Opium Wars

Long before the imperialist West came to China, opium’s use in China had expanded from being “limited to religious or medical purposes” to slowly gaining enough widespread usage to be “made a taxable commodity”, says the book, The Opium Wars.

 

China was a country from whom the West bought things – silk, porcelain, and tea – but the West had nothing to sell that China cared about. This asymmetry in trade continued for centuries because the West had “discovered” the Americas and with it, a seemingly endless stream of gold and silver (theft and mining) that came back to Spain, and from Spain to the rest of Europe. It was this silver that was used to buy things from China. Eventually though, the Americas began to dry up and with it, so too did European ability to buy from China. The West tried again to find something they could sell to the Chinese:

“Finding nothing, their more creative minds decided to just invent one.”

 

Yes, that “creative” solution was to get China hooked to drugs (opium), thereby creating a market for something the West could then sell to China – opium. Back then, China restricted foreigners’ sales to happen through designated ports only. And even there, they had to operate via local agents. This arrangement inevitably ate into the profit margins of anyone trading with China.

 

Initially, the opium market wasn’t big enough for such restrictions to warrant a war by any European country. Instead, Western companies just got even more, er, creative. They bought a large number of old Chinese ships, and anchored them at sea in big groups – they weren’t meant to go anywhere. Western ships carrying the opium would dock with those fixed ships and offload their content onto these “floating warehouses”. Chinese smugglers would come to those anchored ships, buy the opium, and sell it on the mainland.

 

Why didn’t the Chinese authorities do anything? Well, their navy was built to fight pirates and smuggling on rivers, not to fight at sea. As the opium “trade” grew unabated, more and more Western countries jumped in. The huge supply drove down prices, which in turn increased its affordability, making it “even more accessible to the lower classes of China”. A vicious cycle had been set off.

 

As the levels of addition in China started to rise, one would expect the Chinese rulers to finally do something about it. Unfortunately, this coincided with a period when local rebellions began to rise against the Qing monarchy. This put a “huge strain on China’s manpower and treasury” which focussed on internal strife over combating the growing opium crisis.

 

What followed is a long series of wars (the so called Opium Wars), each one resulting in Western victories, punishing treaties, the handing over of Hong Kong and Macau to European powers, the forced opening up of more and more parts of the country to Western traders and missionaries, and ultimately the forced legalization of opium in China.

 

This whole chain of events helped me understand why China hates the West so much more than other colonies like say, India and Africa. The latter were looted, but that was par for the course of how things were back then. But what the West did in China was to forcibly create a market of drug addicts on a massive scale. No country can ever hope to make progress if people are hooked to drugs. And China holds the West responsible for all those decades of lost time even today…