The Opium War by Julia Lovell
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The Opium War never figured very highly in Western historical consciousness, and indeed today is all but forgotten, but it is still very much at the forefront of Chinese national and official self-awareness. Julia Lovell writes in her new history of the Sino-British conflict that
In China today, the Opium War is the traumatic inauguration of the country’s modern history. History books, television documentaries and museums chorus a simple, received wisdom about the conflict ... now one of the founding myths of Chinese nationalism. In the century and a half since it was fought, the Opium War has been transformed from a mere ‘border provocation’ into the tragic beginning of China’s modern history...
China’s past isn’t dead; to paraphrase Faulkner, it isn’t even past. After 170 years, the Opium War, the episode that launched China’s modern history, still informs contemporary China policy and bedevils international relations:
From the age of opium traders 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 twentieth-century, the nineteenth is still with us.
Anyone who has spent any time in Hong Kong (a place which, after all, owes its very existence to the Opium War) will have heard the story many times over: British merchants, demonstrating a streak of deplorable cynicism (or commercial innovation, depending on one’s point of view), hit upon opium as the must-have consumer product that would plug the huge trade deficit with China. By the 1830s, silver—the only mutually acceptable medium of exchange—was flowing out of China at what had become an unacceptable rate. When the Chinese authorities set about destroying stocks of this illegal import which was destabilizing their economy and undermining their society, Britain invaded, guns blazing. It demanded and received compensation and, perhaps worse, extra-territorial concessions.
Lovell takes us through the Opium War blow-by-blow and communiqué-by-communiqué, a thorough account that benefits from being immensely readable. In addition to her accomplishments as a historian, Lovell was first recognized as one of the leading translators of contemporary Chinese fiction. Her ear for dialogue and character is well in evidence here. She quotes extensively from contemporary materials and sources. As she tells the story, the protagonists speak in their own voices, from the unfortunate Charles Elliot and the ineffectual Qing Emperor Daoguang to the German missionary turned spymaster and magistrate, Karl Gützlaff. In one extraordinary and almost touching passage, Lovell refers to a letter from Daoguang:
Two and a half years after the war was supposed to have started, Donguang found himself still lacking the most information about his antagonists: where, in fact, he wondered in a communication of May 1842, is England? Why are the English selling us opium? What are Indians doing in their army? How is it they have a twenty-two-year-old woman for a queen? Is she married?
It may be that the tides of history, throwing the irresistible force of British-led economic globalization against the immovable object of the Qing dynasty’s worldview, made conflict inevitable. Lovell’s book is a welcome and vivid reminder that history is ultimately made by people.
One might question today whether the Opium War needs additional explanation: even the staunchest apologists for the Empire find it impossible to justify armed intervention to support the drug trade. The establishment of Hong Kong, and its on-the-whole benign existence since its foundation, is perhaps the only silver lining to this account. The higher principle on which the British sent in their warships was not the defense of free-trade so much as the freedom to deal in narcotics. A large segment of the British public has always been suitably embarrassed, albeit not embarrassed enough to have relinquished Hong Kong until the last possible moment.
Lovell is at pains to point out that the narrative is more nuanced than that. While providing no excuse for the aggression, opium wasn’t exactly forced upon the Chinese users, and was imported with the cooperation of Chinese merchants and officials. China produced large amounts of the drug itself. Neither nation was in full control, or in much control at all, or often even aware, of what was happening commercially in Canton. The Emperor’s officials lied to him and communications were so slow in those pre-telegraph days that events quickly outran decisions. Lovell notes “how much of the venom in the Chinese version of these events is reserved for characters on their own side: and in particular, for the perceived corruption, indecision and incompetence of the Qing court.”
The final third of The Opium War deals with the aftermath, a period which extends to the present. The Second Opium War, a reprise of the first a decade and a half later, is dealt with briskly. Lovell then argues that the Opium War, or rather the passions it stirred up, mutated into deep-set prejudices and attitudes. Lovell draws a line from these events to the “Yellow Peril” and Sax Rohmer’s Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu. She dates the current Chinese view of the Opium War to the 1920s:
The aim was to persuade the populace to blame all China’s problems on a single foreign enemy: to transform the Opium War and its Unequal Treaty into a long-term imperialist scheme from which only the Nationalists could preserve the country, thereby justifying any sacrifice that the party required of the Chinese.
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The thoroughness of Lovell’s The Opium War renders it more thought-provoking than one might at first suppose. This was not, for example, the first “almost accidental” military action by the British to become part of another nation’s national mythology. Americans grow up, as I did, with stories of the Boston Massacre, a relatively minor event thoroughly propagandized by the revolutionaries. America now seems, on the whole, to be able to separate the actions of the historically perfidious Albion from the modern nation and its people. China apparently hasn’t, or won’t; at least not yet.
A related realization is that one country’s defining event is another’s sidebar. (I recall being astounded, during my year at a London grammar school, that what I knew as the “War of 1812” was considered little more than a minor police action related to the Napoleonic Wars.) The Opium War hardly figures in British historical consciousness. Americans and other Western nations forget that they ever had a role in the opium trade at all. This asymmetry in national memory surely accounts for much of the recurring miscomprehension.
Also thrown into relief are the parallels between the mid-19th century and today. China is once again running a huge trade surplus; the West hasn’t yet found its 21st-century equivalent of opium. After a period of ideological conflict, the West’s problems with China are, once again, related to trade and deficits. And once again, a potentially mutually-beneficial relationship based on trade and investment, rather than the deep antagonism of earlier decades, is bedeviled by misunderstanding.
Lovell believes that the similarities are more than coincidental:
In 1839 the Qing court was too distracted by fears of social unrest to come up voluntarily with a pragmatic response to Western trade demands; Britain interpreted this political paralysis as inveterate xenophobia. In 2010, the situation did not look so very 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 ...
The differences, of course, are just as stark: China, this time, is in the ascendant, and Western nations are no longer in a position to impose their views on international trade by force, military or economic.
China’s views on a number of subjects, including its suspicion of contemporary Western motives, become easier to understand, or at least more nuanced, when seen through the prism of the Opium War. Western protestations on everything from human rights to trade policy acquire a sheen of disingenuousness when compared with their statements of a century and a half ago justifying military and economic aggression. Lovell writes:
Influential nineteenth-century Britons worked hard to fabricate a virtuous casus belli out of an elementary problem of a trade deficit: to reinvent the war as a clash of civilizations triggered by the ‘unnaturally’ isolationist Chinese.
China has not forgotten. This is not to excuse disingenuousness on the part of China, nor is it to argue that China is necessarily well-served by its insistence on allowing this monochromatic view of the past to color its present relations. However, Western policy-makers and commentators would do well to make an effort to remember whence China’s views on international relations arise.