The Opium Wars Still Shape China’s View of the West
economist.com
economist.com
It is significant because this aspect of the west has not changed at all. Just look how our historians are happy to attribute such acts to countries(!???) Until we start attributing invasions to the people who wanted them, those who organized them and those who profited from them this wont change.
Its at best inaccurate to state Britain wanted the war, Britain organized it and Britain profited. At worst it is the very formula to keep at it.
It's not an attitude I've come across before—attributing these actions to individuals rather than nations. It's certainly an interesting one.
This family is at the top of the opiate pyramid.
I was told he was a hospital administrator. But actually he was just a drug pusher. Which makes so much more sense now looking back at the level of wealth.
Drugs are one of the principle means of social control used by the power elite to keep society malleable and repressed - truly. Both illegal - and legal - drugs have their covert uses in this regard.
Since we're at it, can we stop this China vs West thingy, as if the world was binary, as if the only relevant comparison was between those two? I dunno what you mean by West, but you're probably thinking of anglo-saxon countries, in particular the UK and the USA. What you're talking about doesn't apply to other countries that would qualify as western (e.g. Greece, Slovenia, Portugal, maybe some parts of Latinamerica). Besides, most of the world isn't either China (or East Asia if you will) or the West (What's India, Bangladesh, Russia, Africa, etc?). Let's please just stop, the world has more shades than that :-)
To answer your question - main lobbyst behind first Opium War was Scottish opium trader James Matheson [2]. The fortune he had made on selling opium to China had been invested in Rio Tinto[3] - mining company that survived till today.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12147002-the-opium-war
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Matheson
[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Matheson_(industrialist...
The opium wars were about more than enriching 5ish rich dudes. It was about transferring a significant amount of wealth from china to the west ( primarily britain and the US ).
The british and particularly the US industrial revolution was funded by capital extracted from china. The opium wars and the aftermath is easily the greatest theft in human history. It completely changed the west and gave the west a significant leg up vis a vis china and the east. And it set china back 150 years. Nearly 200 years on, china still hasn't recovered from it.
> Just look how our historians are happy to attribute such acts to countries(!???)
All wars are fought for wealth. But the wealthy don't hire historians to out them. Historians are hired to spin a fable. It's why every nations histories of the same event are so different. Historians of each country have to spin a tale that is suitable and furthers the interests of their elites.
It's why we are told that the american revolution was about "freedom and liberty" when it was about our desire to steal more native land. It's why everything from the civil war to ww2 to vietnam are spun into some fairy tale about slavery, nazism or the domino theory when those wars were solely about one thing - wealth.
If you want to study real history, you have to understand who stands to gain and who stands to lose.
Given that the film is made in China and received state support, it is not an accident.
By the way the story of Baghdadi Jew, David Sassoon and his rise in prominence as a result of profiting from the Opium War is quite interesting in itself.
For those eras, Once Upon a Time in China is pretty iconic to me.
It may be news to some millennials in the tech industry, but the past isn't prologue. It isn't even past.
[1] - http://attic.areavoices.com/2011/03/01/listen-to-a-1954-inte...
This whole affair would were it not for nukes preventing it, shape up to be just another Germany beating europe to pulp yelling "remember Versailles" in a asian setting.
The message is more along the line of "weak countries will be defeated", so don't be weak, rather than incite hatred toward Britain.
The so-called Freedom was just bullshit, it only profits, that drive the war.
And I think the western world just never really understand the Chinese people's way of thinking, nor do they care.And that's how this article comes out.
Even national chains, until very recently, didnt accept credit cards.
Some still don't and don't plan to.
Why would one want to let a large part of the economy run through oligopolistic credit card providers, just to let them skim some 2% or 3% off it? It's absurd, if you think about it.
Of course in the UK fees have been "banned" a few weeks ago, which means everybody will get charged the fees via price increases, effectively subsidizing card users.
My point is that both cash and modern cashless payment systems (debit/cash cards) are way better than oligopolistic credit cards with their gaudy marketing and high fees.
> Sparkasse for some reason gave me a MasterCard that had it's own account, so I had to transfer money from the checking account to the card if I wanted to use it.
