by Stephen R. Platt
I keep hearing Sino pundits say that China is motivated to conquer the West with fentanyl and other devious methods of warfare in retaliation for the ‘humiliation’ they suffered due to opium and the Opium Wars. And I don’t buy that explanation one bit. They have always been into devious warfare and the humiliation story is simply propaganda of convenience and deception.
In many ways, the so-called ‘loss of face’ that is supposed to be part of Chinese culture is simply male ego not wanting to admit culpability and disastrous short-comings. Endemic, chronic corruption and abuse by a vast network of bullying bureaucrats had impoverished the people for centuries. When modernity came to China’s shores, China was in the grip a 1000-year tradition of China’s ruling caste of “emperors” living in absolute splendour. Modernity revealed a long chain of cause and effect and perilous weakness.
As for the Opium Wars, within China opium had been used since the 1200s by the royal courts and their massive retinues—each royal had hundred/thousands of slaves and eunichs and everyone used opium. Opium use and production continued right into the 20th century. In the 1930s, 40s, 50s, opium funded endless warring as Stalinist Communism gradually, over those decades, overcame the nation. Chairman Mao was the ultimate winner because (1) in the 40s he got into the opium production game which stuffed his coffers full of much-needed money and (2) he was the most devious and brutal of them all. Read Mao: the Unknown Story by Jung Chang, it’s >600 pages and a real eye-opener.
But back to reading notes from Platt’s Imperial Twilight and me looking for details that would contradict/complicate/disassemble that opium humiliation narrative.
Opium use in China was primarily a luxury of the wealthy and their huge retinue of eunuchs who served them.
Same old same old playbook we see everywhere else. The ruling class, contrary to their incessant claims, did not look after the people properly. The poverty class could not buy land, many were driven off the land and lived on river boats and eventually organized into a pirate class.
The White Lotus rebels on land were poor and desperate to overturn Peking rule. The war against them bankrupted the emperor whose “taxes” came from wealthy traders in the south, whose wealth came from trading tea primarily to the British, but other nations also. The Canton tea trade and the British East India Company were dominant in trade exports. Then came opium.
Steady but small market for opium within China which was not profitable, compared to the Canton tea trade. Though opium was illegal, a rogue commerce was well established.
“Opium by the early 19th century had been long established as a high-end luxury good and despite various edicts condemning it, there seemed from the outside to be no social stigma to its purchase or use.” (p.195)
Competition within India to grow poppies resulted in a glut of opium, which eventually drove prices down, making it less expensive to buy in China so people who weren’t wealthy began indulging in it. When East India Company lost its opium monopoly to independent poppy growers in India, the rate of opium use in China exploded.
Jardine, Matheson and Company (2 Scotsmen) endures to this day as a major multi-national conglomerate headquartered in HK with more than 44K employees.
Matheson imported a printing press to Canton in order to publish the Canton Register. Its purpose was to share shipping news and advocate for the doctrine of free trade.
Super interesting but hardly known Indian character in the opium trade: Jamsetjee Jeejeebuoy—rags to riches story, Bombay philanthropist.
Opium was forbidden but traders also knew it was welcome and trading in it carried almost no risk of punishment. Chinese government efforts to suppress the relatively open traffic were infrequent and half-hearted (205) because many officials were themselves opium users or otherwise involved. Nothing Peking did to rein in corruption worked, decade after decade, emperor after emperor. Chinese enforcement was not just ineffective but almost non-existent.
Dynasties, imperial families, all rotten. All hedonists. Poppies cultivated in the Tang dynasty in the 8thcentury. Chinese medical texts described opium as a medicinal. From 1730s to 1810 not a single case of clear-cut prosecution for opium offences in the Qing empire. Eunuch servants in emperor courts outnumbered the royal family 40 to 1 and they all smoked opium. Opium smoking in the general population spread easily enough.
When opium use went from ingesting to smoking it, that’s when opium became huge. “Imperial guards and government officials were using it. It was becoming socially respectable (225). Even Chinese scholars were opium addicted.
In 1820, a few 100s of one percent of the population were using. 5000 chests of opium brought in per year would supply 40K habitual users nation-wide.
“Against latter day nationalist claims that the British came and forced opium down the throats of helpless Chinese consumers, there was in fact a domestic opium production in China already in place to compete with the import market in Canton (especially in the empire’s western and south western provinces)”. (227)
Traders couldn’t even get into the country, all they could do was to carry their opium to China’s southern coast and sell it to the Chinese agents. Everything from there on into the Qing empire was entirely in Chinese hands.” (228)
One scholar, Bao Shichen, in early 1800s said, “By the time I was a young student, everything was falling apart. Bribery was pervasive and open, the administration was contaminated and vile, and people’s energy was taut like a spring, as if there might be rebellion.” (233)
Over several centuries, “conditions in China were getting worse. Successive dynasties rarely left China in a more solid position than they found it. Patronage, bribery, and embezzlement were the accepted norm among civil officials, especially in the lower orders.” (302)
Taiwan belonged to the Dutch who conquered the aborigines who were not Chinese. A massive influx of Chinese to Taiwan occurred when no good land was available in China.
Matheson pushed hard for war with China. Typical capitalist playbook: once big profits are being made, giving it up will not happen without a fight.
Two decades of dithering, China seemed paralyzed by its internal inertia, the severity of corruption, the size of the nation, but gradually found its footing and got tough. In 1839 the sh*t hit the fan.
The political machinations ground on, power plays, warring, the usual male pattern sociopathy. After a brief “war,” in which the Brits lived up to their moniker of “barbarians,” the Brits got a payment for their opium product that was destroyed and the right to set up residence on a then-empty island called Hong Kong.
Matheson funneled “the vast fortune from his China trade (opium included) back into real estate in Scotland; Matheson would die the 2nd-largest landowner in the entire UK.” (452)
“[Little is said] of the fact that so much of that ‘substantial good’ [Jeejeebuoy’s philanthropy] dispensed to such a ‘large portion of the human race’, was made possible by Jeejeebuoy’s sale, through Jardine and Matheson, of Indian opium to Chinese smugglers.” (433)
Some British Lords and other privileged politicos condemned slavery while fighting a war in support of opium traffickers. The toxic male brotherhood a.k.a. ‘capitalism’ always exists.
After the war, opium imports INCREASED. 1850s. Then, with legalization, the domestic production produced 10X more than imported quantities. “China wallowed in a quagmire of official corruption it could not escape.” (446)
**Opium money—through the fortunes of the Forbes brothers [ancestors of today’s Forbes magazine] financed the building of US railroads in the American mid-west.
-30-
