The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  In autumn 1898, Liang fled China for Japan with a price on his head. That summer, he and his peers had briefly won the ear of the young emperor Guangxu (1871–1908), who for three feverish months had announced a range of Westernizing reforms overhauling education, commerce, the army, industry and government, before his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi, had put him under house arrest and executed those radical leaders who failed to flee her crackdown. But Liang was not silenced. He spent the next decade generating polemics on education, on historiography, on law, parliaments, taxation, freedom, oranges. By the early 1900s, Liang had established himself as one of the most brilliant and influential writers of his generation – perhaps, even, as the founder of modern Chinese journalism. Mao Zedong admitted that he ‘worshipped Liang Qichao’ as a sixteen-year-old, ‘reading and rereading’ Liang’s essays until he ‘knew them by heart.’26

  Like Yan Fu, one of the prolific Liang’s favourite subjects was China’s deficiencies; both men were reluctant to view their country as the blameless victim of Western imperialism. Although they could be tainted by a crude ethnic pride that denigrated the ‘black, red and brown’ peoples while proclaiming the Chinese race ‘the most expansive and vigorous race on earth’, Liang’s sermons were rich also in sinophobia.27 The West might want to treat the Chinese ‘as dogs and horses’, he analysed, but China was to blame for willingly becoming their ‘slaves, wives, and cows’. Why, he asked, ‘are we so rotten and dispirited?’ It was, he concluded, China’s corruption, selfishness, isolation, ignorance, cowardice and conservatism that had allowed the West to take advantage of the country. The West can only ‘humiliate us, and annihilate other people and countries due to the superiority their own institutions (their parliament and newspapers) . . . and to their use of human and material resources.’ ‘The destruction of our country is not due to poverty, or to weakness, or to external troubles, or to internal divisions’, he concluded in 1898. ‘It’s due to the mental weakness of our educated men.’28

  Liang’s critical approach was echoed by the late Qing newspapers that he had helped to popularize. ‘Out of the 400 million people in our nation, half of them are weak women with bound feet’, commented one disgusted journalist in 1904. ‘Of the remaining 200 million, half again are emaciated and sickly opium addicts, and the rest are beggars, thieves, Buddhists, and Daoists, good-for-nothings from wealthy families, local bullies, the diseased, criminals, and actors and actresses.’ ‘The people of our nation do not know what rights are,’ regretted another journalist in 1908. ‘Alas! The dung beetle eats shit and rejoices. A fish swimming in a kettle forgets the water is boiling.’29

  Men such as Yan Fu and Liang Qichao were not to be shaken from their negative view of their countrymen even after the imperialist rape of north China that followed the Boxer Rebellion. The revolt, Yan Fu decided, was an ‘uprising of the superstitious mob and of ignorant and worthless armed bandits . . . It was certainly a disaster for our state.’ Liang Qichao blamed the cataclysm not on Western brutality, but on the ‘poisonous influence’ of traditional Chinese fiction, which was responsible for leading the ‘whole nation into great trouble.’30 Editorials in the country’s most popular newspaper, Shenbao, lambasted the dynasty’s ‘muddleheaded, common, false and reckless’ ministers, who had encouraged the Boxers: ‘if the Boxer rebels are not taken to task, all these [foreign] countries will bring out their military in great numbers and enter China’. China, in other words, had brought Western violence down on itself.31

  Although this wave of Chinese self-recrimination crested in the decade after 1895, it had a much older pedigree. Between the Opium War itself and at least the 1910s, the Chinese (at the top and the bottom of the social scale) saved their most vitriolic attacks not for the foreigners who had brought destruction to the south and east coasts and to north China, but for their own poor leadership – some actually starved themselves to death in protest at the ‘treachery’ of Daoguang’s 1842 negotiators. Even Lin Zexu – so often lionized by his fellow Chinese officials as a fearless patriot – suffered at the hands of public opinion. A victim of the Anglo-French looting of Beijing in 1860 offered the following analysis of the catastrophe. ‘Some blamed Heaven for this unprecedented chaos but how, I say, can you deny it was brought upon us by human error?’ His account of the painful events of 1860 – some 14,000 words long – principally directed its invective not at the British or French, but at derelict Qing ministers. ‘Our nation’s troubles began with Lin Zexu and Yuqian . . . Oh, I could eat their flesh! . . . Lin stole the foreigners’ ships and destroyed their opium. As a result, they became angry and found a pretext for war.’ In his estimation, the chief villain of the second war was the Qing commander, one Senggelinqin, who spent vast amounts of money on half-baked defence plans, then ran away the instant that they failed. ‘He fled like a rabbit and hid like a tortoise . . . The great invasion [of 1860], the poison it caused the people and the disastrous burning of the Summer Palace were all his fault . . . If only we had had a decent commander . . . we would have seen the foreigners off with no trouble at all.’ The people of Beijing, he remembered, all acclaimed him ‘the King of Wobbles . . . how, I wonder, will he dare face the King of the Underworld after he has died?’ Thanks to the incompetence of the leadership, this eyewitness concluded, ‘anyone with a scrap of intelligence would have long known we were bound to lose . . . We invited disaster upon ourselves.’32

