China as “Victim”? The Opium War That Wasn’t

Or, why the narrative of a helpless China being force fed drugs by Britain is wrong.


China as “Victim”? The Opium War That Wasn’t

"Britain’s behavior before, during and after the 1840-42 Anglo-Chinese conflict, the “Opium War.” It’s a brilliantly snappy name that sneakily prejudges the issue in very simple form: while China had done Britain no harm, the British gratuitously invaded China. Britain wanted to expand its imperial power and sell more goods, especially the opium whose import the Chinese tried to ban, while the British sold or smuggled in anyway. In other words, it was a case of commercial and imperialist British greed trying to force opium on the Chinese.

The world is wrong. The British decision to go to war had quite different causes.

First, opium. In China, it was a normal item of use and trade for centuries before the 1840 war. Not until the later 1790s did the Chinese court start to worry about its growing and intensive use. In the 1820s it began seriously to prohibit opium imports, though the bans entirely failed to stop Chinese people from growing or buying it in increasing quantities. Still less did it stop Chinese citizens, merchants, gangs and hordes of officials from ignoring the prohibitions and smuggling it into the country. Even senior officials in charge of coastal protection grew very rich indeed from smuggling, or smugglers’ kickbacks. In the later 1830s the emperor’s most senior advisers debated whether it would be better to enforce the opium prohibitions or to legalize, regulate and tax the trade. Not until 1838-39 did the emperor finally opt for enforcement and send the admirable Commissioner Lin to Canton to see to it.

The most important official concerns were two. One was the damage done to the health and capacity for work of the people using opium, especially the addicts. The other was the economic damage done by the opium trade. Most importantly, too much silver was being paid to foreign merchants for opium, and thus leaving China. The domestic price of silver was therefore going up. But the price of everyday copper cash remained the same. So tax payments, which had to be made in silver, were effectively tax increases, causing much popular resentment and social unrest.

That assessment was almost certainly in important respects wrong. The matter cannot be proved one way or the other, but the circumstances of the time suggest the following. We know that the 1820s and 1830s were a time of social unrest and disturbance in the Chinese empire, with various rebellious groups appearing from time to time, not least in the South. It would be normal at such times for some people to use opium to relieve stress, much as the modern world has used Valium. Such a process could help to account for the startling rate of increase in opium sales at Canton at the end of the 1820s. Furthermore, opium and general trading, or smuggling, was by no means confined to Canton (modern Guangzhou) but was happening in dozens of inlets and small places along the coast. It is beyond belief that the central Chinese authorities, who to this day do not have reliable statistics on most aspects of the Chinese economy, had more than a hazy idea of what was going on, let alone accurate statistics about the opium trade and its effects on the silver supply. What may be slightly more reliable are the numbers for opium shipments to China from India and, maybe, Turkey, and they tell an interesting tale. The available estimates suggest that, in 1800-1801, some 4570 chests of opium were shipped from these sources to China. Twenty years later, in 1820-1821, the total was much the same: 4244 chests. Yet by 1830-1831 that had suddenly more than quadrupled, to 18,956 chests and, by 1838-1839, on the eve of the Sino-British conflict, even that had more than doubled to 40,200 chests...

[In 1840] Opium was legal in Britain itself, which imported some 200,000 pounds of it from India in that same year. It continued in normal use, especially in the form of laudanum, and was used by many distinguished British and European people, including Prime Minister Gladstone in Britain and Prince Bismarck in Germany, was openly sold to the families of wounded soldiers during World War I and traces of laudanum could be found in British over-the-counter cold medicines as late as the 1950s. Indeed, neither in Britain nor in America, were there laws against opium or any other drug until many decades after the 1840-1842 war...

At no point did the British government, or its official representatives in and outside China, countenance the opium smuggling on the China coast or give it aid or comfort. Part of the trouble, indeed, was that while the Chinese expected foreign “headmen” (including British government officials) to keep their compatriots in order, Parliament in London was entirely unwilling to have them enforce Chinese laws against British citizens on Chinese soil. China’s coastal protection was obviously a matter for China itself. No British Minister or official questioned China’s right to control its own shores and borders, or to decide what should be imported and what excluded.

Even the enforced confiscation by the Chinese of opium stocks managed by the Canton merchants brought no hostile reaction from London. When news of Commissioner Lin’s March 18, 1839, confiscation order to those merchants reached London, there was no reaction. Only in September did London became alarmed, with the arrival of a Canton dispatch of May 29 relating China’s military threats against defenseless British civilians. Only then did the great British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, begin to talk about military action. Those public feelings turned to anger and outrage at the end of 1839 when there were further reports of traders and their families having to seek refuge on board British merchant ships at sea, deprived – at least officially – of food and water supplies from shore. When somewhat embellished reports reached London of English women and children being threatened by Chinese soldiers, there was real fury. For British politics the issue ceased to be opium – about which many people sympathized with China – and became the fate of not just opium traders but innocent men, women and children threatened by armed Chinese soldiers.