That's afaik normal for Germany, prepaid CC are probably the only CC you gonna get without a girokonto.
Absolutely!
1. It's quite possible that Germans still have an aversion to inflation due to the 1920's episode of hyperinflation in the Weimarer Republik. My grandmother often spoke of it, she had vivid memories of it, as she was selling groceries in the local "Konsum", had to put up new price tags every hour, and saw the suffering of everyone (including her own family). She liked to recount how her "Volksschule" teacher (in a poor neighbourhood) taught them hundreds and thousands, and then briefly mentioned millions and billions, but glossed over them saying "You'll never have to use them anyway."
(Thus, there are people alive, if I may make that claim for myself, that have heard (visceral) first-hand reports of it.)
2. There is this beautiful paper demonstrating that people have more trust in government and bureaucracy in areas that were part of the (long defunct) Habsburger Empire, even if they (and their counterparts on the other side of the old border) have now lived a century in the same modern country.
"The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy"
3.
> > It's just not true and likely being written by someone who has never asked a single german/chinese.
Many Germans or Chinese have some sort of consciousness of their history; maybe you haven't asked them.
4. And, by the way, you're also formed by your history (via the culture surrounding you) if you don't consciously notice it. Your statement above is as naive as that of people that claim not to be influenced by advertisement, say, or their biological roots, just because they don't notice it.
EDIT: typo
And, for example, since you mention Croatia, in the middle of beautiful Split on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic sea, there's the palace of Roman emperor Diocletian, then Fort Gripe built during the Venetian era to defend against Ottoman attacks, the National Theatre built during the Habsburg era, etc.
Beautiful Dubrovnic three hours down the coast has Byzantine origins (literally), suffered artillery attacks as recently as 1991, and now is a location for the filming of Game of Thrones (King's Land or so).
Of course people have some awareness of the history, they're living in it!
But apart from that, it is more a psychological thing, I guess. Cash you can hold in your hands, feels more safe than just some plastic card. So it is more about feeling, than real security I think.
But there is also the privacy issue. Paying with cash is anonymous. This is still a big thing and maybe the more important factor why cash is more important in germany ...
Is there a name for this fallacy? It seems to come up a lot. I.e., when someone takes an action that has enormous and predictable negative effects for someone else and a comparatively tiny positive effect for themselves, they then argue along the lines that "I was motivated by my gain, not by your loss (even though I knew it would result from my action), so you have no right to complain!"
In this case, it can be both a "deliberate conspiracy" and a "pragmatic response". They deliberately conspired to hurt the Chinese for profit, judging their suffering to be a less important consideration than their own profits.
If no one comes up with anything let’s call it “omelette making”.
“A false dilemma is a type of informal fallacy in which something is falsely claimed to be an "either/or" situation, when in fact there is at least one additional option”
She makes a good point about the difference between banal evil born from apathy and active evil born from hate. The difference is important not because one is morally better than the other, but because the strategy to prevent them is different in each case.
Active hateful evil is relatively easy to prevent, just don't be a dick. But preventing the banal apathetic kind takes more active effort.
This type of nonsense is embedded in English accounts of the British Empire. Variants of the “white man’s burden” and the sacred principles of the market can be spun in all sorts of interesting ways.
The most galling example of this that I’m familiar with is the Irish famine. Millions died of starvation in the midst of a record bumper crop for export. The British justification for deliberate inaction was and for many still is a mixture of denial, high minded debate about the role of government, and a deep concern for keeping Irish wretches out of a cycle of dependency.
Never mind that a third of the population in some areas of India was literally starved to death to grow that exact, or what it did to China, or how it was the foundation of the British empire.
"Poppies have long been used as a symbol of sleep, peace, and death: Sleep because the opium extracted from them is a sedative, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular. In Greek and Roman myths, poppies were used as offerings to the dead. Poppies used as emblems on tombstones symbolize eternal sleep. This symbolism was evoked in the children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which a magical poppy field threatened to make the protagonists sleep forever. A second interpretation of poppies in Classical mythology is that the bright scarlet color signifies a promise of resurrection after death."
"The remembrance poppy was inspired by the World War I poem "In Flanders Fields". Its opening lines refer to the many poppies that were the first flowers to grow in the churned-up earth of soldiers' graves in Flanders, a region of Belgium."
