Remembering and forgetting national humiliation in twentieth-century China

Patriotic Chinese in the twentieth century referred endlessly to the humiliations (guochi) their country had experienced at the hands of foreign imperialism beginning with the Opium War.1 Indeed, in the republican era they even established days of national humiliation or shame (guochi ri) to mark the anniversaries of these painful episodes.2 Such days, along with the sensitivity to national humiliation they reflected, constituted a major form of national remembering and, through much of the century, were the implicit or explicit focus of a vast guochi literature.3