  Xia Xie, a well-regarded 1860s chronicler of both China’s wars with Britain, agreed that the Qing’s troubles were self-inflicted: ‘Worms only appear in a rotten carcass. It was not until exaction followed exaction, and justice was denied to creditors, that the foreigners turned upon us . . . opium only came because profits being impossible by fair means, the foreigners were driven to obtain them by foul means.’33 Late-nineteenth-century accounts of the Opium Wars seemed less interested in the idea that dominates China’s history industry today: that a global imperialist conspiracy was scheming to enslave the Chinese. Until the 1920s, the Chinese did not even get round to producing single, unified names for the war of 1839–42 and the treaty that concluded it. Often, discussions of these events refused to dignify them with the term ‘war’, preferring instead the old usage ‘quarrel’, ‘provocation’ or ‘disturbance’, while the British were identified dismissively as ‘slaves’, ‘pirates’, ‘robbers’, ‘dogs’, ‘sheep’.34

  The new opium-prohibition movement that developed within China around 1900 harmonized with the self-disgusted nationalism of the young century. With its fixation on ‘renovating the people’ into a modern nation, the patriotism of men like Yan Fu returned regularly to medical metaphors for the country’s predicament. ‘A nation is like a human’, wrote Yan. ‘If an individual is not active physically, the body will be weak . . . Does today’s China look like a sick man?’ ‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’ echoed other reformers. ‘This great China, which for many centuries was hailed as the Celestial Empire by neighbours, is now reduced to a fourth-rate nation! The foreigners call us the sick man of East Asia: they call us a barbarian, inferior race.’35 To strengthen the nation, Yan believed, the Chinese must first strengthen themselves by ridding themselves of their bad habits. And of all China’s hideous vices, ‘opium and foot-binding are the most destructive, and the most inveterate.’36 Opium – this intellectual narcotic that was sapping the country’s vigour, and putting its people to sleep when they needed to ‘awaken’ to a new national struggle for survival – became the perfect symbol of the Chinese sickness. ‘Alas!’ cried Shenbao in 1906. ‘The poison of opium that has been flowing so long through China is the cause of our country’s weakness, of our people’s poverty. Every day our vitality ebbs and the day of our extinction grows closer.’37 Even as opium remained a Chinese aspirin for the under-medicated masses, a fuel (as stimulant and appetite suppressant) for armies of cheap labour and a pleasure-giving narcotic for those with money and leisure, elite moral opinion was starting to move against the drug. The picture that the polemica
l press painted of opium addiction became desperate: perhaps ‘70 per cent’, of Chinese, Shenbao announced, ‘can no longer extricate themselves [from the habit] . . . Their lives fall drop by drop into the opium box, and their souls flicker away in the light of the opium lamp . . . When stung they feel no pain; when kicked, their wilted bones fail to rise. Since most of our countrymen wreck themselves by smoking opium, they represent our listless nation.’38

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, in cities and towns across the country, opium-suppression societies denounced the drug in parades, meetings, journals and pamphlets. Hundreds of thousands of dens were shut down, while crowds gathered to attend burnings of confiscated opium and pipes. Investigators raided suspected illicit dens by night; vigilantes set upon inveterate smokers. Detoxification centres (often run by Western missionaries) did brisk business harassing smokers with a wide range of often untested, disgusting and potentially lethal cures. (‘How strange it was’, one observer of British missionaries’ anti-opium activities mused, ‘that the country which sends the poison should also send the antidote.’39) Some gave smokers miracle pills containing pomegranate skin, camphor, capsicum, quinine, belladonna, arsenic and cocaine; others subjected their patients to hypnotism, tai-chi, radio, religion and flannel underwear. Others again treated smokers with morphine pills, which the locals promptly christened ‘Jesus opium’; red Heroin pills – rumoured to contain a virgin’s first menstrual blood – were liked, too. One ex-smoker enthusiastically endorsed a Hong Kong clinician’s cure consisting principally of morphine injections.40

