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Comment by burpsnard | Hacker News Reader

IIRC the chinese were exporting tea, oranges and porcelain to Europe in exchange for silver.

Early/mid 19C, with metal-backed currencies, as most of the circulating Silver had ended up there, it was deemed necessary to reverse that flow.

The Opium wars began, to get all the silver back.

I think westerners underappreciate the salience of these events in the chinese worldview.

And which Colony was established by treaty with the chinese defeat ?

Hong Kong.

https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/trading/story/trade/4...

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I agree that the story is totally different from the other end, and that non-trade things like slavery, war, colonisations and other atrocities committed by the empires and companies preceding them are salient.

I was simply commenting on the trade. What made them different was, in some sense, macroeconomic. By bringing goods home, these trade empires were generating feedback loops. Gold wealth (or share wealth, as is relevant in this context) was spent on goods, in a process that created more of it... Not more of it in the world, necessarily. More of it in London and Amsterdam.

As you say, europe had been importing asian luxury goods since forever. The trade routes were old before Rome was young, as they say.

At the end there, are you implying something salient about the current HK crisis?

A little context on silver: silver is the defacto main currency in China at the time (for at least 1500 years). So for the Chinese perspective, they are really selling tea for "money".

Hongkong, Taiwan, extreme North East and West, Tianjin, Dalian, Shanghai, Xiamen, area bordering Vietnam, probably some more I forget.

The period of the opium wars saw China stripped piece by piece and, indeed, that is having consequences to this day.

The aftermath of WW2 had far bigger consequences. The US was willing to let the Republic of China be the hegemon of East Asia like in the old days in return for an ally against the USSR. But when communist China won the civil war the US began supporting China's old tributaries Japan and Korea against it and kept the RoC alive on Taiwan. That whole interplay between the PRC and the US over the hegemony of East Asia is the crux of most of the issues in that region today.

When it comes to China I don't think that the aftermath of WWII are key.

The events within China were ongoing and had their roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, as per previous comments, and they are still ongoing.

Japan had invaded in earnest in 1937. That in itself was a consequence of what had been going on for more than a century in both Japan and China. WWII's impact is that suddenly the US was happy to help the RoC and even the communists against Japan. The US did shorten the Japanese invasion of China but I don't think Japan could have prevailed anyway because they were to swallow too much.

Then the US supported Korea and Japan in the aftermath of WWII in their global play against communism and the USSR but that did not have much impact on China.

China is the natural and historical super-power in (East) Asia and there is nothing the US can do for or against that on any relevant historical timescale.

What WWII did is making the US the main power in East Asia. That's neo-imperialism, really, and again linked to the temporary weakness of China. This can be useful for some countries in order to balance Chinese influence but, again, in the long run the overwhelming power will remain China. However one looks at it a 300 million people country on the other side of the world cannot outdo a 1.4 billion country next door in the long run.

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Course (I am still seeking an explanation for Japan's signing of the Plaza Accord that doesn't rely on calling in favours from the LDP. Anybody have one?)

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