Writing Homework Help

Drug Wars and Wars on Drugs (Chinese Opium and British Trade)

Read the Global Connections “Opium and the West in China” (Overview section). 

What did Lin Zexu write to Queen Victoria of the British Empire? Which arguments did Lin use in his bid to get the British in ending this practice? Did they prove effective? Why (not)? 

To bring the discussion locally: do you know of a monument to Lin Zexu in New York City? Please google image it and tell us where it is. Let’s see who’ll post it first!

For a short overview Opium War Explained (13 min): https://youtu.be/nDwoBC_DtGc (Links to an external site.)

Text and Images for Discussion (use questions from below as applicable to our discussion question):

China, with its highly structured society, strong central government, and large armed forces, had long kept Westerners at arm’s length. Although the Chinese admitted some European traders and Christian missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they closed their doors rather tightly thereafter. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, China ranked among the world’s most prosperous and powerful societies. The Chinese still considered their huge, populous country the center of civilization surrounded by lesser civilizations. As late as 1793, China’s emperor could easily dismiss a proposed trade agreement with Britain: “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in abundance. We have no need of barbarian products.”

However, during the nineteenth century, population explosion, famine, rebellions, and poor leadership under the declining Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty weakened the ancient civilization. The country became a power vacuum that proved all too tempting to the Western powers. Armed with their guns and goods, Westerners streamed into China.

Opium Wars

First, the British forced themselves on the Chinese. During the 1830s, Britain began trading Indian opium in China for tea, silver, silk, and other products. Soon opium became one of Britain’s most important commodities (see Global Connections). Chinese officials tried to stop the economic drain, addiction, and criminal activities stemming from the opium trade by making the drug illegal. As the Chinese official in charge exclaimed to the British, “You do not wish opium to harm your own country, but you choose to bring that harm to other countries such as China. Why?” In response, Britain sent gunboats and troops armed with modern weapons. They easily defeated the Chinese in a series of clashes known as the Opium Wars. By the terms of the Treaty of Nanking (1842), which ended the conflict, the Chinese ceded Hong Kong to the British, opened several tariff-free ports to foreign trade, exempted foreigners from Chinese law, and paid Britain a large indemnity.

Taiping RebellionAt mid-century, disaster struck. China suffered a devastating civil war—the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). Subsequent rebellions extended the internal conflict another ten years. In the end, these wars took perhaps fifty million lives, and the famines that followed cost the lives of millions more. All this strife weakened the Qing dynasty and revealed the government’s inability to control a nation threatened by external enemies and internal upheaval.

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GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

Opium and the West in China

Opium, a narcotic derived from the opium poppy, was known and used—especially for medical purposes—in China for centuries. However, not until the nineteenth century did its use become so widespread that millions of Chinese became addicted to the drug. The West was not free from opium, either, for Europeans and Americans increasingly resorted to opium-based products such as morphine and laudanum to calm their nerves, ease aches and pains, and control their noisy children. During the nineteenth century, most of China’s opium supply was imported by British merchants from colonial holdings in India.

Chinese officials made only halfhearted attempts to restrict the opium trade until 1838, when Emperor Daoguang finally banned importation of the drug. In 1839, an imperial official, Lin Zexu, wrote a letter to Britain’s Queen Victoria complaining about the destructive impact of opium on China. “Unscrupulous” merchants, Lin wrote, were “so obsessed with material gain that they have no concern whatever for the harm they can cause to others.” These merchants had flooded China with so much opium “that this poison has spread far and wide in all the provinces.” Lin asked the queen to stop the trade and “destroy and plow under all of these opium plants.” When Lin began confiscating and destroying imported opium, the British responded with force. As one of China’s discouraged commissioners reported, “The ships of the barbarians are sturdy and their cannons fierce.” By 1842, British firepower had overwhelmed the Chinese, and the Treaty of Nanjing legalized the opium trade and granted concessions to Britain and other Western powers.

The struggle against the British over opium was only the beginning of the wars and other upheavals China suffered during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Internal problems also increasingly plagued the vast country, weakening the government’s ability to resist the West. In 1852, Zeng Guofan, a perceptive scholar and high official in Emperor Xianfeng’s government, commented on the situation. Taxes, Zeng claimed, were overwhelming the people. Therefore, “people are complaining and angry, and often the resistance to tax payment bursts forth and mushrooms into full-fledged riot.” More and more impoverished people were resorting to banditry to survive. Yet attempts to stop the lawlessness were useless because governmental soldiers “have always been in collusion with the bandits,” Zeng maintained, and would soon release the bandits “in return for a handsome bribe.” Moreover, people had lost faith in the justice system because so many “innocent men are condemned” and the people “[are unable] to have a wrong redressed.” The next year, a series of disastrous uprisings struck China, the worst of which came with the Taiping Rebellion. Over the following ten years, the conflicts devastated large parts of the country. While the government eventually crushed the rebels, the country soon began losing lands and control to imperial powers.

