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The Opium Wars Still Shape China’s View of the West

138 points by farnsworthy 9y ago

StudentStuff 9y ago
Communism will win
- ben_w 9y ago
  Communism, like libertarian capitalism, simplifies the human condition too much to win in a pure form. Both have important lessons, neither is sufficient. At least, neither is sufficient for now; I can image fully automated luxury space communism working, once AI is good enough.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    A post scarcity society is likely to be inerently more libertarian than communist, true post scarcity does not need a centrally managed economy. Communism doesn’t simplify the human condition as much as it replaces it, the scary part of communism isn’t the economy but the eradication of the self in favor of a group identity.
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      Communism is not a centrally managed economy. It is an anarchistic form of society with no state. You might be confusing it with socialism which is what most states that are colloquially referred to as "Communist" really are. Socialism is supposed to be a short term form of government for transitioning to a communist society, but no real-world socialist state has made any significant progress at transitioning to communism.
      - dogma1138 9y ago
        Communism is certainly is a centrally manged state owned economic system. Under communism there is no individual ownership and the state owns all of the means of production.
        TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        That is absolutely incorrect. Communism has no private property, but also has no state. You are thinking of socialism. That said, there are no large scale examples of real-world communist societies, so it is for the most part purely hypothetical, unlike socialism which has many real-world examples. You may be confused because of all of the states where the main political party is called the Communist party, but those states do not self-identify as communist. They self-identify as socialist states that are in the process of transitioning to communism.
        dogma1138 9y ago
        I’m not confused because communism does not exists in a vacuum a communist society will be a state. The “abolishment” of the state under communism does not do so in practice but rather in principle when everyone belongs to the state there is no state but it’s an empty and meaningless starlet. Communism also outside of some fringe Marxism and anarcho communism is not anarchist at all but rather very centralized.
        TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        Communism is by definition stateless, so any society where a state exists is not communism. You might say that this is impossible, and that would quite possibly be right, which is why there is no real-world example of a communist society. I think the only way that it could possibly work is with post-scarcity or at least much less scarcity that currently exists.
        dogma1138 9y ago
        How do you call a group of people with an shared identity and sovereignty? No real-world example is a coupout and a no true scottsman all in one. The stateless part is not what you think it means it just means that the state is not a separate entity to the individual mostly because individualism does not exist the only thing that exists is the group. When everyone is equal then there are no senators or presidents or mayors but everything is still centralized so some governing body forms or it’s total anarchy. But that doesn’t matter as long as not everyone is commmunist you would have a communist and a none communist state unless due to the authoritarian nature of communism the non communist group is annihilated. If anything the core principals of communism are much more abhorrent than any implementation of it we had so far.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      Your reply finally encouraged me to (skim) read my copy of the Communist Manifesto. Ironically, the very criticism you have of communism is their criticism of the bourgeoisie. Now, I think I should go read my copy of The Wealth of Nations for balance…
Pica_soO 9y ago
China history is a warning sign against centralism and the ability of humanity to get stuck in loops, economic and culturally - where it from a ruling partys point of view doesn't make sense to do anything to escape the loop. Impressive is that china at least kept- enforced by the layout of the country, a centralized state. At least it did not decay as much as the middle east or africa - after reaching peak people.
- erikb 9y ago
  This is so western propaganda boilerplate. What is the warning sign? China lifted more people out of poverty than all other countries combined. Actually the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism, and many western populations complain about their governments moving their power into a more and more centralized system. Have you for instance seen how Philipines and Turkey have moved away from a pro-western position?
  - kylell 9y ago
    Turkey indicted 30k people and ruined lots of lives, just because someone hacked their wifi and added a link to some gullen (made up state enemy) website app, and just visiting that app website would put you in jail, but their didn't even do that. Philipines is worse with drugs regular killings, you must be quite an idiot to say this.
  - barkxyz 9y ago
    It was the mistakes of a highly centralized government that helped thrust those same people into poverty in the first place. Why should centralism be credited for helping pull them out but not for putting them there in the first place? Meanwhile the West long ago eradicated the kind of poverty that still persists in China. Is that to be credited to our system of government too?
  - adventured 9y ago
    > What is the warning sign? In the span of about 12 years, China became the world's most indebted nation. They have to accumulate about $4 trillion in debt annually to add $600 to $700 billion in GDP expansion, of which 1/3 to 2/5 goes just to paying for new debt interest costs. That debt scenario keeps getting worse each year. Local government defaults are a common discussion now, it's assumed they're going to suffer vast bankruptcies all over the nation. In just the next five years, they'll increase their already shocking pile of debt by another ~75% or so, adding between $20 and $30 trillion in new debt. > the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism That's incorrect. The whole world, including China, has attempted to partially emulate the developed nations of the West. China has gradually abandoned Communism and shifted to a market based economy, as one example. Their former system failed entirely, their shift to market based systems is an obvious admission of that. That process continues. All the developed Western nations have far superior standards of living at the median than China. The top Western examples are four to five times higher than China, and that's before accounting for the near total dearth of human rights in China. That gap is even greater when it comes to the poor. In China ~250 million people are still living on $3 per day or less.
