Gendering national shame: Xie Bingying and Chinese students in Japan, 1900s–1930s

Since the late Qing period, narratives of humiliation have significantly shaped Chinese national identity, embedding sorrow, resentment, and anger into the collective memory of Sino-Japanese conflicts. Chinese students studying in Japan, who directly confronted the self-Other dichotomy, produced writings that vividly illustrate how the emotional regime of nationalism continuously inscribed shame onto the body. Xie Bingying’s two periods of study in Japan reveal how a modern woman negotiated with emotional struggles when experienced collectively or when faced individually with the Other. In the solitude of a Japanese prison, Xie’s shame arose not only from exposing her body to the gaze of Japanese men, but also from the visible traces of her reformist feet. Her physical vulnerability became an embodied site where nationalist discourse – framing women’s bodies as battlegrounds of modern civic education – entangled itself deeply with longstanding cultural norms that sexualised female virtue.