At the 2012 London games, an American commentator called a 16-year-old Chinese swimmer’s world-record performance “suspicious” and “disturbing” for how fast it was. Soon thereafter, an article in China’s official Xinhua News Agency quoted a sports official claiming that the Americans “cannot accept China’s rise. That’s why they criticize Chinese athletes.”

At the same games, several upsets and disqualifications that cost Chinese athletes gold medals were attributed to Western conspiracies—supposedly borne out of a “hysterical” and “paranoid” fear of China, according to the Communist Party mouthpiece, People’s Daily. (These claims were never substantiated).

Perhaps the most significant outpouring of indignation came in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing games, when the worldwide Olympic torch relay was disrupted by protesters in London, Paris, and San Francisco, and led to boycotts of French companies in China. At one protest outside the French retailer Carrefour in the city of Qingdao, protesters directly linked historic and modern issues when they toted signs saying, “Say No to Carrefour! Say No to French Imperialists! Strongly Protest Britain and France Invading China in 1860! Strongly Protest [Britain and France] Slandering Our Olympics in 2008!”

The below video, made by a Chinese college student, went viral and captured the mood at the time. “Imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy us!” it says over chilling music, adding that China’s torch relay struggle is “just like the long march for [China’s] rise from a semi-colony up to a modern independent country.”

To understand this enduring sentiment, one has to understand the “Century of Humiliation” narrative that has become a cornerstone of China’s national identity. The narrative goes like this: China was once a great world power and glorious peace-loving civilization, until foreign aggressors in Europe, the United States, and Japan—starting with the British and the First Opium War in 1839—brought the country to its knees through a century of brutal conquest and forced territorial concessions.

Though a similar “national humiliation” grievance existed under China’s Kuomintang government in the 1920s and 1930s, it was abandoned by Mao Zedong following his assumption of power in 1949 in favor of a story line that stressed socialist triumphalism and proletarian internationalism. But the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the domino collapse of communist states over the next few years illustrated that that approach had run out of steam, so the Communist Party shifted its focus back to a nationalistic victimhood narrative wherein it played the role of savior. According to this narrative, it wasn’t until the Japanese army was defeated in 1945 and the Communist Party prevailed in China’s civil war in 1949 that the country was set on a path toward national “rejuvenation.”