The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  But our best example of early twentieth-century China’s ambivalence towards opium is perhaps Yan Fu. Aged twenty-eight, he acquired – to the tremendous disappointment of his later nationalist biographers – the opium habit himself, thirteen years before he would begin to characterize it as one of China’s most pernicious customs. He struggled guiltily with the habit for the rest of his life – even though his breathing problems gave him a sound medical reason for taking the drug as a cough suppressant. In 1921, a year after he had finally succeeded in giving up his opium pipe, he died of asthma.59

  Chapter Eighteen

  COMMUNIST CONSPIRACIES

  The 1850s were a trying decade for Karl Marx. Expelled from three countries (and barred even from Switzerland), in 1849 he had settled in London with his family. Not long after their arrival, however, the Marxes were evicted from their lodgings and their few possessions confiscated by bailiffs. In the next ten years, three of his children died, most probably from the strains of destitution, as Marx stumbled between financial crises, squandering his journalistic income and handouts from his friend Engels on maintaining a respectable middle-class facade (a useless personal secretary, seaside holidays, ball-gowns for his would-be debutante daughters), all the while agitating for the overthrow of capitalism by the global proletariat.

  Despite the chaos of his own circumstances, Marx retained a robust belief in his ability to pronounce on the affairs of the world. And through the decade, his attention turned sporadically to China. The series of articles on the subject that he composed for the New York Daily Tribune had little good to say about Palmerston and his ‘Christianity-canting and civilisation-mongering’ government,1 or about the merchant interests who were, by 1857, driving the two sides towards ‘this most unrighteous war’ that will lead the Chinese ‘to regard all the nations of the Western World as united in a conspiracy against them.’2 For China, Marx decided, the first Opium War had been an epochal catastrophe: ‘The tribute to be paid to England after the unfortunate war of 1840, the great unproductive consumption of opium, the drain of the precious metals by this trade’ had broken the country.3 Worse than that, the British had calculatingly poisoned an empire, for ‘the opium seller slays the body after he has corrupted, degraded and annihilated the moral being of unhappy sinners, while every hour is bringing new victims to a Moloch which knows no satiety, and where the English murderer and Chinese suicide vie with each other in offerings at his shrine.’4

  Yet at the same time, Marx was unable to muster much admiration for China, this ‘giant empire,

  containing almost one-third of the human race, vegetating in the teeth of time . . . contriving to dupe itself with delusions of celestial perfection . . . Before the British arms the authority of the Manchu dynasty fell to pieces; the superstitious faith in the eternity of the Celestial Empire broke down; the barbarous and hermetic isolation from the civilised world was infringed . . . That isolation having come to a violent end by the medium of England, dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air.5

  The inevitable result of this clash was ‘one formidable revolution . . . afforded by the English cannon forcing upon China that soporific drug called opium . . . It would seem as though history had first to make this whole people drunk before it could rouse them out of their hereditary stupidity.’6

  There was little that was original in Marx’s conclusions about China and its Opium Wars. Key elements of his analysis – in particular, his scorn for the decadence of the Chinese empire – are to be found scattered across previous China-watchers’ accounts. Heavily influenced by earlier European sinophobes of the nineteenth century, Marx propounded a vision of China that stripped it of both complexity and agency: that saw it as an inert empire capable only of being ‘woken’ by the West in the Opium War. The one novelty that Marx added to the standard racist repertoire of Victorian commentaries on China was a similarly intense disgust for Western imperialism.

  By 1860, Marx had moved on from China, to concentrate instead on failing to complete Volume 1 of Capital; he seems never to have returned seriously to the subject. Less than a century later, however, his views would become enshrined in Chinese nationalist thought as the definitive account of ‘the Celestial Empire’ and the Opium Wars. This account would become the founding myth of Chinese nationalism: the beginning of the Western imperialist conspiracy against a rotting ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial’ China, from which only communism could save the country. At the heart of anti-Western Maoism, therefore, lies a profound reverence for European opinion.

  And to tell the strange story of how the opinions dashed off by a bourgeois from the Lower Rhine became holy writ in China, we must first return to the labours of another financially challenged chancer of the late-nineteenth century (and the architect of a one-party Chinese nation-state): Sun Yat-sen. It was Sun’s late, ambivalent decision of the 1920s – taken in desperation to win Soviet funding for his faltering revolution – to name imperialism as the cause of all modern China’s problems that transformed the Opium War into the inaugural trauma of Chinese history, and into a vital ingredient of twentieth-century patriotic propaganda.

  Born in 1866 into a peasant family a little north of Macao, educated in Hong Kong and Hawai’i thanks to the generosity of a brother who had sailed off to make his fortune overseas, Sun was the archetypal product of China’s forced opening to the West. By his late twenties, he had competent English, had graduated from a Hong Kong college with rudimentary knowledge of Western medicine and had converted to Christianity.