Belgium still keeps statues of King Leopold, Spain keeps statues of Cortez and Pisarro, Portugal of Vasco da Gama, the US is only now arguing about the statues for Confederate soldiers; Italy, Poland and France never did a real "mea culpa" on how they actually helped and collaborated with the Nazis, Brazil and most of Latin America keep ignoring the ongoing extermination of their natives, most Japanese try to avoid knowing what their country did in Manchuria during WWII, Turkey keeps denying the Armenian genocide,...
Or a nation might face up to a big shame as cover so they can nurture many "little shames", like modern Germany's treatment of its Turk residents.
I respectfully disagree. I've always thought of Dutchies as open-minded but I remember reading a plaque at the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) that left my jaw on the floor by being overly euphemistic. It was an exhibit of about 2-dozen weapons symbolically surrendered by Indonesian leaders; the text was worded as if it was a voluntary gift of their own volution. I thought a little self-honesty would go a long way.
The British government engaged in many kinds of relief effort. They bought food from America to import it, albeit screwed it up because Ireland didn't have sufficiently advanced mills to process the imported grain. They repealed import tariffs (the Corn Laws). Large public works programmes were created to employ the devastated farmers. This was all made more complicated by an Irish attitude that to ask for charity from the English was weakness and should never be done:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Charity
William Smith O'Brien—speaking on the subject of charity in a speech to the Repeal Association in February 1845—applauded the fact that the universal sentiment on the subject of charity was that they would accept no English charity.
Mitchel wrote in his The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), on the same subject, that no one from Ireland ever asked for charity during this period, and that it was England who sought charity on Ireland's behalf, and, having received it, was also responsible for administering it.
Despite this large sums were donated by the English through private charities anyway.
What you're referring to is a later stage of the famine whereby a new Whig government came into power, and it did indeed feel that the market should be left to sort things out. So it stopped intervening against food exports, believing that would make things worse instead of better (i.e. people who were successfully growing food despite the blight would have to sell it below cost and would go bankrupt). Even so, it still organised a public jobs programme so huge it became impossible to administer (over 500,000 people employed).
That state lasted all of six months before the government of the day realised it had failed and changed tack again, switching to a mix of direct relief through soup kitchens and the like.
So your claim that there was "deliberate inaction" is hardly true. There was lots of action at all times and the debate focuses on to what extent the action was incompetent or not.
Food exports from poor countries are a tricky subject even today. African countries export food to Europe and would export far more if it weren't for the CAP, even though Africa has famines, hunger and disease. Should they be prevented from doing so, or will trade enrich them and ultimately end their poverty?
On one hand that's irrelevant, and I think that's the point you're making: that war was the first nail in the coffin (which had been a-building for over a century) for the Qing dynasty, and regardless of the cause that was the action's effect.
However if you agree with her analysis there are another couple of important lessons: not everything requires a conspiracy (in fact the whole British Empire has been described as being "created in a fit of absent-mindedness") -- in other words the collective local actions of many can have a malign global effect. This should influence any of us when designing systems: do they misuse user data? Exploit or make our customers susceptible to attack? This very issue comes up in another HN submission today, on the privacy implications of self-driving cars.
And her analysis points out another important feature: though not everything requires a conspiracy, adding one post facto can be very useful. Consider both sides' propaganda battle after Al Qaida attacked NY&DC: both benefited (at least in the short term) by portraying it as a massive clash of cilizations rather as a publicity stunt by a bunch of asshole gangsters. The same was true by using the term "opium war" and its continued value today on the Chinese side.
[italics mine] How much did the British know about the addictive effects of opium? This seems like a rather crucial part of the story. Several decades after the Opium War, opium became popular in Europe and led to various social maladies, which culminated in its ban and the initiation of the drug wars. It seems to me that if the British had really known how destructive opium is, they would have banned it at home during the war.
