Discussion on the Legacy of the Opium Wars

[J66185]

This is my first thread in the forums, and yes, I read the rules regarding drug discussion, but this is not completely about drugs, I want to discuss how the policies carried out during the war would affect China and the world after it took place. I was inspired by a book by Julia Lovell's "The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China", whose handwriting, I must say is, superb and interesting. Also, if anyone plans to discuss the historiography of the Boxer Uprising, search up History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth, by Paul A. Cohen.

 

[Yakman]

This is my first thread in the forums, and yes, I read the rules regarding drug discussion, but this is not completely about drugs, I want to discuss how the policies carried out during the war would affect China and the world after it took place. I was inspired by a book by Julia Lovell's "The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China", whose handwriting, I must say is, superb and interesting. Also, if anyone plans to discuss the historiography of the Boxer Uprising, search up History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth, by Paul A. Cohen.

well... it kinda put the kibosh on Chinese attempts to play catch up to western industrialization. they might have made a play for East Asia (or at least their own independence) had they succeeded in throwing out the English, but it was not meant to be. The resulting chaos of the war led (indirectly) to the two most deadly wars of the 19th century, which were fought concurrently in China, and killed an estimated 30 million people.

Chinese weakness to foreign aggression would be the hallmark of the next 100 years. and guess what happened 100 years later...

 

[J66185]

I meant specifically about China and the perception of the Western world in the context of the legacy part.

 

[Yakman]

I meant specifically about China and the perception of the Western world in the context of the legacy part.

what does that mean?

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

I meant specifically about China and the perception of the Western world in the context of the legacy part.

It is always best to start at the beginning.

Britain owned Afghanistan, the most perfect place on earth to grow opium poppies, and still its most valuable export today. The only reason to own Afghanistan is to own these fields and control distribution. This applies to the British, Russians and Americans.

Britain refused to import opium, so what was the Raj to do? Export it to China, where there was a ready made market. However, China did not want to import opium, closed their ports, which were later fired upon by the British Navy. The resultant treaty opened specific ports to Western trade, and mandated China had to import opium and pay for it in silver. That silver was traded for tea, silk and jade and exported to the West.

To my knowledge, this is the first drug war; but not the last. US involvement in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama and Afghanistan - off the top of my head - strongly suggest an intelligence agency using drugs to pay for a private war is a modern, unsavory, way of doing bidness.

This, to me, is the legacy of the Opium Wars.

 

[J66185]

Actually, contrary to some views, Qing China was definitely not the xenophobic foreign empire as some would clearly like to portray it, in fact, it was an empire capable on handling many fronts, it was just wrapped up in its insecurities dealing with domestic troubles. As for the "Yellow Peril", this was a result of guilt stemming from the fact the British army technically, no, literally massacred their soldiers and blew their fort apart in nearly every battle and shipping opium that was clearly more potent than the local variety, which was paradoxically nurtured by the Anti-Opium Missionaries that refused to see any form of opium usage as having any positive effects, and hence perpetuated into the negative stereotypical view of the Chinese.

 

[MarcoRossolini]

I've done very little reading on the subject, but one brush with left a lasting impression on me. In a University tutorial a Chinese (presumably - she always brought everything back to China - even in a very Eurocentric history subject) mentioned the Opium Wars like it was a deliberate Western attempt to torpedo Chinese industrialisation.

 

[J66185]

In addition, the myth-building around the Opium Wars, which is actually recently levitated to public consciousness to a strong degree, in that it probably helped out a lot in keeping the populace subdued and the party in power, but China, war or no war is still governed by domestic concerns, nevertheless.

 

[Yakman]

Actually, contrary to some views, Qing China was definitely not the xenophobic foreign empire as some would clearly like to portray it, in fact, it was an empire capable on handling many fronts, it was just wrapped up in its insecurities dealing with domestic troubles. As for the "Yellow Peril", this was a result of guilt stemming from the fact the British army technically, no, literally massacred their soldiers and blew their fort apart in nearly every battle and shipping opium that was clearly more potent than the local variety, which was paradoxically nurtured by the Anti-Opium Missionaries that refused to see any form of opium usage as having any positive effects, and hence perpetuated into the negative stereotypical view of the Chinese.

The Qing were clearly not very capable. They just had a lot of inertia.

they could have been very capable. they were moving in that direction. the Opium War came at just the right time to knock them off from that course.

it led to the Taiping. It led to the muslim revolts. It led to the Nian rebellion. Only a state which rested on thousands of years of continuity could resist such traumatic upheavals AND foreign attack, such as the 2nd Opium War. They had to go back to the basics, which is what created the internal intellectual challenge of "Chinese Nation/Foreign Dynasty".

A Qing Dynasty sans Opium War might well have continuity well into the 20th century. There might be a constitutional chinese emperor today, who knows!? but the opium war directly threw the Imperial system into disarray at precisely the wrong time.

 

[J66185]

Don't forget that around that time, the Qing Empire was experiencing many problems: economic stagnation, environmental exhaustion(including increasing destructive and repetitive floods), overpopulation that was straining the civil service system, decline of the army and in some cases, general standards of public order as well. Daoguang was not quite the emperor equipped for the task ahead, despite the fact he had impressed his grandfather, Qianlong, by shooting his first deer with a bow at 9 years old, and 22 years later, sprang to the defense of the Forbidden City, pleasing his pleasure-loving father Jiaqing. However, it seems that once he took the throne, his nerve seems to have deserted him.

