State-Sponsored Narco-Imperialism in China
China never trusted outsiders. As a “central civilization,” it treated foreign commerce as a limited privilege granted under strict controls. This was the Canton System of trade. Westerners were confined to the single port of Canton (Guangzhou). They had to deal exclusively through licensed Chinese merchants (the Cohong). Foreigners were forbidden from permanent residence or free travel inland.
Britain under Elizabeth I tried to establish connections with China in the 16th century and promoted voyages, but failed. In 1637, Captain John Weddell led the first English ships to reach the Chinese coast near Canton and Macau. This private venture, though backed by King Charles I, proved unsuccessful as it met with resistance from Chinese authorities.
The East India Company was the first British company to establish a regular trading presence in Canton around 1699–1700. It took another century to establish a British diplomatic mission: the Macartney Embassy of 1792–1794.
Saving Silver
Britain wanted Chinese goods (especially tea, silk, and porcelain), but China had little interest in most British products and insisted on payment in silver. This caused a massive outflow of silver from Britain to China.
By the early 19th century, British trade with China had produced a significant trade deficit. Britain bought enormous quantities of Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea. China purchased very little from Britain. The British East India Company found a solution: it began growing opium in Bengal and smuggling it illegally into China through a network of licensed merchants.
Opium had been known in China earlier, mainly as medicine. The Portuguese traded small quantities of opium with China in the early 18th century. From around 1773, the British became the dominant suppliers. Chinese emperors banned the sale and smoking of opium from 1729 onward and later banned its importation, but enforcement was weak and the trade continued through smuggling.
State-Sponsored Smuggling
Imports of opium rose sharply, from a few hundred chests per year in the early 18th century to roughly 4,000 chests by the 1790s, and over 10,000 by the 1820s. It reached its peak at around 40,000 chests (about 2,500 tonnes) by the late 1830s.
With such massive volumes, by the 1820s–1830s the trade reversed the silver flow: silver was now leaving China to pay for opium. Opium revenues also helped finance Britain’s purchases of Chinese tea. Addiction spread widely in China and became a serious social and economic crisis. The Qing dynasty recognized the catastrophic social consequences. By 1839, approximately 2 million Chinese citizens were opium addicts.
Commissioner Lin Zexu was appointed to stop the trade. He confiscated and destroyed 1,400 tons of British opium. He wrote a letter to Queen Victoria appealing to her personal morality, asking how a country that banned opium for its own citizens could justify flooding another nation with it. He was counting upon the humanity of Queen Victoria. But we already know better about the British.
Britain’s response was to launch a war. It refused to call the smuggling of opium into China a “crime.” When Thatcher quipped about crime thrice in relation to Bobby Sands, she simply chose to ignore her own history.
War to Commit Crime
The Royal Navy bombarded Chinese coastal cities. It used modern sailing warships and steam-powered iron vessels (notably the Nemesis). These vessels could operate in shallow rivers and against the wind. British artillery had longer range, higher accuracy, a faster rate of fire, and better gunpowder. Infantry used reliable flintlock muskets and early rifles with far greater range and rate of fire than Qing weapons. The result was that the British could inflict damage from a safe distance without taking many casualties.
Chinese cannons were often outdated (many designs 100–200 years behind), fixed in place, shorter-ranged, and less accurate. Many soldiers still relied heavily on traditional weapons (spears, swords, bows) or old matchlock-style firearms. Gunpowder quality was generally poorer.
The resulting Treaty of Nanking forced China to open five treaty ports, cede Hong Kong to Britain, pay significant reparations, and grant British merchants most-favored-nation trading status. The treaty said nothing about legalizing opium. The trade simply continued. This became known as the First Opium War, lasting from 1839 to 1842.
But now the British had tasted power through war. Peace did not last long. They returned for another war on the pretext of an insult to the British flag. This time the French joined them.