>The opium trade incurred intense enmity from the later British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.[65] As a member of Parliament, Gladstone called it "most infamous and atrocious" referring to the opium trade between China and British India in particular.[66] Gladstone was fiercely against both of the Opium Wars Britain waged in China in the First Opium War initiated in 1840 and the Second Opium War initiated in 1857, denounced British violence against Chinese, and was ardently opposed to the British trade in opium to China.[67] Gladstone lambasted it as "Palmerston's Opium War" and said that he felt "in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China" in May 1840.[68] A famous speech was made by Gladstone in Parliament against the First Opium War.[69][70] Gladstone criticized it as "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace".[71] His hostility to opium stemmed from the effects of opium brought upon his sister Helen.[72] Due to the First Opium war brought on by Palmerston, there was initial reluctance to join the government of Peel on part of Gladstone before 1841.
It's easy in hindsight to suggest that the British should have listened to Mr. Gladstone, but who can say for themselves that they certainly would have, in a time and place when almost nobody knew anything about opium?
Wait, what?
The Chinese weren't entirely the victims?
(Just seems a little out of place, given the rest of the article.)
Lord Elgin ordered the burning as vengeance for it.
Hopefully that colours the decisions made to rebalance the trade system.
because there are long list of high tech & military stuff that China is simply not allowed to buy. it is so bad to the extent that Chinese are not allowed to buy Intel Phi processors which many of your local computer shops allow you to make orders.
Surely Chinese are interesting in buying America's advanced jet fighters, missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers, satellites etc. On the non-military side, how about super computers, space techs, laser, semiconductor techs, optical fiber, high end composite materials. EU has very similar laws & policies, nothing really different from the US.
China's interested in buying precisely one round of each thing. And thereafter replacing it with their own. That's not a criticism, it's a fact of life in dealing with China. They have zero interest in being dependent on any outside nation more than absolutely necessary.
The things you list, wouldn't even remotely dent the trade deficits China rings up. You're talking about $5 to $6 trillion per decade with the US and EU combined.
Intel processors et al. are not going to fix that. There's absolutely nothing that can plug a $600 billion per year hole with China (US+EU), realistically. Energy exports (in the case of the US) is the only thing that could dent it. The solution is to move more manufacturing away from China and rebalance that large concentrated deficit with other nations in a distributed manner, and to make more things domestically. That will happen naturally as China's wages & costs continue to rise.
Sometime later, a Chinese company named Hero took over the plant and machinery and started making their own pens, including knock-offs of the "51" such as the Hero 616 and 100, and leading to a fair sized industry of Chinese fountain pens, many of which are very cheap to purchase apparently due to export subsidies by the Chinese government.
When living in Hong Kong in the years running up to the handover in 97 the Chinese government used the Opium Wars as an excuse to accuse the British of all sorts of bizzare things during the negotiations. My favorite was calling the governor Chris Patten the "son of a running dog" which has a bit more bite in Chinese. A lot of the knashing of teeth on the Chinese side of the table was repeatedly justified by the dastardly deeds of the British in the Opium Wars to a country that was then still under the rule of an Emperor, which later turned into a corrupt republic and then overthrown again by the Communists and now seems to have been overthrown by the combined forces of Louis Vuitton, Rolex and Channel.
Selectively telling the truth and always weirdly emphasis on Chinese government makes me feel sick after reading. I guess that's the reason I stopped its subscription long time ago.
Today the have the idea of exporting everything to the world and buy nothing besides a few raw materials, creating a giant trade deficit. Let's see how it ends.
How does knowing roughly 100 Chinese people from different social levels, tiers, geographic locations, backgrounds compare to reading an article of foreign origin, though?
The article is not wrong. Opium war, in the official narrative of recent Chinese history, is phrased as "the start of a hundred years of humiliation of China". It is heavily focused event in middle school history class. It definitely still shapes China in a lot of way, like the strictest drug prohibition may be in the whole world.
In every day communication, it might not be significant, but it does have a greater effect on a subconscious level, serving as foundation for regular Chinese folk to perceive the relationship with West in general, which is centered with invasion, humiliation, lose of sovereignty and the shame of inferiority.
Russia has similar grievances against the West that are promoted on TV, and people care strongly about them as a result. In the early 90s, when the injuries were fresh, the TV deemphasized them and fewer people cared.
I've come to believe that when a government makes its citizens care about foreign policy, that's usually a distraction from domestic problems. In Russia's case it's corruption. Not sure about China.