erikb 9y ago
It is not true. It's just that politicians need official reasons to do what they do. And it's a great thing to use historical reasons because nobody can really counter them. Not a single Chinese person I know thinks about Westerners as sources of the Opium Wars and therefore as enemies. The opinions move between "West is so rich, let's be more like them" and "We are nearly back to our old glory, now also learn some of our culture!"
- thereare5lights 9y ago
  Oh yea, there are over a billion Chinese people in China alone and because not a single Chinese person you know has told you they think that, it must not be true!
  - erikb 9y ago
    True, it doesn't reach a stastistical significance of >=95%. How does knowing roughly 100 Chinese people from different social levels, tiers, geographic locations, backgrounds compare to reading an article of foreign origin, though?
- tanilama 9y ago
  >> Westerners as sources of the Opium Wars and therefore as enemies The article is not wrong. Opium war, in the official narrative of recent Chinese history, is phrased as "the start of a hundred years of humiliation of China". It is heavily focused event in middle school history class. It definitely still shapes China in a lot of way, like the strictest drug prohibition may be in the whole world. In every day communication, it might not be significant, but it does have a greater effect on a subconscious level, serving as foundation for regular Chinese folk to perceive the relationship with West in general, which is centered with invasion, humiliation, lose of sovereignty and the shame of inferiority.
  - cousin_it 9y ago
    Not sure you're disagreeing with the grandparent. A belief can be deeply held and a result of manipulation at the same time. Russia has similar grievances against the West that are promoted on TV, and people care strongly about them as a result. In the early 90s, when the injuries were fresh, the TV deemphasized them and fewer people cared. I've come to believe that when a government makes its citizens care about foreign policy, that's usually a distraction from domestic problems. In Russia's case it's corruption. Not sure about China.
akhatri_aus 9y ago
Yet its the same problem today that prompted the Opium Wars as back then: The West buys more from China than China buys from The West. Hopefully that colours the decisions made to rebalance the trade system.
- dis-sys 9y ago
  > The West buys more from China than China buys from The West because there are long list of high tech & military stuff that China is simply not allowed to buy. it is so bad to the extent that Chinese are not allowed to buy Intel Phi processors which many of your local computer shops allow you to make orders. Surely Chinese are interesting in buying America's advanced jet fighters, missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers, satellites etc. On the non-military side, how about super computers, space techs, laser, semiconductor techs, optical fiber, high end composite materials. EU has very similar laws & policies, nothing really different from the US.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    The Xeon Phi deal was pretty silly considering that Inspur just bought GPUs instead and Intel was allowed to sell Xeon Phis to Baidu in large amounts.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > Surely Chinese are interesting in buying America's advanced jet fighters China's interested in buying precisely one round of each thing. And thereafter replacing it with their own. That's not a criticism, it's a fact of life in dealing with China. They have zero interest in being dependent on any outside nation more than absolutely necessary. The things you list, wouldn't even remotely dent the trade deficits China rings up. You're talking about $5 to $6 trillion per decade with the US and EU combined. Intel processors et al. are not going to fix that. There's absolutely nothing that can plug a $600 billion per year hole with China (US+EU), realistically. Energy exports (in the case of the US) is the only thing that could dent it. The solution is to move more manufacturing away from China and rebalance that large concentrated deficit with other nations in a distributed manner, and to make more things domestically. That will happen naturally as China's wages & costs continue to rise.
realPubkey 9y ago
This reminds me of the articles saying that germans like to use cash because of the inflation 100y ago. It's just not true and likely being written by someone who has never asked a single german/chinese.
- garmaine 9y ago
  On the other hand, having traveled extensively in Europe the Americas, and Asia, Germany does use cash far more than other countries even in Europe, although yes not to the extent cash is preferred in Asia.
  - jotm 9y ago
    Getting a MasterCard or Visa was harder in Germany than it should've been. They're optional and cost extra, standard debit cards for a checking account are Cirrus/Maestro, which can't be used to pay online or abroad or in many places. It was easier to just use them to withdraw cash. Sparkasse for some reason gave me a MasterCard that had it's own account, so I had to transfer money from the checking account to the card if I wanted to use it. Maybe things have improved.
    - PuffinBlue 9y ago
      It's maybe more that shops/businesses didnt accept payment by much other than cash, bank transfer or ec card. Even national chains, until very recently, didnt accept credit cards.
      - wazoox 9y ago
        Yup, 2 years ago I went into a large chain store in Germany to buy a camera, no credit card accepted, in a place selling mostly expensive gear such as cameras, laptops, dishwashers... Boggled my mind. Fortunately I had enough cash this time.
        rocqua 9y ago
wangii 9y ago
I don't understand the motivation of the article. Does the author try to justify the Opium War? Or to remind 1+ billion Chinese that the intepretation of history always subject to rulers' agenda, which is clearly stated in Chinese textbook? To show off his not-so-sharp observation to his readers? Or, to warn USA not to abandon the free trade principle?
- philipov 9y ago
  The motivation of all such articles is that someone's job is to write articles, and so articles must be written within the publishing deadline.
- thomasahle 9y ago
  What about giving the readers a better understanding of how China sees the West? These things can be complicated, and pointing out some of the forming events can be very helpful.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Some Chinese people are still cranky about the Opium Wars, some Irish folks still talk about the 800 year occupation, some Native Americans are still miffed about the whole killing and taking stuff thing. It may be news to some millennials in the tech industry, but the past isn't prologue. It isn't even past.
    - eastWestMath 9y ago
      Yeah, I’m pretty sure a lot of IRA funding came out of Boston. Turns out there were children and grandchildren of potato famine refugees who were still pretty pissed - who’d have thunk it.
      - Tsiklon 9y ago
