On May 9, 1999, I was riding a bicycle on the streets of Nanjing, China, zigzagging through, what we call in Chinese, a "people mountain, people sea." The news about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade the previous night had just spread, and thousands of Chinese who believed that NATO (or more specifically, the Americans) did it deliberately flooded the streets to express their anger. But I, then a junior reporter at a local radio station, detected more of a sense of joy than boiling-point rage among the protestors.

In a city where there are major universities, students unsurprisingly became the majority of protestors. They marched under the banners of their own schools, chanted nationalist slogans and emitted thunderous cheers when they were joined by students from another school. They all condemned the "American imperialists," but few people I interviewed were able to tell me the full name of NATO and the member countries in the league. They didn't seem to be interested in those details.

Toward the end of a night of protest, I witnessed protestors smashing a McDonald's statue and attacking a small restaurant named California Beef Noodles, which had little to do with California other than its name. This seemed to give the exited young faces a lot of pleasure.

It was at a time of year when tens of thousands of college seniors had nothing much to do other than wait for their graduation. The protest was like one of their numerous farewell parties, except that this one, in the minds of the protesters, was more meaningful.

That make what's going on in China right feels like deja vu. When an international tribunal in The Hague rejected Beijing's claims of South China Sea sovereignty earlier this month, nationalist sentiments were ignited once again.

In Laoting county, Hebei province, protesters blocked a KFC restaurant with a banner saying: "By patronizing American KFC, you cost our ancestors' face." In Dalian, Liaoning Province, a man was beaten up by another man on the subway simply for wearing Nike sneakers. And on WeChat, the most popular social media platform among Chinese, there have been widely circulated screeds calling for boycotting US products and preparing for a war with the "enemies."

The way nationalists choose to show their anger is still the same. The faces and the voices of the protestors flushed with excitement.

But again, I saw joy in them, the same joy that mobilized the protest 17 years ago, and many other irrational activities before and after that. 

There is a reason why every few years the same behavior emerges under the cover of nationalism in China.

Most people have dreamed of becoming heroes. And most of us are disappointed by the ordinariness of our lives. If you don't live in a revolutionary era and you are not a Hollywood actor, there are few ways for us to overturn this state of affairs. But with some patience it will just wait, most of the time quietly, for an opportunity when we can find on a course, a mission, or anything that is bigger than our own lives.

In the US, sometimes the same desire can be distorted and drive a few extremists to kill cops or join the IS. But many people use the presidential elections to show how they feel.

You pick up your candidate, you fight for him or her, verbally and sometimes, physically. By doing so, you can become part of a movement.

In China people seize other opportunities to express themselves.

A few years ago, when Dutch company Mars One kicked off a project to build a human colony on Mars, they got 200,000 volunteers who would like to be sent to the planet by 2023 on a one-way trip - something that's strictly hypothetical at the moment, and seems unlikely to happen. Interestingly, 6 percent of them were from China, the third source country only behind the US and India. Quite phenomenal for a country where people are not known for being adventurous.

Recently, a WeChat publication posted a message saying it would offer airfare tickets to an undisclosed location to the first 30 people who replied. The only thing was the flight was ready to take off and you had to arrive at the airport in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou within four hours. More than 50,000 people replied, willing to take the spontaneous trip. 

Nationalist stunts, though, require no qualification other than being Chinese, gives you the feeling of being useful for your country, and it generally won't get you in trouble with the government.

But any worries that China will become hell for foreigners or foreign products are overblown. The day after the Nanjing protest in 1999 happened to be the day of the registration for the Graduation Record Examinations (GRE), a standard test that one has to take in order to apply for graduate school in the US.

The line in front of the registration office, located in Nanjing University, zigzagged for half a mile. When I looked at the young faces in the queue, I was all but certain that some of them were the same as those who used street protests against "American imperialists" the previous night. That is a hopeful contradiction.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com