The opium wars are a very big part of Chinese history and current culture I don’t know who do you know In China but a few elites educated in the West are not a good sample.
Look at the average inner city population in tier 1-3 cities, look at the recent changes in the attitude towards foreigners in China this is definitely an existing issue.
Could you elaborate? As a foreigner in China, this seems pretty relevant.
But the Chinese don't blame the West for the decline of China and the fall of the empire. They blame the old corrupt elite. When Deng Xiaoping went abroad in the 80s he did his damnedest to appear cultured and in control.
Hmm, I hope that's true. But there's also the "century of humiliation" thing going on, which, to my mind, is an attempt to divert blame away from China itself (basically Mao -- the greatest enemy China ever had) toward outsiders. I don't know to what degree people are buying it.
Also, Chinese people don't see China as a single continuous entity like outsiders do, so most of the blame shifting doesn't have to go toward outside sources.
One of the largest banks in the world ( HSBC ) was created in hong kong to launder opium money from china. FDR's grandfather was Warren Delano, one of the largest opium dealers in china. The opium money is what funded our institution building in the 1800s. The universities, museums, hospitals, etc were built with money from our opium dealers in china.
http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2017/07/31/opium-boston-his...
It is odd how much time we spend on ww1 and ww2 when neither war altered the balance of power. The opium wars ended the "faux parity" that existed between china and the west and it catapulted the anglosphere to the top.
We live in an anglo world ( formerly british led but now US led ) because of the opium wars.
At least, neither is sufficient for now; I can image fully automated luxury space communism working, once AI is good enough.
Communism doesn’t simplify the human condition as much as it replaces it, the scary part of communism isn’t the economy but the eradication of the self in favor of a group identity.
Under communism there is no individual ownership and the state owns all of the means of production.
You may be confused because of all of the states where the main political party is called the Communist party, but those states do not self-identify as communist. They self-identify as socialist states that are in the process of transitioning to communism.
The “abolishment” of the state under communism does not do so in practice but rather in principle when everyone belongs to the state there is no state but it’s an empty and meaningless starlet.
Communism also outside of some fringe Marxism and anarcho communism is not anarchist at all but rather very centralized.
I think the only way that it could possibly work is with post-scarcity or at least much less scarcity that currently exists.
No real-world example is a coupout and a no true scottsman all in one.
The stateless part is not what you think it means it just means that the state is not a separate entity to the individual mostly because individualism does not exist the only thing that exists is the group. When everyone is equal then there are no senators or presidents or mayors but everything is still centralized so some governing body forms or it’s total anarchy.
But that doesn’t matter as long as not everyone is commmunist you would have a communist and a none communist state unless due to the authoritarian nature of communism the non communist group is annihilated.
If anything the core principals of communism are much more abhorrent than any implementation of it we had so far.
Ironically, the very criticism you have of communism is their criticism of the bourgeoisie.
Now, I think I should go read my copy of The Wealth of Nations for balance…
Impressive is that china at least kept- enforced by the layout of the country, a centralized state. At least it did not decay as much as the middle east or africa - after reaching peak people.
Have you for instance seen how Philipines and Turkey have moved away from a pro-western position?
Meanwhile the West long ago eradicated the kind of poverty that still persists in China. Is that to be credited to our system of government too?
In the span of about 12 years, China became the world's most indebted nation. They have to accumulate about $4 trillion in debt annually to add $600 to $700 billion in GDP expansion, of which 1/3 to 2/5 goes just to paying for new debt interest costs. That debt scenario keeps getting worse each year. Local government defaults are a common discussion now, it's assumed they're going to suffer vast bankruptcies all over the nation. In just the next five years, they'll increase their already shocking pile of debt by another ~75% or so, adding between $20 and $30 trillion in new debt.
> the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism
That's incorrect. The whole world, including China, has attempted to partially emulate the developed nations of the West. China has gradually abandoned Communism and shifted to a market based economy, as one example. Their former system failed entirely, their shift to market based systems is an obvious admission of that. That process continues. All the developed Western nations have far superior standards of living at the median than China. The top Western examples are four to five times higher than China, and that's before accounting for the near total dearth of human rights in China. That gap is even greater when it comes to the poor. In China ~250 million people are still living on $3 per day or less.
