The Opium Wars are Back with a Vengeance

Surplus elites, DEI, drugs, and subversive traitors demoralized China in the 1800s before its "Century of Humiliation" - America must learn these lessons of history

The CCP is seeking revenge for The Opium Wars of the mid-1800s. Qing China was humiliated by the British Empire and carved up by Western powers. 150 years later in retaliation, the CCP flooded America and Europe with fentanyl that killed millions. When great powers decline, rot from within destabilizes well before any external pressure is applied. Several remarkable passages from The Opium War by Julia Lovell capture the parallels between 19th Century China and 21st Century America.

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Surplus striver elites embittered by the brutal civil service exam system fomented turmoil and revolutions.

By the Ming dynasty, the imperial government had succeeded in channelling educational aspirations almost wholly into passing the civil-service exams: the tests of Confucian orthodoxy that controlled the paths to wealth and social success. The life cycle of an aspiring bureaucrat began in the womb, with prenatal manuals lecturing pregnant women on maintaining the posture that would best aid the development of an embryonic graduand…

During the Qing, around 2 million candidates sat for the lowest, county level of examinations, an opportunity available twice every 3 years; only 1.5% passed. No more than 5% would succeed at the next, provincial stage, and less than 1.5% made it past the final, metropolitan rung. These ratios, if anything, probably deteriorated through the Qing dynasty, as appointment quotas failed to keep up proportionally with the 18th century’s doubling of population. As a result, late-imperial China was increasingly saddled with an aging population of academic failures…

The Ming dynasty was brought down in 1644 by insurrections led by a postman who happened also to be a failed examination candidate. The most destructive popular revolt of the 19th century, the Taiping, was led by a provincial school-teacher who after repeatedly failing the civil-service examinations suffered a nervous breakdown in which he hallucinated that God told him he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. When his breakaway Heavenly Kingdom was finally annihilated after 14 years in 1864, it had left tens of millions dead and almost toppled the dynasty.

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DEI policies favoring the ruling Manchu minority fueled resentment from the Han majority, who were locked out from prestige careers.

Under the Qing, positive discrimination in favour of the minority of Manchu candidates made the process even more frustrating for the Han Chinese majority. In theory, Qing orthodoxy held that the Manchus formed ‘one family’ with the Han Chinese that they ruled. In reality, the Manchu population (outnumbered by their Han Chinese subjects 350 to 1) worked to keep a sense of their ethnic otherness alive.

After 1644, Manchus were privileged over Han at every point in the imperial bureaucracy. The civil-service examinations were dumbed down for Manchu candidates… The path of promotion for Manchu officials was quicker than for Han officials because they are few and posts reserved for them were many… Han Chinese men were spending lifetimes over-educating themselves to face demoralizingly low examination pass-rates, while watching less talented foreign rivals overtake them - a sure recipe for ill-feeling…

The explosion of the Taipings was bound up with the growth of the Western presence in China. On the one hand, their ideology was based on a puritanical, authoritarian reading of Christianity gleaned from contact with Canton missionaries and their tracts. On the other, Taiping leaders reviled another noted Western import: opium. Those caught consuming the stuff were quickly beheaded… The Taiping hatred of opium was also an expression of their passionate anti-Manchusm - The Qing, Taiping rulers believed, had deliberately encouraged addiction in order to enslave the Chinese. ‘The Manchus have poisoned the body and soul of our nation’, one Taiping leader analyzed…

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Traitors from within collaborated with foreigners to profit and destroy their own people; the emperor’s Viceroy Lin Zexu discovered the collusion as he cracked down on drug trafficking and dumped 2,000 opium chests into the ocean.

By the time the British fleet arrived in the summer of that year, the emperor’s attention had long drifted elsewhere. Lin’s ignorance also shows, again, how little he trusted the Cantonese locals in his struggle to bring the British to heel. Theoretically, he had to hand at least a dozen wily ‘experts’ who had made careers and fortunes dealing with the foreigners: the Hong merchants (not to mention the thousands who made their livings servicing the needs of the foreigners)…

‘The trouble lies within, not without, because every merchant has got rich through the foreigners, and even the lowest orders make their livings from them. All the merchants and people who live near the coast are fluent in the foreigners’ language. The craftier of their number are spies, and know everything that is going on in government offices, and are quick to pass it on.’