  In 1894, he made a brief attempt at a more conventional career in the imperial bureaucracy, travelling north to deliver to the Qing head of state, Li Hongzhang, a long petition that offered his services to modernizing China. Preoccupied by war with Japan, Li did not make time to see him. This snub seems to have been enough to convince Sun that he must concentrate his energies on bringing down the entire edifice of Qing rule, and before the year was out he had founded a secret revolutionary cell in Hawai’i, the Revive China Society, dedicated to overthrowing the Manchus. After his first planned uprising in 1895 failed disastrously, he fled China with a price on his head and began a career as a professional itinerant revolutionary. Through this dispossessed period, Sun would develop his vision of a republican, nationalist state that would in later decades help win him a place in modern Chinese history as ‘father of the nation’.

  Over the course of the next sixteen years, Sun flitted between countries (Britain, France, Japan, the United States) and social groups (bandits, pirates, monarchists, anarchists, foreign ministers, missionaries, overseas Chinese businessmen, American mercenaries), begging for money and help for his anti-Manchu revolution, artfully telling each constituency what they wanted to hear. In London one season, he would extol the virtues of the British legal system; in Japan the next, he would excoriate the horrors of Western colonialism to Pan-Asianists. A year later, he would be wooing China’s secret societies with toasts in pigeon’s blood, while offering parts of south China to French imperialists if they first pledged to finance his ‘federated republic’.

  After a decade of failed rebellions, he read in October 1911 – in a newspaper, while breakfasting at the foot of the Rocky Mountains – that a string of revolutionary uprisings, beginning with a botched bomb explosion in central China, had brought down the Qing dynasty. (Sun was in the United States to work out the details of an anti-Qing conspiracy with a hunchbacked adventurer called Homer Lea, who was offering $3.5 million worth of soldiers and weapons in exchange for full economic control of the republic that would ensue.) Rather than rush straight back to China, however, Sun booked a ship ticket to London, where he promised the British government that in return for their support of the new regime he would appoint British officers to the command of the Chinese navy and enthrone a British official as his ‘political adviser’.7

  Finally returning to China
on Christmas Day 1911, he accepted the presidency for thirty-four days, before handing over the infant republic to a former Qing general, Yuan Shikai, whose personal command over the Beiyang army in the north-east – the country’s largest, most modernized military force – had enabled him to dominate negotiations between the Qing and the revolutionaries over the preceding weeks. In 1913, Sun found himself on the run again after Yuan had ordered the assassination of a newly elected prime minister, thereby destroying the new government’s shaky democratic structures.8 For the next decade, Sun returned to frequenting the drawing rooms of the international rich and powerful, offering slices of his future Chinese republic to the highest bidder.

  But despite his promises to would-be foreign friends, he made little progress in finding funding for his republican dream. Following Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, his subordinates divided the country into personal enclaves and began battling each other for overall control. In 1917, after the warlord fashion of the day, Sun headed for his native Canton and, decked out in plumed helmet, fringed epaulettes and white gloves, proclaimed himself Grand Marshal of a cash-starved military government that existed principally on paper – he could muster, at the peak of his command, some twenty battalions and one gunboat. By 1922, even by the standards of his career to that point, Sun’s position was looking precarious. On 16 June, his headquarters in Canton were bombarded by a former ally, Chen Jiongming, a Cantonese commander who objected to Sun’s schemes to force Guangdong to pay for a northern expedition to reunite the country under his leadership. In the fire that resulted, Sun was forced to flee his house pursued by rifle shots and shouts of ‘Kill Sun! Kill Sun!’ He spent the next seven weeks sweltering on board a gunboat, waiting in vain for reinforcements to restore him to his seat of power, while his old friends the British did nothing except send a ship to taxi him to Hong Kong.9

  Impelled at least partly by hopelessness, around this time Sun began to give thought to overtures from the Soviet Union. The Russians, it emerged, were willing to provide his fractious Nationalist Party (Guomindang or GMD – the organization that he had founded in 1912, to replace his similarly fractious Revolutionary Alliance of the 1900s) with funding, arms and political and military training. Sun, in return, would allow members of the young Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921 with help from the Comintern, into the ranks of the Nationalists, to form a United Front. Sun hoped that the Soviets would make him a Chinese Lenin, injecting the cash, weapons and discipline necessary to turn the Guomindang into a force that could reunite the country by defeating the warlords who had carved up China. The Russians planned to further their long-term aim of world revolution by advancing in China the primary political stage – national bourgeois revolution assisted by Chinese Communists – from within which, they hoped, communist revolution would spring.