  The truly unfortunate were locked up, abruptly deprived of the drug and dosed with strong coffee. ‘Opium took us to paradise’, scrawled one unfortunate on the wall of a late-nineteenth-century clinic. ‘Now we are tortured in hell.’41 Those too poor or overworked to find an alternative, one missionary reported, simply died of the shock: ‘When the opium dens were first closed the mortality among the poorer people was dreadful, for the opium smokers lived from hand to mouth, and, as they could not work without their usual opium, they died, partly of starvation, and partly from sudden deprivation of the drug.’42 In 1906, the Qing government officially supported the campaign, announcing a new ban on opium and its intention to rid the empire of the drug within ten years. In 1907, Great Britain was somehow shamed into the Anglo-Chinese Ten-Year Opium Suppression Agreement, which pledged to cut opium imports into China by 10 per cent a year, if China cut back equally on domestic growth of the drug. (The Times responded to the news by sneering at the Chinese ‘love of regulations’ but ‘abhorrence of regulation’, and loftily calling on the British to take a lead, thereby displaying those ‘qualities of humanity and altruism upon which we base our claims to a civilization superior to that of the East.’43)

  Like the Taiping Rebellion’s ideologues and reformists such as Yan Fu and Guo Songtao, though, anti-opium campaigners seemed reluctant to blame China’s opium habit exclusively on imperialism. ‘The English use opium to speed China’s demise’, summarized a Shanghai poet at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘The Chinese do not understand and vie to smoke it; this can be called great stupidity.’44 The origins of opium, then, had become clouded by the start of the twentieth century. Even if opium had originally been brought to China by foreigners, it was the weak Chinese who had seduced themselves into the habit; this weakness was in turn exacerbated by opium. ‘To prevent worse to come,’ ran one anti-opium manifesto, ‘we have first to realize with sadness that in this world our race is the lowest.’45 A throwaway remark about the Opium Wars in a history textbook of the 1900s catches the self-loathing: ‘The empire grew addicted to smoking opium . . . The government tried all sorts of methods to curb the habit, due to the harm that it did to the population, but our people were too stubbornly stupid to give it up.’46

  In a province like Sichuan, in any case, locals had some difficulty in viewing opium as a foreign commodity, because local production had long outstripped imports. Since 1860, opium duties had bought boats, guns and ammunition to help the Qing government suppress civil wars such as the Taiping Rebellion. After 1874, Li Hongzhang had argued that domestic cultivation should openly resume, while piously declaring that the ‘single aim of my Government in taxing opium will be in the future, as it has always been in the past, to repress the traffic – never the desire to gain revenue from such a source.’47 Nonetheless, during the 1870s south-west China alone began to produce more opium than the country was importing. Anti-imperialist passions in late-Qing China were often directed at issues other than opium. Through the 1900s, many regions of China were in the grip of a passionate Rights Recovery Movement, opposing European and American attempts to buy up the country’s nascent railway system and Qing willingness to sell it: students threatened to starve themselves to death, soldiers wrote letters of protest in blood and one academic allegedly died of sadness on hearing the news that the government had accepted a massive foreign loan to build one stretch of track.48 A cartoon from the 1908 Shanghai Times entitled ‘Experts at Destroying China’ pictured five pickaxes hacking at the characters for ‘China’. Only one represented foreign interests (missionaries); the other four stood for soldiers, officials, political factions and bandits.49

