a charismatic thirty-nine-year-old Fudan philosophy professor named Ding Yun. He is a translator of Leo Strauss, the political philosopher whose admirers include Harvey Mansfield and other neoconservatives. A Strauss student, Abram Shulsky, who co-authored a 1999 essay titled “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous),” ran the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans before the invasion of Iraq. Since then, other Strauss disciples have vigorously ridiculed suggestions of a connection between Strauss’s thought and Bush-era foreign policy.

I saw Mansfield in Shanghai in May, during his first visit to China, at a dinner with a small group of conservative scholars. He was wearing a honey-colored panama and was in good spirits, though he seemed a bit puzzled by all the fuss they were making about him. His first question to the table: “Why would Chinese scholars be interested in Leo Strauss?”

Professor Ding teaches a Straussian regard for the universality of the classics and encourages his students to revive ancient Chinese thought. “During the nineteen-eighties and nineties, most intellectuals had a negative opinion of China’s traditional culture,” he told me recently. He has close-cropped hair and stylish rectangular glasses, and favors the conspicuously retro loose-fitting shirts of a Tang-dynasty scholar. When Ding grew up, in the early years of reform, “conservative” was a derogatory term, just like “reactionary,” he said.

But Ding and others have thrived in recent years amid a new vein of conservatism which runs counter to China’s drive for integration with the world. Just as America’s conservative movement in the nineteen-sixties capitalized on the yearning for a post-liberal retreat to morality and nobility, China’s classical revival draws on a nostalgic image of what it means to be Chinese. The biggest surprise best-seller of recent years is, arguably, “Yu Dan’s Reflections on the Analects,” a collection of Confucian lectures delivered by Yu, a telegenic Beijing professor of media studies. She writes, “To assess a country’s true strength and prosperity, you can’t simply look at GNP growth and not look at the inner experience of each ordinary person: Does he feel safe? Is he happy?” (Skeptics argue that it’s simply “Chicken Soup for the Confucian Soul.”)