        I recall seeing an article regarding an interview with a US Civil War veteran in the 1950's [1] which made me think, the Irish Famine was only some 150 years ago. It would have been likely that as recent as say, the 1930's you may have still had living survivors - and by extension, their stories of what they saw may yet be in living memory - it definitely would have still been in the 1970's. [1] - http://attic.areavoices.com/2011/03/01/listen-to-a-1954-interview-with-the-last-surviving-union-civil-war-vet/ http://attic.areavoices.com/2011/03/01/listen-to-a-1954-inte...
patrickg_zill 9y ago
I am surprised that the article makes no mention of the many Chinese action movies made that are set in the time period of the Opium Wars and that make explicit reference to it. Given that the film is made in China and received state support, it is not an accident. By the way the story of Baghdadi Jew, David Sassoon and his rise in prominence as a result of profiting from the Opium War is quite interesting in itself.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  I love foreign films. Any reasonably high brow recommendations?
  - faitswulff 9y ago
    "High brow" is generally not what you'll get in Hong Kong cinema. The director Wong Kar Wai comes to mind, but I'm not sure if any of his movies are set in the Opium War or hand-off eras. For those eras, Once Upon a Time in China is pretty iconic to me.
  - wj 9y ago
    Not high brow but I loved the Once Upon a Time in China trilogy.
  - ahtu123 9y ago
    Not during the opium wars period but I love a movie called To Live. It's about a family's struggles with adjusting for the insanity of the cultural revolution. Lots of dark humor and I was super impressed by the scope of it. The familys world comes crashing down multiple times as the civil war breaks out and the revolution really kicks off. The movie, director and lead actress got banned from making movies for a few years too so you know it's good.
Feniks 9y ago
History shapes culture who knew? America is still fighting the Civil War. But the Chinese don't blame the West for the decline of China and the fall of the empire. They blame the old corrupt elite. When Deng Xiaoping went abroad in the 80s he did his damnedest to appear cultured and in control.
- b6 9y ago
  > They blame the old corrupt elite. Hmm, I hope that's true. But there's also the "century of humiliation" thing going on, which, to my mind, is an attempt to divert blame away from China itself (basically Mao -- the greatest enemy China ever had) toward outsiders. I don't know to what degree people are buying it.
  - analyst74 9y ago
    You have to understand that Chinese culture is very inward-looking. All the invasions, unless they end up ruling China like Mongolians and Manchurians, are merely considered external forces not too different from natural disasters. Also, Chinese people don't see China as a single continuous entity like outsiders do, so most of the blame shifting doesn't have to go toward outside sources.
evolighting 9y ago
But every country teaching their version of history. Opium Wars is truly what change the Old China, force it open door which has long been closed. The so-called Freedom was just bullshit, it only profits, that drive the war. And I think the western world just never really understand the Chinese people's way of thinking, nor do they care.And that's how this article comes out.
ksec 9y ago
Well, that is the same as The World War 2 still shape x's view of the X.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hungerstrike 9y ago
If you disagree, I'd love to hear what you know about it! Did Mao not come out of Yale? Did he not have help from non-Chinese during his reign of terror? What part do you think I got wrong? The conclusion? Do you think "China" just shot up out of nowhere over the past 70 years because they had cheap labor? No. Their power could not have been created without the help of western nations. The most prolific mass murderer in the world, Mao Zedong, came out of Yale. Once he came to power, he had all sorts of help from non-Chinese. The plot here is fairly simple and you can see it happening every day. China is the model for a new world government that will be implemented after the USA is wiped off the map. "Made in China" is the type of curse that the elite globalists who run things like to give people. They've been telling people what's going to happen for a long time and once it does happen, the people will get exactly what they paid for.
- wozniacki 9y ago
  The plot here is fairly simple and you can see it happening every day. China is the model for a new world government that will be implemented after the USA is wiped off the map. "Made in China" is the type of curse that the elite globalists who run things like to give people. Care to elaborate? Especially the "China is the model" part.
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    That’s the conclusion that I’ve reached. There are many rich and powerful men on record saying that they are working towards such a thing. I’m assuming this is the implementation.
    - wozniacki 9y ago
      Could you be a bit more generous with the details? Sources? Links? If these are anecdotes, what exactly did they say or mean?
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  "Came out of Yale" means one year running a magazine for the Yale associated school in China? As for the Western support, I can't begin to guess what you mean. My complete shot in the dark is some Western capitalists tried to make money in China, as they already have a history of being fine with the death of Chinese people to make money.
ptx 9y ago
> Julia Lovell, a British historian, makes a similar point. In her book “The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China”, she says the move into opium by British traders was not, as claimed by many Chinese historians, a deliberate conspiracy to make narcotic slaves of the Chinese. “It was a greedy, pragmatic response to a decline in sales of other British imports,” she writes. Is there a name for this fallacy? It seems to come up a lot. I.e., when someone takes an action that has enormous and predictable negative effects for someone else and a comparatively tiny positive effect for themselves, they then argue along the lines that "I was motivated by my gain, not by your loss (even though I knew it would result from my action), so you have no right to complain!" In this case, it can be both a "deliberate conspiracy" and a "pragmatic response". They deliberately conspired to hurt the Chinese for profit, judging their suffering to be a less important consideration than their own profits.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  I call it nationalist denial. Or deliberate ignorance. This type of nonsense is embedded in English accounts of the British Empire. Variants of the “white man’s burden” and the sacred principles of the market can be spun in all sorts of interesting ways. The most galling example of this that I’m familiar with is the Irish famine. Millions died of starvation in the midst of a record bumper crop for export. The British justification for deliberate inaction was and for many still is a mixture of denial, high minded debate about the role of government, and a deep concern for keeping Irish wretches out of a cycle of dependency.
  - awakeasleep 9y ago