  From the 1920s onwards, China’s young, authoritarian political parties would make much of the horrors of imperialism in China; the reality was more equivocal.50 Certainly, there was much that was alarmingly foreign, or racist about the Western presence in China (concentrated in the concessions that developed in the treaty ports after 1842). Falling into the first category was the curious and disgusting food that the foreigners seemed to enjoy (the breaded cutlets, the curries, the rich soup, the butter, the pastries, jellies, custards, blancmanges); their habit of taking egg in their tea, if there was no milk to be had; their penchant for violent exercise (‘shaking up the liver’) in strange, uncomfortable clothes – one Chinese official is supposed to have once asked a British consul why he did not pay someone to play tennis on his behalf.51 Falling into the second category was the effective apartheid of much treaty-port life: the spirit of exclusion expressed by the legend of the Shanghai park sign stipulating ‘No Dogs or Chinese’; the condescending lectures delivered to ‘hopeless’ native servants. (The first chapter of the first Chinese-language textbook I ever picked up, printed in the 1950s, contained the all-important sentence construction: ‘Tell the servant to . . . [open the window etc.]’.52)

  But the treaty ports were more than a symbol of imperialist oppression – they were also 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 1901.53 While some locals worried that in half a century Shanghai would be so overladen with skyscrapers that it would be swallowed up by the earth, elsewhere in the metropolis writers, artists, filmmakers and actors sipped chocolate and coffee in chichi jazz cafes, caught Tarzan movies or screwball comedies fresh out of Hollywood, shopped for high-heeled leather shoes and lipsticks in towering department stores, bought first editions of Joyce or Eliot in bookshops or enjoyed sauntering up and down the city’s Parisian boulevards. Mesmerized by the cosmopolitanism of the place, Shanghai novelists of the 1920s and 1930s scattered their texts with chic foreign phrases: ‘chicken a la king’; ‘charming, Dear!’, ‘kiss-proof’.54 The press explosion of the late Qing – the mass of newspapers that jibed at the establishment through the first decade of the twentieth century, creating a public opinion that made nationalism and revolution possible – could not have taken place outside the foreign concessions in cities such as Shanghai, where extraterritoriality permitted a degree of intellectual freedom not possible elsewhere in the empire. In 1904, the fugitive Liang Qichao risked his life to return to Shanghai – a price of 100,000 ounces of silver still on his head – to start a new paper. In 1911, the accidental bomb explosion that kicked off a nationalist revolution and brought to an end 2,000
years of imperial rule over China took place at a secret meeting in the Russian concession in the central Chinese city of Hankow.

  And despite the anti-opium fury generated across the fin-de-siècle empire, plenty of people seemed unable to make up their minds about it or to treat it as a serious problem. The inconsistency of Sun Yat-sen, acclaimed on both sides of the Taiwanese straits as guofu (the father of the modern Chinese nation), was exemplary. ‘Opium has caused more harm than war, plague and famine in China for more than ten years’, he pronounced in the 1920s, perhaps forgetting that back in 1894 he had advised the Qing leadership to exhort the people to grow their own poppies to squeeze out the foreign competition, informing them that he had enjoyed much success persuading farmers in his home village in Guangdong to do just that. The bouquet of his local variety, he commented with authority, was ‘even better than that of Indian opium, and far superior to that of Sichuan and Yunnan.’55 Shanghai guidebooks vacillated over opium, exclaiming on one page about the wonders of the city’s opium halls, while attacking the drug as a poison on another.56

  In any case, there was too much money tied up in China’s narcotic economy for it to surrender to prohibition without a fight. Although Alexander Hosie, the man whom Britain appointed to verify the Qing’s claims of reducing opium production, reported that it had shrunk dramatically across China between 1907 and 1910, and in places been eradicated altogether, in 1908 a British missionary reported a case from north-west China in which ‘the farmers, in spite of strongly worded proclamations and occasional demonstrations of soldiers, refuse to destroy it. Bands of their wives have gone to the magistrate’s yamen, saying, “You may kill us, but we will grow opium.” ’57 Anti-opium activists were periodically roughed up by angry, unemployed former den managers. Banquets and bribes, moreover, usually offered a way out for those unwilling to give up opium cultivation. If fed and remunerated well enough, poppy-extermination squads would simply tap the flowers with their swords. The inconvenient fact was that by 1900, opium had become naturalized to China: it was too useful, too prevalent to be easily uprooted. Even after the Nationalist Party began executing smokers in the 1930s, the Chinese attachment to opium remained hard to shake. As late as 1944, a war fought by local farmers to protect poppy fields in Guizhou left eighty killed or wounded. In 1939, an opium-prohibition inspector in Yunnan was reported to have died of a sudden, mysterious illness; careful investigation (which his successor was careful not to undertake) would have revealed that local bigwigs had had him crushed to death under rice sacks.58