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What incident are you thinking of, exactly? I can't recall of any incident where they've been in an actual position to react to said national humiliations, though that might be due to alot of my focus on China being more historical than present day.
The period from the first Opium War to the eventual reunification of the Chinese mainland at the end of the Civil War lasted about a hundred years, hence the Chinese Communist narrative regarding "the century of humiliation", the main consequence of said humiliation being that the regime that lost legitimacy cannot reunite the country and thus needs to be replaced by another.
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Broadly historically speaking? The Opium Wars left a century+ long impact on the national pysche. Even farther back, the Mongolian invasion was a huge deal. One they ended up (partially) whitewashing into a "Yuan Dynasty" as if it were just a normal thing. More recently? Online Chinese hypernationalist netizens have reacted very harshly to a wide range of perceived insults abroad. Sometimes encouraged by the government, but lately they have had to be restrained in some cases. There are a ton of media examples from the last 10 years.
Edit: and yes, as magicmushrooms said, humiliation implies national weakness which implies governmental weakness, and would indeed threaten the CCP's claim to legitimacy, crazy as it might sound to us here. That's partly why the "how" matters, because some resolutions can be "spun" better than others. Outright military defeat? Yikes. Collapse of the government is just as likely and scary as a vow of revenge, Versailles style.
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@EverythingIsFine may be referring to the idea of the Mandate of Heaven - that the Chinese tend to violently chuck out governments that are seen to have failed. If the CPC were forced to relinquish its claim to Taiwan as part of a peace deal, it would have a hard time holding on to power. This potentially means loose nukes.
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