    Another example is the opium poppy used as a symbol of Remembrance Day. It's a silly coincidence and was chosen because of the poem "in Flanders Fields". Never mind that a third of the population in some areas of India was literally starved to death to grow that exact, or what it did to China, or how it was the foundation of the British empire.
    - cgmg 9y ago
      It's not a "silly coincidence." "Poppies have long been used as a symbol of sleep, peace, and death: Sleep because the opium extracted from them is a sedative, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular. In Greek and Roman myths, poppies were used as offerings to the dead. Poppies used as emblems on tombstones symbolize eternal sleep. This symbolism was evoked in the children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which a magical poppy field threatened to make the protagonists sleep forever. A second interpretation of poppies in Classical mythology is that the bright scarlet color signifies a promise of resurrection after death." "The remembrance poppy was inspired by the World War I poem "In Flanders Fields". Its opening lines refer to the many poppies that were the first flowers to grow in the churned-up earth of soldiers' graves in Flanders, a region of Belgium."
oldpond 9y ago
Flowers in the Blood is an excellent read for anyone interested in this bit of history. https://www.amazon.ca/Flowers-Blood-Story-Jeff-Goldberg/dp/1626365407/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1517671999&sr=8-10&keywords=flowers+blood https://www.amazon.ca/Flowers-Blood-Story-Jeff-Goldberg/dp/1...
mcguire 9y ago
"Then, in revenge for the torture and killing of a group of British negotiators by the Chinese,..." Wait, what? The Chinese weren't entirely the victims? (Just seems a little out of place, given the rest of the article.)
- eadmund 9y ago
  I did a quick Googling. Turns out that a bunch of them were civilians, one of them was a journalist and friend of the British commander. They were tied up, denied water and their mouths filled with dust, among other tortures. Lord Elgin ordered the burning as vengeance for it.
- Sniffnoy 9y ago
  Yes -- I'm not sure people quite appreciate just how serious a matter killing a negotiator is: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/dont-shoot-the-messenger/ https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/dont-shoot-the...
hokus 9y ago
The most significant to me is that all the death destruction and suffering was all to further enrich some 5ish rich dudes. It is significant because this aspect of the west has not changed at all. Just look how our historians are happy to attribute such acts to countries(!???) Until we start attributing invasions to the people who wanted them, those who organized them and those who profited from them this wont change. Its at best inaccurate to state Britain wanted the war, Britain organized it and Britain profited. At worst it is the very formula to keep at it.
- fredley 9y ago
  I wonder how many rich dudes are at the top of the opiate pyramid in the US at the moment, profiting from the current crisis. It's not an attitude I've come across before—attributing these actions to individuals rather than nations. It's certainly an interesting one.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    I certainly have heard many people blame the Iraq war on Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell. Seems to me that the thesis is basically correct.
  - radicaldreamer 9y ago
    The attention economy is similar, with a small number of rich dudes at the top and vast addiction at the base.
  - gregpilling 9y ago
    http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-family-oxycontin/ http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-famil... This family is at the top of the opiate pyramid.
    - throwawayopium 9y ago
      I dated a girl whose mother cleaned their house. They had wealth I'd never seen before. Their house was massive. Like the basement was larger than any home I'd ever been in. I was told he was a hospital administrator. But actually he was just a drug pusher. Which makes so much more sense now looking back at the level of wealth.
ttscar 9y ago
In 2018's city of London, I can see small sliver laugh gas bottles frequently on the street, almost every day in my commuting - as Economist suggested, "by then, smoking the drug had come to be viewed not so much as a bad habit encouraged by the British." Selectively telling the truth and always weirdly emphasis on Chinese government makes me feel sick after reading. I guess that's the reason I stopped its subscription long time ago.
colorincorrect 9y ago
and rightfully so. under the guise of chinese-communism, the opium wars serves as canonical example of the evils of western capitalism.
YTGRK 9y ago
https://youtu.be/wxU3yWAURE8 https://youtu.be/wxU3yWAURE8
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jk2323 9y ago
China had accumulated a lot of the world silver reserves by selling tons silk and porcelain but buying basically nothing. Selling Opium to China "solved" this problem. Today the have the idea of exporting everything to the world and buy nothing besides a few raw materials, creating a giant trade deficit. Let's see how it ends.
- lithos 9y ago
  They already bypassed much of this generation's "drug of choice" by making foreign social media difficult.
  - westiseast 9y ago
    China has its own highly addictive social media.
partycoder 9y ago
The British empire invaded 9 out of 10 countries.
vonnik 9y ago
I think a more accurate headline would be "China's perception of the Opium Wars shape its view of the West." Why were the Opium Wars fought? One narrative says the Qing were trying to protect their population from the harms of addiction. But it is also true that the Qing were concerned about the outflow of silver, which was being used by Chinese merchants to buy opium, but which had also become the base currency of the Chinese economy in the mid-19th century. China was accumulating silver because it was selling more than it bought (sound familiar?), and opium was one commodity that found demand on the mainland.
yakitori 9y ago
It's really sad how little we are taught about the opium wars. It is easily the most important war in the last 500 years. The wealth that was taken from china as a result of the opium wars provided capital to britain and the US to fund our industrial revolution. It altered the course of history. One of the largest banks in the world ( HSBC ) was created in hong kong to launder opium money from china. FDR's grandfather was Warren Delano, one of the largest opium dealers in china. The opium money is what funded our institution building in the 1800s. The universities, museums, hospitals, etc were built with money from our opium dealers in china. http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2017/07/31/opium-boston-history http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2017/07/31/opium-boston-his... It is odd how much time we spend on ww1 and ww2 when neither war altered the balance of power. The opium wars ended the "faux parity" that existed between china and the west and it catapulted the anglosphere to the top. We live in an anglo world ( formerly british led but now US led ) because of the opium wars.