Loot Like Common Thugs
In October 1856, Chinese authorities boarded a ship called the Arrow in Canton. The ship was Chinese-owned but registered in Hong Kong and flying a British flag. They arrested some of the Chinese crew on suspicion of piracy and smuggling and lowered the British flag. The British consul claimed this was an insult to the British flag and a violation of treaty rights. The consul demanded an apology and the release of the crew. The Chinese side refused to give a full apology in the language Britain wanted.
At the same time, a French missionary was killed in the interior of China. France used this as its own justification to join Britain. Both decided to use force to make China accept broader demands. This war was about forcing China to open up much more widely to Western trade, diplomacy, and influence. But opium legalization was also one of the primary goals. This became known as the Second Opium War, lasting from 1856 to 1860.
In 1858, Anglo-French forces moved north, captured the Taku Forts near Tianjin, and forced China to sign the Treaty of Tianjin. This treaty gave the Western powers most of what they wanted: more open ports, diplomats residing in Beijing, freedom of movement inland, and missionary rights. Opium was effectively legalized in follow-up agreements. But China delayed ratifying the treaty and resisted the idea of foreign ambassadors living in Beijing.
In 1859, British and French envoys tried to go to Beijing to exchange the ratified treaties. Chinese forces blocked them at the Taku Forts and defeated the small force that attempted to force a passage.
The next year, in 1860, Britain and France sent a much larger army. They captured the Taku Forts, advanced to Beijing, and the Xianfeng Emperor fled. British troops under Lord Elgin entered Beijing. They looted the Old Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, a complex of palaces and gardens representing centuries of Chinese artistic and cultural heritage. After looting it, they burned it to the ground. Lord Elgin ordered the burning explicitly to punish the Chinese government and avoid harming civilian areas of the city.
China was forced to accept the Convention of Beijing (1860), which confirmed the 1858 treaties and added further concessions (including the cession of the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain).
The unequal treaties signed in the wake of these wars gave Britain extraordinary extraterritorial legal rights on Chinese soil. These remained in place until 1943.
The British were throughout protecting a criminal enterprise in narcotics against a sovereign nation attempting to protect its own people.
On foreign soil, crime was not a crime.
Revisiting Bobby Sands
In 1860 in Beijing, the mistreatment of British captives was instantly elevated to a supreme moral crisis. Lord Elgin declared that violating the dignity of British envoys justified burning centuries of irreplaceable cultural heritage and stealing thousands of royal treasures. Here, “human dignity” was used as a convenient pretext for state violence, plunder, territorial concessions, and corporate narco-trafficking.
In 1981 in Northern Ireland, when Irish prisoners demanded basic human dignity. They wanted to wear their own clothes, access to toilets, and freedom from beatings. Here the British state apparatus inverted its logic.
The state manufactured bio-sanitary torture by locking men in cells with open chamber pots and refusing to clear waste. When the prisoners smeared excrement on walls to survive the bio-hazard, the state used its media machine to label them “barbaric.”
Here, denying human dignity was justified under the banner of “law, order, and discipline.”
For an imperial state, human rights are never an intrinsic moral duty. They are an instrument of power. They exercise it when they are in power.
In Chapter 3, we dealt with East Africa. In the next chapter, we shall discuss South Africa and how it suffered at the hands of the British.
References:
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Lin Zexu, Imperial Commissioner. Letter to Queen Victoria, 1839. Documented and analyzed in Perdue, Peter C., “The First Opium War”, MIT Visualizing Cultures (ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/opium_wars_01).
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Loch, Henry Brougham. Personal Narrative of Occurrences During Lord Elgin’s Second Embassy to China, 1860. John Murray, London, 1869. (Eyewitness account by Elgin’s aide describing the looting and burning of the Old Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan).
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Elgin, James Bruce, 8th Earl of (ed. Theodore Walrond). Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin. John Murray, London, 1872. (Lord Elgin’s official letters justifying the deliberate destruction of the Summer Palace).
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Hanes, W. Travis and Sanello, Frank. The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another. Sourcebooks, 2002. ISBN: 978-1402201493. (Detailed historical narrative of the British state-backed narco-trafficking enterprise).