Meanwhile, the destructive consequences of the opium trade mounted. Isabella Bird Bishop, a British traveler in China during the 1890s, reported on the situation. In addition to noting the continuing importation of opium into China by the British, Bishop observed that “the area devoted to the [opium-producing] poppy in Sze Chuan [province] is enormous.” Moreover, its culture was “encroaching on the rice and arable lands” so much that “there was no longer a margin left on which to feed the population in years of a poor harvest.” Even though the Chinese regarded the opium habit as a disease, Bishop continued, in that province “opium houses are as common as gin shops in our London slums.” In the large cities of that province, she noted, 80 percent of men and 40 percent of women were opium smokers. “It is obvious,” she concluded, “that opium has come to stay.”

To other observers throughout China and the West, it seemed equally clear that China was caught in the tightening grip of Western and Japanese imperialists as well as a powerful and addictive narcotic.

Making Connections

1. How did Chinese officials try to restrict the opium trade?
2. What do you think of the British response?

In the years that followed, China fought a series of wars against foreigners. It lost them all, and each defeat chipped away at its sovereignty and racked up yet more indemnities. The Western powers grabbed up spheres of influence and semi-independent treaty ports where all foreigners were exempt from Chinese jurisdiction. In addition, they built railroads to penetrate farther into China’s heartland. As shown on Map 20.5, they also took lands on the huge country’s periphery. By all these means, the French and British added to their possessions in south Asia, Russia gained territory in the north, and Japan snapped up Korea and Taiwan in the east.

The Philippines

The United States joined in the frenzy, grabbing the Philippine Islands after a war with Spain in 1898 and a long struggle against Filipino nationalist forces that cost the lives of perhaps 200,000 Filipinos. President William McKinley explained that the United States had the duty “to educate the Filipinos and uplift and Christianize them.” To protect its commercial interests in Asia, the United States called for an “Open Door” policy that would avoid further territorial annexations by the imperial powers. Rivalry among the great powers themselves, as much as Chinese resistance, saved China from complete loss of its independence.

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thinking about

GEOGRAPHY

MAP 20.5Imperialism in Asia, 1840–1914

This map shows the expansion of imperialism in Asia by the Western powers and Japan.

Explore the Map

1. Which powers had gained the largest territorial interests in Asia by 1914?
2. Where do you think conflicts were likely to break out among Russia, Britain, and Japan? Why?

Boxer RebellionMeanwhile, Chinese nationalism rose in response to foreign aggression. In 1899–1900, the Boxer Rebellion, a serious uprising against Western influences, erupted. Furious at those who had betrayed Chinese religion and customs, the Boxers, a secret organization that believed in the spiritual power of the martial arts, killed thousands of Chinese Christians and a number of foreigners—all with the encouragement of China’s dowager empress. Figure 20.9, a painting by American artist John Clymer, depicts a battle between the Boxers— in the center, with swords and spears—and U.S. marines—in the lower right, with Modern machine guns, rifles with bayonets, and revolvers. The Boxers, represented as wild and bloodthirsty, seem to burst out of the heavily populated Chinese society, while the steadfast U.S. Marines fire from the outside into that society. Combined forces from the imperial powers brutally suppressed this nationalist movement and forced China to pay large indemnities.

FIGURE 20.9

John Clymer, The Boxer Rebellion, 1900 This dramatic painting shows U.S. Marines firing on the Boxers, who in 1899 staged a rebellion against foreign influence in China.

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Even propped up by imperial powers, the corrupt Chinese central government could not last. In 1911, reformers led by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), a Western-educated doctor, launched a revolution aimed at freeing China from foreign exploitation and modernizing its society. Rebellions swept most of China and pushed the corrupt, inept, disintegrating dynasty to its final collapse. Sun proclaimed a republic, but the power soon dispersed among imperial generals, who became warlords. China’s struggles to cope with the encroaching world and its internal problems were far from over.

Sherman, Dennis. The West in the World, Combined Volume, Edition 5, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2018, 618-621.

d9 what are the Congolese instructions

What are the Congolese Ghosts of the Belgian King Leopold II? Who discovered them? How did the world hear about them? What happened next – to the king and to the ‘ghosts’? What are the repercussions? Have such and similar practices ended?

View the YouTube video (23:07) by Margi Films – King Leopold’s Ghost: https://youtu.be/AsSzy4SPu_E

and view these alternate videos: King Leopold’s Ghost movie trailer (5 min): https://youtu.be/-oxzQ1M2Ymg