138 points by farnsworthy 9y ago

StudentStuff 9y ago

Communism will win

ben_w 9y ago
Communism, like libertarian capitalism, simplifies the human condition too much to win in a pure form. Both have important lessons, neither is sufficient. At least, neither is sufficient for now; I can image fully automated luxury space communism working, once AI is good enough.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  A post scarcity society is likely to be inerently more libertarian than communist, true post scarcity does not need a centrally managed economy. Communism doesn’t simplify the human condition as much as it replaces it, the scary part of communism isn’t the economy but the eradication of the self in favor of a group identity.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    Communism is not a centrally managed economy. It is an anarchistic form of society with no state. You might be confusing it with socialism which is what most states that are colloquially referred to as "Communist" really are. Socialism is supposed to be a short term form of government for transitioning to a communist society, but no real-world socialist state has made any significant progress at transitioning to communism.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      Communism is certainly is a centrally manged state owned economic system. Under communism there is no individual ownership and the state owns all of the means of production.
      - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        That is absolutely incorrect. Communism has no private property, but also has no state. You are thinking of socialism. That said, there are no large scale examples of real-world communist societies, so it is for the most part purely hypothetical, unlike socialism which has many real-world examples. You may be confused because of all of the states where the main political party is called the Communist party, but those states do not self-identify as communist. They self-identify as socialist states that are in the process of transitioning to communism.
        dogma1138 9y ago
        I’m not confused because communism does not exists in a vacuum a communist society will be a state. The “abolishment” of the state under communism does not do so in practice but rather in principle when everyone belongs to the state there is no state but it’s an empty and meaningless starlet. Communism also outside of some fringe Marxism and anarcho communism is not anarchist at all but rather very centralized.
        TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        Communism is by definition stateless, so any society where a state exists is not communism. You might say that this is impossible, and that would quite possibly be right, which is why there is no real-world example of a communist society. I think the only way that it could possibly work is with post-scarcity or at least much less scarcity that currently exists.
        dogma1138 9y ago
        How do you call a group of people with an shared identity and sovereignty? No real-world example is a coupout and a no true scottsman all in one. The stateless part is not what you think it means it just means that the state is not a separate entity to the individual mostly because individualism does not exist the only thing that exists is the group. When everyone is equal then there are no senators or presidents or mayors but everything is still centralized so some governing body forms or it’s total anarchy. But that doesn’t matter as long as not everyone is commmunist you would have a communist and a none communist state unless due to the authoritarian nature of communism the non communist group is annihilated. If anything the core principals of communism are much more abhorrent than any implementation of it we had so far.
  - ben_w 9y ago
    Your reply finally encouraged me to (skim) read my copy of the Communist Manifesto. Ironically, the very criticism you have of communism is their criticism of the bourgeoisie. Now, I think I should go read my copy of The Wealth of Nations for balance…

Pica_soO 9y ago

China history is a warning sign against centralism and the ability of humanity to get stuck in loops, economic and culturally - where it from a ruling partys point of view doesn't make sense to do anything to escape the loop. Impressive is that china at least kept- enforced by the layout of the country, a centralized state. At least it did not decay as much as the middle east or africa - after reaching peak people.

erikb 9y ago
This is so western propaganda boilerplate. What is the warning sign? China lifted more people out of poverty than all other countries combined. Actually the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism, and many western populations complain about their governments moving their power into a more and more centralized system. Have you for instance seen how Philipines and Turkey have moved away from a pro-western position?
- kylell 9y ago
  Turkey indicted 30k people and ruined lots of lives, just because someone hacked their wifi and added a link to some gullen (made up state enemy) website app, and just visiting that app website would put you in jail, but their didn't even do that. Philipines is worse with drugs regular killings, you must be quite an idiot to say this.
- barkxyz 9y ago
  It was the mistakes of a highly centralized government that helped thrust those same people into poverty in the first place. Why should centralism be credited for helping pull them out but not for putting them there in the first place? Meanwhile the West long ago eradicated the kind of poverty that still persists in China. Is that to be credited to our system of government too?
- adventured 9y ago
  > What is the warning sign? In the span of about 12 years, China became the world's most indebted nation. They have to accumulate about $4 trillion in debt annually to add $600 to $700 billion in GDP expansion, of which 1/3 to 2/5 goes just to paying for new debt interest costs. That debt scenario keeps getting worse each year. Local government defaults are a common discussion now, it's assumed they're going to suffer vast bankruptcies all over the nation. In just the next five years, they'll increase their already shocking pile of debt by another ~75% or so, adding between $20 and $30 trillion in new debt. > the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism That's incorrect. The whole world, including China, has attempted to partially emulate the developed nations of the West. China has gradually abandoned Communism and shifted to a market based economy, as one example. Their former system failed entirely, their shift to market based systems is an obvious admission of that. That process continues. All the developed Western nations have far superior standards of living at the median than China. The top Western examples are four to five times higher than China, and that's before accounting for the near total dearth of human rights in China. That gap is even greater when it comes to the poor. In China ~250 million people are still living on $3 per day or less.

erikb 9y ago

It is not true. It's just that politicians need official reasons to do what they do. And it's a great thing to use historical reasons because nobody can really counter them. Not a single Chinese person I know thinks about Westerners as sources of the Opium Wars and therefore as enemies. The opinions move between "West is so rich, let's be more like them" and "We are nearly back to our old glory, now also learn some of our culture!"