If you took a hard look at Chinese history, I think you’d find that there has never really been central control. Governors and bureaucrats of the various provinces and regions have long been able to defy directives from Beijing, Nanjing, or wherever else the dynastic capital happened to be at the time. The sheer size of China, and the dizzying differences in language and culture, made true central control a fantasy until 1949.
In a sense, maybe the greatest gift to the Communist Party was the outbreak of WW2 that set the stage for the subsequent civil war. Instead of dozens of regional warlords, you had a “clean” battle between two sides. When the Communists won, they finally assumed more or less total control of the country.
Contrary to there being some kind of group think that dooms China every century or so, the more proximate causes of political turmoil have been intense, irresolvable infighting that occurs contemporaneously with a natural disaster or foreign invasion.
I hadn't heard this before. From what I've heard, the Communists has to fight at least in two fronts: against the government as well as against Japan.
When you look at Nationalist efforts to secure the critical Burma Road into Burma and India, and the hundreds of thousands of casualties involved in fighting rearguard actions as civilians and governments fled inland, the casualty counts are not even close. Nationalist military fatalities are generally estimated by historians to outnumber Communist military fatalities by nearly an order of magnitude.
One of the reasons I wrote that WW2 set up the communists for a clean victory in the resumption of the civil war is that Japanese surrender left vast swaths of China under communist control, simply because there was not a nationalist presence in many of those areas. Hundreds of thousands of firearms, rounds of ammunition, and artillery pieces were surrendered by the Japanese to communist armies. As a result, the Communists were for the first time able to equip a large regular army, as opposed to fighting irregular war as guerrillas.
I highly recommend reading Forgotten Ally by Rana Mitter. This is maybe the best popular history of China in WW2.
P.s. I say this as the descendant of soldiers who fought on both sides of the civil war.
Ha ha, this is so funny. This might be the origin of Serbian saying, "God is too high, Russia too far, rely on yourself and your horse."
World was connected way before Internet.
Do you think "China" just shot up out of nowhere over the past 70 years because they had cheap labor? No. Their power could not have been created without the help of western nations. The most prolific mass murderer in the world, Mao Zedong, came out of Yale. Once he came to power, he had all sorts of help from non-Chinese.
The plot here is fairly simple and you can see it happening every day. China is the model for a new world government that will be implemented after the USA is wiped off the map. "Made in China" is the type of curse that the elite globalists who run things like to give people. They've been telling people what's going to happen for a long time and once it does happen, the people will get exactly what they paid for.
The plot here is fairly simple and you can see it
happening every day. China is the model for a new world
government that will be implemented after the USA is wiped
off the map. "Made in China" is the type of curse that the
elite globalists who run things like to give people.
Sources? Links?
If these are anecdotes, what exactly did they say or mean?
Regarding Maos time at Yale, you can read more about that here - http://www.mygen.com/users/ufo/Mao_was_a_Yale_Man.html
That source for Mao seems to be nearly exclusively drawing from seemingly unrelated dead third party sources. One of them is the Church of the Subgenius, a parody religion. And the only real link I can find them stating is that they were both in one of the most populous cities of China.
There is actually a mountain of evidence if you care to look. Without even looking at specific peoples actions or associations I know what is going on because of history and because of how obvious it is. There's always a group trying to rule the world. Heck Britain almost did it with fucking medieval technology!
China was definitely not built up solely from within. There are powerful non-Chinese globalists and banksters with strangleholds over many industries at work here. I mean, do you think Chinese farmers are putting this technological tyrannical monster of a government together? The Chinese people aren't doing this to themselves. They are loving it right now though because it's like 1950's USA there and people are getting relatively rich.
ADDENDUM: Anyway, these are not fun ideas to have rattling around in your head. I suggest not looking into it at all because there is absolutely nothing that you could possibly do about it if there's any truth here. The big take away that I got from my investigation is basically this: Live like there is no tomorrow and make sure you're doing what you want to be doing every day. Enjoy as much as possible! Let go of whatever bullshit that you can, because life is short.