The news of Shinzo Abe’s assassination rocked the world for a brief moment, and opened the doors for some unseemly reactions from China’s public, but within the context of Sino-Japanese history one may have expected worse.

Weibo used to be the only place to find vibrant sources of debate in China. But in recent years, Weibo has become the platform of choice for nationalism, xenophobia and racism. Today, Weibo users have two labels for those they consider to be in the habit of lecturing them on “political correctness”— the “public intellectual” and the “saint bitch.” The invention of these two terms speaks volumes about the evolution of discourse on Chinese social media in recent years.