thereare5lights 9y ago
Oh yea, there are over a billion Chinese people in China alone and because not a single Chinese person you know has told you they think that, it must not be true!
- erikb 9y ago
  True, it doesn't reach a stastistical significance of >=95%. How does knowing roughly 100 Chinese people from different social levels, tiers, geographic locations, backgrounds compare to reading an article of foreign origin, though?
tanilama 9y ago
>> Westerners as sources of the Opium Wars and therefore as enemies The article is not wrong. Opium war, in the official narrative of recent Chinese history, is phrased as "the start of a hundred years of humiliation of China". It is heavily focused event in middle school history class. It definitely still shapes China in a lot of way, like the strictest drug prohibition may be in the whole world. In every day communication, it might not be significant, but it does have a greater effect on a subconscious level, serving as foundation for regular Chinese folk to perceive the relationship with West in general, which is centered with invasion, humiliation, lose of sovereignty and the shame of inferiority.
- cousin_it 9y ago
  Not sure you're disagreeing with the grandparent. A belief can be deeply held and a result of manipulation at the same time. Russia has similar grievances against the West that are promoted on TV, and people care strongly about them as a result. In the early 90s, when the injuries were fresh, the TV deemphasized them and fewer people cared. I've come to believe that when a government makes its citizens care about foreign policy, that's usually a distraction from domestic problems. In Russia's case it's corruption. Not sure about China.

akhatri_aus 9y ago

Yet its the same problem today that prompted the Opium Wars as back then: The West buys more from China than China buys from The West. Hopefully that colours the decisions made to rebalance the trade system.

dis-sys 9y ago
> The West buys more from China than China buys from The West because there are long list of high tech & military stuff that China is simply not allowed to buy. it is so bad to the extent that Chinese are not allowed to buy Intel Phi processors which many of your local computer shops allow you to make orders. Surely Chinese are interesting in buying America's advanced jet fighters, missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers, satellites etc. On the non-military side, how about super computers, space techs, laser, semiconductor techs, optical fiber, high end composite materials. EU has very similar laws & policies, nothing really different from the US.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  The Xeon Phi deal was pretty silly considering that Inspur just bought GPUs instead and Intel was allowed to sell Xeon Phis to Baidu in large amounts.
- adventured 9y ago
  > Surely Chinese are interesting in buying America's advanced jet fighters China's interested in buying precisely one round of each thing. And thereafter replacing it with their own. That's not a criticism, it's a fact of life in dealing with China. They have zero interest in being dependent on any outside nation more than absolutely necessary. The things you list, wouldn't even remotely dent the trade deficits China rings up. You're talking about $5 to $6 trillion per decade with the US and EU combined. Intel processors et al. are not going to fix that. There's absolutely nothing that can plug a $600 billion per year hole with China (US+EU), realistically. Energy exports (in the case of the US) is the only thing that could dent it. The solution is to move more manufacturing away from China and rebalance that large concentrated deficit with other nations in a distributed manner, and to make more things domestically. That will happen naturally as China's wages & costs continue to rise.

realPubkey 9y ago

This reminds me of the articles saying that germans like to use cash because of the inflation 100y ago. It's just not true and likely being written by someone who has never asked a single german/chinese.

garmaine 9y ago
On the other hand, having traveled extensively in Europe the Americas, and Asia, Germany does use cash far more than other countries even in Europe, although yes not to the extent cash is preferred in Asia.
- jotm 9y ago
  Getting a MasterCard or Visa was harder in Germany than it should've been. They're optional and cost extra, standard debit cards for a checking account are Cirrus/Maestro, which can't be used to pay online or abroad or in many places. It was easier to just use them to withdraw cash. Sparkasse for some reason gave me a MasterCard that had it's own account, so I had to transfer money from the checking account to the card if I wanted to use it. Maybe things have improved.
  - PuffinBlue 9y ago
    It's maybe more that shops/businesses didnt accept payment by much other than cash, bank transfer or ec card. Even national chains, until very recently, didnt accept credit cards.
    - wazoox 9y ago
      Yup, 2 years ago I went into a large chain store in Germany to buy a camera, no credit card accepted, in a place selling mostly expensive gear such as cameras, laptops, dishwashers... Boggled my mind. Fortunately I had enough cash this time.
      - rocqua 9y ago

wangii 9y ago

I don't understand the motivation of the article. Does the author try to justify the Opium War? Or to remind 1+ billion Chinese that the intepretation of history always subject to rulers' agenda, which is clearly stated in Chinese textbook? To show off his not-so-sharp observation to his readers? Or, to warn USA not to abandon the free trade principle?

philipov 9y ago
The motivation of all such articles is that someone's job is to write articles, and so articles must be written within the publishing deadline.
thomasahle 9y ago
What about giving the readers a better understanding of how China sees the West? These things can be complicated, and pointing out some of the forming events can be very helpful.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Some Chinese people are still cranky about the Opium Wars, some Irish folks still talk about the 800 year occupation, some Native Americans are still miffed about the whole killing and taking stuff thing. It may be news to some millennials in the tech industry, but the past isn't prologue. It isn't even past.
  - eastWestMath 9y ago
    Yeah, I’m pretty sure a lot of IRA funding came out of Boston. Turns out there were children and grandchildren of potato famine refugees who were still pretty pissed - who’d have thunk it.
    - Tsiklon 9y ago
      I recall seeing an article regarding an interview with a US Civil War veteran in the 1950's [1] which made me think, the Irish Famine was only some 150 years ago. It would have been likely that as recent as say, the 1930's you may have still had living survivors - and by extension, their stories of what they saw may yet be in living memory - it definitely would have still been in the 1970's. [1] - http://attic.areavoices.com/2011/03/01/listen-to-a-1954-interview-with-the-last-surviving-union-civil-war-vet/ http://attic.areavoices.com/2011/03/01/listen-to-a-1954-inte...

patrickg_zill 9y ago

I am surprised that the article makes no mention of the many Chinese action movies made that are set in the time period of the Opium Wars and that make explicit reference to it. Given that the film is made in China and received state support, it is not an accident. By the way the story of Baghdadi Jew, David Sassoon and his rise in prominence as a result of profiting from the Opium War is quite interesting in itself.

