| 1 | American school kids (and American adults) don't know much, if anything, about the two Opium Wars, but in China they are an ever-present reminder of national humiliation. | |
| 2 | Newly-rich Chinese collectors are buying back their stolen treasures to mitigate what is seen as a national shame, when their country was weak and dominated by the West. | |
| 3 | Mr Putin seems to regard foreign debt as a sort of national insult, and is paying most of it off. | |
| 4 | In the 1920s Chinese nationalists began spinning the arrival of Western gunboats as the cause of all the country's problems - the start of China's "century of humiliation". | |
| 5 | So when Chinese officials start talking about "national humiliation", it is sometimes a clue that you are being encouraged to look the other way . |
