China Changes Course, Advocating Tempered Response to Its Critics

"Rational patriotism," Zu said, "is a calm, controlled and emotion-free action. The action should benefit the national interest in the long run."

Still, emotions among many Chinese people continue to run high. Ouyang Bingfeng, 21, an exhibition designer in Beijing, said he has been participating in online discussions about how best to show the world that Chinese people are unified against Tibetan separatism. "Don't insult us," he said he wants to tell the world. "We are a 5,000-year-old, big country and we are unified."

But those who joined in the Carrefour protests for that very reason are being accused in online forums of being unruly, he said. People are sending messages saying the Carrefour protests were violent incidents.

That's a big shift from last week.

Ma Ruibin, a 31-year-old engineer in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in western China, went with three friends to a Carrefour on April 17 and handed out leaflets encouraging people not to boycott the store, which employs thousands of Chinese and sells many Chinese-manufactured products at low prices.

"A lot of people called us traitors," Ma said in a telephone interview. "The patriotic youth are very irrational. Their overreaction will damage the country's image. We want to show a different opinion. China is trying to join the international community. To do that we have to be more rational and open."

Chen Huai Yuan, 26, runs an Internet company that helped popularize a "heart" icon in the MSN Messenger program meant to express love and support for China. He said his company first queried 1,800 of its users about posting the heart icon, which appears next to the word "CHINA," alongside their screen names. Within 24 hours, 6 million users had adopted it.

He hopes people keep using it.

"Expressing your patriotism is not only about when bad things happen," Chen said. "Nationalism can be a long-term thing."

He said "there's culture shock" as China takes a higher profile on the world stage. "The Chinese way of thinking is different from the Western way," Chen said. "In the West, they think Chinese people don't have human rights. As Chinese, we have social security, we have a legal system. We don't feel like we don't have enough human rights."

Several people said they were unclear what form their expressions would take from here, though bloggers are encouraging people to do meaningful work that earns international respect. Sun Fa, a 28-year-old protester, said, "Everyone has a different view of what is rational."

Researcher Liu Liu contributed to this report.