3pt14159 9y ago
I love foreign films. Any reasonably high brow recommendations?
- faitswulff 9y ago
  "High brow" is generally not what you'll get in Hong Kong cinema. The director Wong Kar Wai comes to mind, but I'm not sure if any of his movies are set in the Opium War or hand-off eras. For those eras, Once Upon a Time in China is pretty iconic to me.
- wj 9y ago
  Not high brow but I loved the Once Upon a Time in China trilogy.
- ahtu123 9y ago
  Not during the opium wars period but I love a movie called To Live. It's about a family's struggles with adjusting for the insanity of the cultural revolution. Lots of dark humor and I was super impressed by the scope of it. The familys world comes crashing down multiple times as the civil war breaks out and the revolution really kicks off. The movie, director and lead actress got banned from making movies for a few years too so you know it's good.

Feniks 9y ago

History shapes culture who knew? America is still fighting the Civil War. But the Chinese don't blame the West for the decline of China and the fall of the empire. They blame the old corrupt elite. When Deng Xiaoping went abroad in the 80s he did his damnedest to appear cultured and in control.

b6 9y ago
> They blame the old corrupt elite. Hmm, I hope that's true. But there's also the "century of humiliation" thing going on, which, to my mind, is an attempt to divert blame away from China itself (basically Mao -- the greatest enemy China ever had) toward outsiders. I don't know to what degree people are buying it.
- analyst74 9y ago
  You have to understand that Chinese culture is very inward-looking. All the invasions, unless they end up ruling China like Mongolians and Manchurians, are merely considered external forces not too different from natural disasters. Also, Chinese people don't see China as a single continuous entity like outsiders do, so most of the blame shifting doesn't have to go toward outside sources.

evolighting 9y ago

But every country teaching their version of history. Opium Wars is truly what change the Old China, force it open door which has long been closed. The so-called Freedom was just bullshit, it only profits, that drive the war. And I think the western world just never really understand the Chinese people's way of thinking, nor do they care.And that's how this article comes out.

ksec 9y ago

Well, that is the same as The World War 2 still shape x's view of the X.

deleted 9y ago

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hungerstrike 9y ago

If you disagree, I'd love to hear what you know about it! Did Mao not come out of Yale? Did he not have help from non-Chinese during his reign of terror? What part do you think I got wrong? The conclusion? Do you think "China" just shot up out of nowhere over the past 70 years because they had cheap labor? No. Their power could not have been created without the help of western nations. The most prolific mass murderer in the world, Mao Zedong, came out of Yale. Once he came to power, he had all sorts of help from non-Chinese. The plot here is fairly simple and you can see it happening every day. China is the model for a new world government that will be implemented after the USA is wiped off the map. "Made in China" is the type of curse that the elite globalists who run things like to give people. They've been telling people what's going to happen for a long time and once it does happen, the people will get exactly what they paid for.

wozniacki 9y ago
The plot here is fairly simple and you can see it happening every day. China is the model for a new world government that will be implemented after the USA is wiped off the map. "Made in China" is the type of curse that the elite globalists who run things like to give people. Care to elaborate? Especially the "China is the model" part.
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  That’s the conclusion that I’ve reached. There are many rich and powerful men on record saying that they are working towards such a thing. I’m assuming this is the implementation.
  - wozniacki 9y ago
    Could you be a bit more generous with the details? Sources? Links? If these are anecdotes, what exactly did they say or mean?
boomboomsubban 9y ago
"Came out of Yale" means one year running a magazine for the Yale associated school in China? As for the Western support, I can't begin to guess what you mean. My complete shot in the dark is some Western capitalists tried to make money in China, as they already have a history of being fine with the death of Chinese people to make money.

ptx 9y ago

> Julia Lovell, a British historian, makes a similar point. In her book “The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China”, she says the move into opium by British traders was not, as claimed by many Chinese historians, a deliberate conspiracy to make narcotic slaves of the Chinese. “It was a greedy, pragmatic response to a decline in sales of other British imports,” she writes. Is there a name for this fallacy? It seems to come up a lot. I.e., when someone takes an action that has enormous and predictable negative effects for someone else and a comparatively tiny positive effect for themselves, they then argue along the lines that "I was motivated by my gain, not by your loss (even though I knew it would result from my action), so you have no right to complain!" In this case, it can be both a "deliberate conspiracy" and a "pragmatic response". They deliberately conspired to hurt the Chinese for profit, judging their suffering to be a less important consideration than their own profits.