Lin made it very clear that he had the greatest disgust for such individuals - one of his first acts on reaching Canton had been to lecture the Hong merchants on their collaboration with the British and threaten to behead their ringleaders. Qing China on the eve of the Opium War was a place too wrapped up in its own insecurities to put its best energies into dealing with the British…

In the Chinese narrative of the Opium War, you might expect the line between heroes and villains to be a clear one: honourably resisting servants of the Chinese empire on the one hand, wicked British on the other. The curious thing, though, is how much of the venom in the Chinese version of these events has been reserved for characters on their own side: and in particular, for the perceived corruption, indecision and incompetence of the Qing court.

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The CCP continues to weaponize the Opium Wars to crush internal dissent, demonize the West, and distract from its own failures.

The aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre fell upon an auspicious commemoration: the 150th anniversary of the Opium War. And through the months following June 1989, some of the country’s modern historians got to work. While elsewhere in the world Communist states collapsed, academic hacks wrote and organized… In 1990, China’s establishment fought a vigorous campaign to remind the Chinese people of their history of oppression at the hands of the West, through dozens of articles, conferences, and spin-off books about the conflict….

In 1839, the Qing court was too distracted by fears of societal unrest to come up voluntarily with a pragmatic response to Western trade demands. In 2010, the situation did not look so different, with the government infuriating Western states over its rejection of climate-change legislation that might slow growth, its harsh stance on social control and its aversion to compromise on international trade issues, such as strengthening the yuan relative to the dollar (thereby making exported Chinese manufactures more expensive, foreign imports less so)…

From the age of the opium-trades to the internet, China and the West have been infuriating and misunderstanding each other, despite ever-increasing opportunities for contact, study and mutual sympathy. Ten years into the 21st century, the 19th is still with us.

NOTE: In 2009, China executed a British national named Akmal Shaikh for heroin trafficking.

Unrelated: British all-iron warship Nemesis wrecking the Chinese fleet in 1840 in response to Chinese seizing and dumping opium into the ocean.

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Opium is a hell of a drug and war on drugs will never end because of demand from addicts.

Consider a late-imperial photograph of Chinese opium smokers. In one typical shot, two men recline on a couch, enveloped in long, padded jacquard silk gowns. One has an arm draped around a young woman, who is also reclining back on top of him. Necks propped up against the headboard, both men stare down the couch at the camera: eyes half-closed, mouths expressionless. Even today, when synthetic opiates make opium look tame, the image is troubling…

Perhaps to modern eyes there is something particularly decadent about lying down to take your narcotic of choice, something abject about the supine stare. As the smokers gaze levelly back at us, through dope-clouded eyes, they seem to be defying us: ‘We are deliberately, happily smoking ourselves into oblivion. What are you going to do about it?'…

From late Qing newspapers: “Out of the 400 million people in our nation, half of them are weak women with bound feet. Of the remaining 200 million, half again are emaciated and sickly opium addicts, and the rest are beggars, thieves, Buddhists, and Daoists, good-for-nothings from wealthy families, local bullies, the diseased, criminals, and actors and actresses. Alas! The dung beetle eats shit and rejoices. A fish swimming in a kettle forgets the water is boiling… Perhaps 70% of Chinese can no longer extricate themselves from the habit. Their lives fall drop by drop into the opium box, and their souls flicker away in the light of the opium lamp. When stung they feel no pain; when kicked, their wilted bones fail to rise. Since most of our countrymen wreck themselves by smoking opium, they represent our listless nation.”

In 1886, a Scottish globetrotter predicted: “If a taste for opium should once gain a footing in England, as it has already done in America, there may be reason to fear lest the poison which Britain has so assiduously cultivated for China, may eventually find its market amongst our own children - a retribution too terrible to contemplate, though one against the possibility of which it were well to guard.”

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