This paper presents data from a qualitative research project with university students in China regarding how they interpreted and represented the government's newly stated direction into a "New Era". It also investigates how different forms of media, as well as ideological and political curricula and activities, informed student participants' unsystematical and sentimental national imaginaries. This research employs qualitative coding methods and textual analysis to interpret the meanings of 73 students' interview transcripts. The findings reveal that most participants in the study did not take up the governmental voice, but used their own imaginaries in reworking the meaning of related policies. Their national imaginaries had plural and inconsistent value orientations, articulating a fervent nationalist aspiration with the apathy of socio-political issues and an uncritical admiration of the west. University students' imaginaries were less informed by ideological and political education, but more by images offered and circulated via popular and social media. Adopting a critical stance, the research views popular and social media as largely shaped by commercial logic. These forms of media provide barren soil for critical reflections upon individuals' relations to the nation.