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Comment by bshepard | Hacker News Reader

It is important to stress that China was ruled, at the time, by a government that was widely seen as "Nonchinese" -- this sense of external rule surely had a great deal to do with the emergence of mass addiction, as the Ching state that imposed the laws had serious legitimacy issues (and would collapse less than a century later.)

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The Manchu were not Han, but they were Chinese in a broader sense: they've lived for centuries in what is now considered Chinese territory, and by the 19th century they were already assimilated to such an extent that most Manchus spoke Chinese, not Manchu. Today there are still ~10 million Manchus in China, but virtually none speak the language anymore. (Admittedly this is in part because in the early days of Communist China it was not a great idea to show any traces of potentially reactionary Manchu heritage.)

Manchu "foreignness" was a major contributor to the Taiping Rebellion, a war sufficient to kill something like 30 million people -- many more than were killed even in WW1. It was a big deal.

To be frank, it's clear the Brits were the baddies here. They used guns to force a state that had banned terrible drugs to unban it.

Whether that state was totally nice or democratic or "Chinese" or whatever value you cherish, is besides the point. It does not legitimize any of what GB did during either Opium War, and therefore I disagree that it's "important to stress".

Some people think banning drugs is a bad idea, and that it's better to allow free trade.

A good response to that would be, "yeah, but it was for the Chinese to make their minds up about that, not the British!"

And a good response to that might be: "when you say the Chinese made their minds up, are you talking about a democratic process?"

>And a good response to that might be: "when you say the Chinese made their minds up, are you talking about a democratic process?"

It was the early 19th century. You could count the number of democratic countries on one hand. (If you counted countries where only men could vote)

Really zero hands; there was nowhere in 1839 that would be considered democratic by modern standards (no-one even had universal male suffrage at that point, never mind universal suffrage).

Right. But this renders moot the whole question of force and consent here. One undemocratic government did something to another undemocratic government. Or at least, if you think democracy is the sole source of legitimacy, that's what happens. I think there are other possible stories that could be told.

Neither side of this battle thought that allowing 100% unfettered trade in the terrorities they controlled was a good thing. This wasn't some ideological war by starry eyed libertarians.

19th century Britain is probably as close to "starry-eyed libertarianism" as has ever been seen before or since. They repealed the Corn Laws.

Eh. China had a number of "foreign", or certainly non-Han, dynasties. I'd suggest that the Qing-era opium problem had more to do with the world's pre-eminent nation acting as a sort of state drug cartel, to be honest.

How was it nonchinese?

The Qing were originally Manchu invaders. And yes, the Qing empire is still viewed by many in China to be illegitimate.

Which is what I find strange about the Century of Humiliation. Why is China losing a minor war that killed a couple thousand Chinese soldiers a great humiliation while getting outright conquered at least twice (once by the Mongols and once by the Manchu) isn't?

Tens of millions of Chinese died during the Manchu invasion of China. The Qing forced every Han Chinese male to shave their forehead and wear a queue on the threat of death, but that's apparently not humiliating.

Following the Opium Wars and other conflicts in the 19th century China actually lost territory and sovereignty in part of its own territory in the heart of China. Suddenly areas of Beijing are controlled by Europeans, and so are many Treaty Ports" along the coast.

When the Mongols and Manchu conquered the Chinese "Crown" it was more of a change of dynasty and they they effectively became Chinese. Mongolia was part of the Chinese empire until its fall in 1912, for instance.

Mongol or Manchu brings more lands to them, and eventually they (Han Chinese) assimilate the invaders. The English took land and the Chinese haven't able to reverence yet. Not to mention this event happened more recently.

I think this is the main thing. While the Mongols and the Manchus defeated China militarily, they were assimilated culturally within a few generations. Even before the Manchu invasion began, the Manchu leaders were larping as Chinese rulers. Chinese culture always won.

But in England and the West in general, China found an adversary that could defeat them militarily, and which had no interest in adopting their culture or civilization. Quite the contrary, the new foreign invaders were disrepectful of Chinese culture in a way that was new and shocking.

It's Chinese, but non-Han.

https://www.history.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Evelyn-Rawsk... Professor Evelyn Rawski of U of Pittsburg explained that the last Chinese dynasty was the Qing who were ethnically Manchu. They saw themselves as ruling five different peoples: Han China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Uighurs, and Tibet. She argues that sinicization is a modern invention.

Quotes from the PDF "What is at issue is not the magnitude of Qing achievement, but Ho's statement that "the key to its [Qing] success was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization". The new scholarship suggests just the opposite: the key to Qing success, at least in terms of empire-building, lay in its ability to use its cultural links with the non-Han peoples of Inner Asia and to differentiate the administration of the non-Han regions from the administration of the former Ming provinces."

""Sinicization" -- the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into Chinese culture -- is a twentieth century Han nationalist interpretation of China's past."

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