By Runjie Ou 8/20/2024
On the second day of my field trip, I visited the library of Nanjing University. The university holds a vast collection of original documents from the Republic of China era. I had the opportunity to explore reprinted editions of several rare historical materials relevant to my research.
The earliest publication of the book with a theme to reflect on the topic of national humiliation in China could be traced back to 1909, A Brief History of National Humiliation (国耻小史). The popularity of those publications of national humiliation surged from 1915, and I found an original copy of Gallery of National Humiliation (国耻鉴), which was publicized on that year, in the collection of Nanjing University. I also had a chance to look for newspaper reports related with the topic of national humiliation in Shenbao and governmental reports of Nanjing Republic Government as the university also has the whole collections of them. Nowadays, most of historical documents have been coded as digital recourses and could be visited online. However, it is still worth to visit the library collection such as that in Nanjing University as the paper copies keep the original format and printing for those materials. Not need to say that paper copies could provide better reading experience than the online version.
Between my visits to major sites of my field research, I also went to several local Chinese bookstores (such as Vanguard 先锋书店, a famous books store in Nanjing) to see if I could still find any books addressing the theme of national humiliation today. To my surprise, I didn’t come across anything resembling A History of Humiliation or nationalist pamphlets with similar themes, like China Can Say No (中国可以说不), which I remember being a bestseller when I was a child. Instead, I found several highly professional and academic publications related to the topic (and I didn’t expect to see them in a public book shop!). For example, I discovered a book focused specifically on the general history of foreign concessions in China, as well as another one on the political thought of Kang Youwei.
The comparison between the collections from the library and book stores (and together with the comparison between those from the 20th century book stores and 21th century book stores in China) reminds me of some words from Hegel in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. According to Hegel, philosophy has become a matter of schools since the eighteenth century as it is no longer a universal wisdom or a guide to life for all men. It is good for the philosophy, as it has gained precision and systematic form; it is bad from some perspectives, as philosophy change from a living style to a discipline. The same thing happens to the discourse of national humiliation: it has transformed from some kind of passion that every citizen was supposed to bear in mind to research topics by scholars. While in the last century national humiliation is more likely to be a public topic, nowadays common people have no interest to talk much about it.
