Associate professor Onodera Shiro, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Saitama University, Japan, was invited to address a speech on September 3, 2014, by the research team “Chinese identity and the formation of a modern state” of the project “the formation of modern China” of Humanities Center, NCCU. The speeches divided into two parts: topic “National Humiliation and National Celebration – the Establishment of the Commemoration Culture of Modern China and the Public Recollection” in the morning and topic “The Policy of Memorial Days during the Anti-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War under the regime of Kuomintang (KMT)” in the afternoon.

Of the morning part professor Onodera considered that the movements to commemorate the national humiliation made those awful reminiscences constantly appear in people’s mind and activated the national humiliation to become a stronger public memory to trigger the people’s affection. Since Liang Qi-chao, a leader of the reformist party of China, proposed the policy of commemorating the national humiliation, and its influence extended to the National Government after the revolution.

This issue led to the hot discussion of the present professors. Take professor Zheng Wen-hui for instance. She thought that how modern awareness of humiliation got strengthened and developed could be added to Onodera’s presentation. Besides, commemoration could be plentiful forms such as official, national or cultural. Furthermore, what’s the difference among them? Of a series of commemorated activity how the commemorated rituals showed with visualization. How the officials organized the activities with the visible image. Beside a chain of extended thoughts, present scholars also tried to liken the contemporary movements to the past. Regarding the memorial days, from the standpoint of professor Yang Rui-song, not all the memorial days contained the meaning of national humiliation. In addition, national humiliation was not necessarily the passive thing. China, for example, consecutively mentioned about the century national humiliation and the Chinese dream. Although the national humiliation was the original appearance of the trauma, it led to the honorable aspect as well.

Professor Onodera had discussed the establishing process of the memorial-day system under the regime of KMT from the National Revolution to the early 1930’s while the lecture in the afternoon was the supplementary elaboration on the memorial-day system. Of the lecture professor Onodera focused on the memorial days before and during the anti-Japanese war to observe how KMT and the National Government made use of setting several memorial days to enhance the wartime mobilization. From his angle, the purpose of setting the past revolutionary memorial days was to manifest the revolutionary history of KMT and to show the legitimacy of governance. Nevertheless, the intention of setting the wartime festivals was to implement each substantial policy. Reducing the revolutionary memorial days and increasing the concrete-policy related memorial days indicated that the transformation of the policy emphases of the KMT regime.

After the presentation several scholars supplemented their own perspectives. Professor Pan Shao-yu, for instance, mentioned that the Youth Day was originally set on May 4; nonetheless, Mao Ze-dong delivered an announcement of neo-nationalism and marked the May 4 as the statement of the Communist Party so that the KMT government changed the date to March 29. This event showed the combat of awareness between the KMT and the Communist Party. Not merely the above supplementation but also many other observations could be added to professor Onodera’s study.