Spooky23 9y ago
I call it nationalist denial. Or deliberate ignorance. This type of nonsense is embedded in English accounts of the British Empire. Variants of the “white man’s burden” and the sacred principles of the market can be spun in all sorts of interesting ways. The most galling example of this that I’m familiar with is the Irish famine. Millions died of starvation in the midst of a record bumper crop for export. The British justification for deliberate inaction was and for many still is a mixture of denial, high minded debate about the role of government, and a deep concern for keeping Irish wretches out of a cycle of dependency.
- awakeasleep 9y ago
  Another example is the opium poppy used as a symbol of Remembrance Day. It's a silly coincidence and was chosen because of the poem "in Flanders Fields". Never mind that a third of the population in some areas of India was literally starved to death to grow that exact, or what it did to China, or how it was the foundation of the British empire.
  - cgmg 9y ago
    It's not a "silly coincidence." "Poppies have long been used as a symbol of sleep, peace, and death: Sleep because the opium extracted from them is a sedative, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular. In Greek and Roman myths, poppies were used as offerings to the dead. Poppies used as emblems on tombstones symbolize eternal sleep. This symbolism was evoked in the children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which a magical poppy field threatened to make the protagonists sleep forever. A second interpretation of poppies in Classical mythology is that the bright scarlet color signifies a promise of resurrection after death." "The remembrance poppy was inspired by the World War I poem "In Flanders Fields". Its opening lines refer to the many poppies that were the first flowers to grow in the churned-up earth of soldiers' graves in Flanders, a region of Belgium."

oldpond 9y ago

Flowers in the Blood is an excellent read for anyone interested in this bit of history. https://www.amazon.ca/Flowers-Blood-Story-Jeff-Goldberg/dp/1626365407/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1517671999&sr=8-10&keywords=flowers+blood https://www.amazon.ca/Flowers-Blood-Story-Jeff-Goldberg/dp/1...

mcguire 9y ago

"Then, in revenge for the torture and killing of a group of British negotiators by the Chinese,..." Wait, what? The Chinese weren't entirely the victims? (Just seems a little out of place, given the rest of the article.)

eadmund 9y ago
I did a quick Googling. Turns out that a bunch of them were civilians, one of them was a journalist and friend of the British commander. They were tied up, denied water and their mouths filled with dust, among other tortures. Lord Elgin ordered the burning as vengeance for it.
Sniffnoy 9y ago
Yes -- I'm not sure people quite appreciate just how serious a matter killing a negotiator is: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/dont-shoot-the-messenger/ https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/dont-shoot-the...

hokus 9y ago

The most significant to me is that all the death destruction and suffering was all to further enrich some 5ish rich dudes. It is significant because this aspect of the west has not changed at all. Just look how our historians are happy to attribute such acts to countries(!???) Until we start attributing invasions to the people who wanted them, those who organized them and those who profited from them this wont change. Its at best inaccurate to state Britain wanted the war, Britain organized it and Britain profited. At worst it is the very formula to keep at it.

fredley 9y ago
I wonder how many rich dudes are at the top of the opiate pyramid in the US at the moment, profiting from the current crisis. It's not an attitude I've come across before—attributing these actions to individuals rather than nations. It's certainly an interesting one.
- njarboe 9y ago
  I certainly have heard many people blame the Iraq war on Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell. Seems to me that the thesis is basically correct.
- radicaldreamer 9y ago
  The attention economy is similar, with a small number of rich dudes at the top and vast addiction at the base.
- gregpilling 9y ago
  http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-family-oxycontin/ http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-famil... This family is at the top of the opiate pyramid.
  - throwawayopium 9y ago
    I dated a girl whose mother cleaned their house. They had wealth I'd never seen before. Their house was massive. Like the basement was larger than any home I'd ever been in. I was told he was a hospital administrator. But actually he was just a drug pusher. Which makes so much more sense now looking back at the level of wealth.

ttscar 9y ago

In 2018's city of London, I can see small sliver laugh gas bottles frequently on the street, almost every day in my commuting - as Economist suggested, "by then, smoking the drug had come to be viewed not so much as a bad habit encouraged by the British." Selectively telling the truth and always weirdly emphasis on Chinese government makes me feel sick after reading. I guess that's the reason I stopped its subscription long time ago.

colorincorrect 9y ago

and rightfully so. under the guise of chinese-communism, the opium wars serves as canonical example of the evils of western capitalism.

YTGRK 9y ago

https://youtu.be/wxU3yWAURE8 https://youtu.be/wxU3yWAURE8

deleted 9y ago

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jk2323 9y ago

China had accumulated a lot of the world silver reserves by selling tons silk and porcelain but buying basically nothing. Selling Opium to China "solved" this problem. Today the have the idea of exporting everything to the world and buy nothing besides a few raw materials, creating a giant trade deficit. Let's see how it ends.

lithos 9y ago
They already bypassed much of this generation's "drug of choice" by making foreign social media difficult.
- westiseast 9y ago
  China has its own highly addictive social media.

partycoder 9y ago

The British empire invaded 9 out of 10 countries.

vonnik 9y ago

I think a more accurate headline would be "China's perception of the Opium Wars shape its view of the West." Why were the Opium Wars fought? One narrative says the Qing were trying to protect their population from the harms of addiction. But it is also true that the Qing were concerned about the outflow of silver, which was being used by Chinese merchants to buy opium, but which had also become the base currency of the Chinese economy in the mid-19th century. China was accumulating silver because it was selling more than it bought (sound familiar?), and opium was one commodity that found demand on the mainland.

yakitori 9y ago

It's really sad how little we are taught about the opium wars. It is easily the most important war in the last 500 years. The wealth that was taken from china as a result of the opium wars provided capital to britain and the US to fund our industrial revolution. It altered the course of history. One of the largest banks in the world ( HSBC ) was created in hong kong to launder opium money from china. FDR's grandfather was Warren Delano, one of the largest opium dealers in china. The opium money is what funded our institution building in the 1800s. The universities, museums, hospitals, etc were built with money from our opium dealers in china. http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2017/07/31/opium-boston-history http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2017/07/31/opium-boston-his... It is odd how much time we spend on ww1 and ww2 when neither war altered the balance of power. The opium wars ended the "faux parity" that existed between china and the west and it catapulted the anglosphere to the top. We live in an anglo world ( formerly british led but now US led ) because of the opium wars.