It is true that there was another important factor. The British Superintendent at Canton had promised the merchants compensation for the compulsory surrender of opium to Commissioner Lin. That meant that the value of the opium was, in effect, being underwritten by the British government. Since the London cabinet could not decently disavow its own superintendent, Captain Charles Elliot, it had to try and find some two million pounds – which it did not have...

There was also general irritation with Chinese constraints on trade and confinement of the Western traders to Canton lest, in the view of the imperial authorities, too many foreigners roaming around the empire should disturb the tranquility of Chinese life...

The real issues for the British therefore became not opium but jurisdiction, ultimately sovereignty, expansion of trade and by no means least the safety of British men, women and children threatened, chased away or imprisoned without charge or trial.

On February 20, 1840, Lord Palmerston wrote to the emperor and, simultaneously, to the commanders of the British force sent to Canton. While the Chinese were fully entitled to enforce their anti-opium edicts, Palmerston wrote, it was something else entirely to punish the innocent (i.e., those merchants who did not trade opium) together with the guilty and to threaten lives without as much as a trial. The force should seek reparations for the insults to Queen Victoria’s officer at Canton, and to British people; to secure the opening of other ports to trade; to get agreement that the British and every-one else could trade in China; and to allow British diplomats to come to Beijing and the ports...

When the British, having advanced up the Yangzi, were on the brink of storming China’s ancient capital, both sides signed the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing...

The treaty did not mention opium. As early as 1841, while the conflict was in progress, John Quincy Adams, the former sixth President of the U.S., remarked that opium “is a mere incident to the dispute, but no more the cause of the war than the throwing overboard of tea in Boston harbor was the cause of the North American revolution ... the cause of the war is the kowtow – the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of the relations between lord and vassal.”

So how and why did the view take hold that it had been an “Opium War”?

Commissioner Lin, and the Chinese governing groups in general, then and later totally failed to see that there could have been any cause for strife other than opium and British commercial greed and imperial rapacity. That becomes easier to understand if one recalls the astonishing degree of Chinese lack of interest and misunderstanding of what the British, and especially British law and government, were all about. Lin him-self, a man of great intelligence and perspicacity, had no difficulty in managing dealings with the British at Canton. But understanding the British government, its structure or motives, or the forces that moved it, was something else. For instance, his letters to Queen Victoria (which were never delivered) are couched in terms suggesting he thought this young woman, so recently on the throne and even more recently married, actually ran British foreign policy, in much in the same way as the Chinese emperor dictated policy in Beijing.

More importantly, and also more generally, the years and decades that followed the 1840-1842 war saw, from Beijing’s point of view, a long catalogue of further Western (including British) demands and interventions... In that context, the 1840-1842 war became just one entry in a long catalogue of Western sins which made China an innocent victim of foreign aggression and exploitation.

Furthermore, the whole business of China’s recovery and restoration became by the second half of the century inextricably mingled with an upsurge of patriotism. Nationalism became an essential strand not just in China’s restoration but in the transformation of what had become a rickety and out-of-date empire into what would be, in governmental structure and social organization, more like a modern nation state. In that context, blaming foreigners became (and, significantly, remains into the twenty-first century) an important and perhaps necessary rallying cry for the population.

In Britain, too, views not only of China, but about Britain’s activities at Canton, became distorted. Both there and in the U.S. came an upsurge of moral indignation not confined to the business of China. Much more generally there was growing self-criticism about the effects of a burgeoning capitalism on workers and their families, and sympathy for oppressed “underdogs” of every kind. The spread of socialist and even early anti-imperialist ideas was also significant. Some of that was fuelled, on the issue of China in particular, by the increasing number of missionaries, especially Protestants and more especially still the non-Conformists, who wrote and spoke with passion about China’s misery and the way in which opium – and alcohol – were undermining Chinese society and keeping the Chinese from Christ. This was a period, too, when the Western medical profession, with the Americans largely in the lead, was becoming a powerful social regulating force, one that, especially in conjunction with the churches, was to bring “Prohibition” to the U.S. less than half a century later. So the general anti-opium and anti-drug campaigns in the West gathered pace...

In China itself, the issue of opium quickly changed its form. Within sixteen years of the Treaty of Nanjing, China had abolished the opium import restrictions, not least because they had become irrelevant. By 1860, and much more so by 1900, the Chinese were growing at home many times as much opium as the British, or anyone else, could import. What is more, they kept on doing it, in increasing quantities and virtually throughout all the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century."