How did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regain the support of Chinese citizens after the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989? Why has popular sentiment turned toward anti-Western nationalism despite the anti-dictatorship democratic movements of the 1980s? And why has China become more assertive toward the United States and Japan in foreign policy?

Zheng Wang offers an explanation for these trends as he follows and analyzes the CCP's ideological reeducation of the public, which relentlessly portrays China as the victim of "one hundred years of humiliation" and foreign imperialist bullying in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Wang uses historical memory to decode China's political transition, popular sentiment, and international behavior in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era. He also explores the role that historical memory has played in China's rise, its manipulation by political elites, its resonance in the popular imagination, and its ability to constrain and shape China's foreign relations with major powers.