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Remembering and Forgetting National Humiliation in Twentieth-Century China* b y PaulA. Cohen 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 This concern with national humiliation is well known. Much less familiar is a persistent sense of anxiety over what appeared to significant numbers of intellectuals as China's obliviousness to such humiliation. This anxiety took different forms in different periods. In the late Qing, the complaint most often heard was that Chinese, unlike other peoples, were somehow impervious to feelings of national shame. Then, early in the Republican period (the principal focus of this. article), the problem shifted, in the view of many commentators, from imperviousness to forgetfulness. Chinese, it was now argued, after being subjected to acts of national humiliation, erupted in anger for a short time but then promptly forgot the source of their anger and retreated to their original condition of indifference. Anniversaries were regularly observed and formulaic memory markers widely circulated in society, but doubt was expressed whether * This article is a preliminary foray into an area that I only began to look into seriously several years ago. I am much indebted to Peter Gries, Mary Rankin, Mark Selden, Elizabeth Sinn, and the anonymous reviewer for Twentieth-Century China, each of whom read the piece in one or another of its incarnations and provided valuable advice on where and how to strengthen it. I also benefited from audience comments following talks at the University of Hong Kong, Harvard University, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and from the suggestions of participants in two conferences relating (in part) to issues of memory in Chinese history, held in Oberflockenbach, Germany, in May 2001, and in Heidelberg in November of the same year. Merle Goldman, Rudolf Wagner, and Vivian Wagner alerted· me to important source materials, and Hue-Tam Ho Tai provided helpful insight into the Goujian story, memory, and other pertinent matters. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 27, NO.2 (April, 2002): 1-39 2 Twentieth-Century China such actions encouraged genuine remembering of the painful history to which they alluded. Also-and this is a form of "forgetting" that Republican observers generally overlooked-anniversaries afforded a golden opportunity for different societal groupings to rework the past for their own purposes, tailoring· it more closely to the needs and aspirations of the present. In the final decade of the twentieth century, the problem with respect to the remembering of national humiliation assumed yet another guise. For the great majority of Chinese at century's end the humiliations of the past were no longer a matter of immediate, personal experience. Since an important source of legitimation for China's ruling Communist Party was its part in the vanquishing of imperialism in the 1940s-and the closure this brought to the country's "century of humiliation"-the challenge facing patriotic educators, in the climate of revived nationalistic feeling and weakened faith in Communism that characterized the 1990s, was to fill the minds of the young with narratives of the suffering and humiliation of the imperialist interval in China's history and entreat them to "not forget." Indeed, "do not forget"-wuwang-became the mantra of the guochi writing of this decade. THE LATE QING: POSING THE PROBLEM The fear that humiliating experiences, instead of serving as a constant goad to action, would quickly be forgotten was nothing new in China. It lay at the very heart of the well-known Spring and Autumn period saga of Goujian, King ofYue, who, after being defeated at Mount Kuaiji (in modem Zhejiang) by his arch-rival Fuchai, the king of Wu, was forced into servitude by the latter. Although during the Spring and Autumn period guochi referred to the...

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