Gaze at his official portrait - arrayed in the standard-issue bulky red turban, yellow brocade gown and a beaded necklace of QIng emperorship - and he looks a different creature from his predecessors: the face pinched, angular, just a touch apprehensive, compared to his father's expansive jowliness, or his grandfather's patrician gravitas. His least successful attributes were probably indecision and a fondness for scapegoating others. A day or two after he had succeeded his father, he removed three key advisers for letting a mistake slip into his deceased father's valedictory edict; a couple days later, he reinstated two of them. He even changed his mind about a choice of final resting place.
Being an emperor was a lot stressful than you might imagine. It was not just the workload that was bad enough: a Qing emperor's average day at the palace consisted of audiences and memorial-reading, followed by more audiences, then more memorial-reading, sometimes varied by having officials presented, or by assessing death penalties. Emperorship was also burdened with an oppressive sense of public obligation.

 

[J66185]

Plus doublespeak was certainly not a 20th-century thing, opium was referred to as yapian (invented as early as the Ming Dynasty), the term in current use today, translates as 'crow slices', diyejia (probably a simple transliteration from a Greek term for a treacly opiate), yingsu (jar millet - for the poppy seeds'resemblance to those of millet), mi'nang (millet bags) and wuxiang (black fragrance). All through the nineteenth century, yapian coexisted with a host of other other references: afurong (literally, poppy), datu or xiatu (big mud or little mud), yangtu (mud from the Western seas), yangyan (smoke from the Western seas), yangyao (medicine of tonic from the Western seas). The prefix yang, incidentally, did not denote fear or distrust for the alien, but it was part of full-blown mania for all things foreign: 'foreign things are now the most fashionable things now,' observed one mid-nineteenth century essayist, 'foreign copper, china paint, linen, cotton ... the list is endless.' When the Communist Party - while publicly denouncing their rivals, the Nationalists, and Western imperialists for profiting from the drug trade - secretly grew opium to make ends meet in north-west China in the early 1940's, they generated another couple of euphemisms: 'special product', and sometimes 'soap'.

By the time of the Opium War, the empire was not just importing and domesticating this prized foreign drug; it was producing it, in tremendous quantities. (Nonetheless, although native opium appealed because of its cheapness, it was always a poor cousin tot he foreign product, due to the greater potency of the latter.)

 

[J66185]

A Qing Dynasty sans Opium War might well have continuity well into the 20th century. There might be a constitutional chinese emperor today, who knows!? but the opium war directly threw the Imperial system into disarray at precisely the wrong time.

Besides even, if, the Opium Wars didn't even take place, so what? The Qing was already declining around the time, due to the fact they unable to effectively govern the rapidly increasing population of their empire, and declining environment and overburdened civil service increasingly saddling the government with aging academic failures, along with low emperor qualities certainly didn't help any matters as well.

 

[J66185]

In addition, did the United Kingdom's policy shift toward the Qing empire reflect any other significant changes in their foreign policy? (UK)
P.S. During this period, many politicians were horrified at the prospect of going to war against Afghanistan, and Palmerston didn't have a qualified troupe of competent foreign ministers, and how come I have never come across any references to the 'Pumicestone' in any AARs I come across so far?

 

[HuzzButt]

'Pumicestone'

I'm just wondering what you mean with pumicestone?

 

[J66185]

They're references to Palmerston by certain foreign dignitaries that he rubbed the wrong way :laughs:

 

[J66185]

I would also like to raise another topic; during the Warlord period, there were many discussions about what direction should China take to modernize to itself to survive in a hostile world that they saw, would perpetually threaten to devour China, and how the Opium Wars were revised into 'the first great national humiliation'.
P.S. Despite the fact that 'unequal treaties' opened up more Chinese ports to the foreign powers, the ports themselves were more than a symbol of imperialist oppression - they were a symbol of progress. China's industrialization and modernization began in places like Shanghai, with banks, gaslights, electricity, telephones, running water and automobiles becoming part of the city between 1848 and 1901. The press explosion during the late Qing era could not have taken place outside the foreign concession in cities such as Shanghai, where extraterritoriality permitted a degree of intellectual freedom not possible elsewhere in the empire.

 

[Yakman]

Besides even, if, the Opium Wars didn't even take place, so what? The Qing was already declining around the time, due to the fact they unable to effectively govern the rapidly increasing population of their empire, and declining environment and overburdened civil service increasingly saddling the government with aging academic failures, along with low emperor qualities certainly didn't help any matters as well.

yes, times change. governments face challenges. and?

they can either reform and get through it, or collapse, or knuckle down until they get lined up along the wall.

that's history.

 

[J66185]

Let's not forget that that inflation caused handouts to the Bannerman to shrink as time went on, it's not unheard of as well, as @volksmarschall explain in an article he found.
Were the Barbarians a Negative or Positive Influence?

 

[J66185]

Unfortunately, I am going to make an unrelated question, in Victoria II, when the Opium War kicks off, can we have the dynamic or event that states the confusion and made-up reports by officials and officers to display, "What is even going here?"

 

[Yakman]

Unfortunately, I am going to make an unrelated question, in Victoria II, when the Opium War kicks off, can we have the dynamic or event that states the confusion and made-up reports by officials and officers to display, "What is even going here?"

that would be the most annoying pop-up ever, because it would happen every day for every imperial power, for every single province.