  But to secure Soviet money, Sun had to make a stand on a handful of key Communist policies. Displaying solidarity with the proletariat was one: organizing strikes, reducing rents, redistributing land and so on. In theory, this step made good sense, promising to turn Sun’s Nationalist Party into a genuinely mass organization. In practice, it would prove problematic, for Sun had little stomach for class struggle. Since 1905, Sun’s political manifestoes had glibly called for the ‘equalization of land rights’, while failing to acknowledge the social and economic conflict this process would necessarily bring with it. As a man permanently short of funds, Sun was naturally drawn to the rich and powerful, within and without China: to politicians, merchants, industrialists and wealthy landlords.10

  Resisting ‘the world-suppressing yoke of imperialism’ was a second important Soviet principle with which Sun needed to concur – for imperialism, Marx had upheld (and Lenin agreed), was the highest stage of capitalism.11 Again, in theory, this stipulation should not have posed any great difficulty for a Chinese political movement aspiring to mass popularity. By the 1920s, China had been suffering from foreign aggression for some eighty years; the past decade alone had been studded with new outrages. Taking advantage of China’s post-revolutionary chaos, the Japanese government had in 1915 served Yuan Shikai with their Twenty-One Demands, asserting economic and political sovereignty over slices of Manchuria and Mongolia. Four years later, the British, French and Americans at Versailles had rewarded Japanese naval assistance in the First World War with another large portion of north-east China. Indignant Chinese youth had responded by plunging into the protest of the May Fourth Movement – a surge of radical nationalism named after the violent anti-imperialist demonstrations of 4 May 1919.

  Again, in reality, mobilizing and harnessing anti-imperialist zeal in Republican China was not so straightforward. Assuredly, certain groups in Chinese society were prone to fury about foreign aggression: in particular, the students, teachers and writers who, through articles, demonstrations and petitions, drew attention to the country’s mistreatment at the hands of the Powers. They filled journals and newspapers with appalled editorials about China’s international predicament; they voted to brand shop signs, textbooks, flags and packaging (for cigarettes, wine, straw hats, stockings) with the words ‘National Humiliation’; they commemorated traumatic anniversaries as ‘National Humiliation Days’. There was money to be made from the Humiliation industry, too. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Demands, one newspaper advertised a special souvenir product: ‘National Humiliation’ towels, to help remind the Chinese people (through daily ablutions) that the shame of foreign aggression had to be wiped away. Another company six years later tried a similar pitch for tooth powder: ‘you will naturally associate this in your mind with the great “national humiliation” and ponder ways to brush it clean.’12

  But this anger was mixed with fear that, without the vigilance of the nation’s intellectual leaders, ordinary Chinese would easily forget the horrors of foreign oppression. The Chinese, editorialists complained through the 1910s and 1920s, had a serious national humiliation attention deficit disorder: ‘an enthusiasm for things that only lasted five minutes’.13 Fulminations against external aggression in early Republican newspapers frequently veered into denunciations of popular indifference. ‘There are a great many Chinese citizens’, one commentator of the early 1920s worried, ‘who do not appreciate the seriousness of the current national crisis and their responsibility to do something about it. This is a new national humiliation and also a great crisis.’ One newspaper cartoon from 1922 pictured a disapproving-looking individual standing by an enormous thermometer showing that the country’s ‘National Humiliation Commemoration Fever’ had dwindled to almost nothing.14

  Even China’s most passionate anti-imperialists – those who threw themselves into the May Fourth Movement – were inconsistent in their attitudes to the West. On the one hand, the protests – which quickly developed into strikes and boycotts of foreign goods across China’s cities – decried the Great Powers’ partition of China. But on the other, May Fourth nationalists (just like their radical predecessors from the turn of the century) worshipped Western ‘civilization’: its science, its democracy, its literature and culture. The basic task, proclaimed Chen Duxiu, one of the movement’s intellectual leaders, ‘is to import the foundation of Western society, that is, the new belief in equality and human rights.’ For people like Chen, the real enemy was not the West, but China’s own Confucianism: ‘We must be thoroughly aware’, he reminded his readers in 1916, ‘of the incompatibility between Confucianism and the new belief, the new society and the new state.’15 All that these nationalists could agree on was that something was intrinsically wrong with China and the Chinese – the country’s sufferings at the hands of imperialism were consequences of this more fundamental malaise. ‘The majority of our people are lethargic,’ Chen worried in 1917, ‘and do not know that not only our morality, politics and technology but even common commodities for daily use are all unfit for struggle and are going to be eliminated in the process of natural selection.’16

  China’s National Humiliation commemorat
ion fever dwindles.

  Sun Yat-sen had as much trouble turning on the imperialist powers as the next cosmopolitan patriot. This was partly for pragmatic, financial reasons: since he had fled China for his life in 1895, his revolutionary hopes had been kept alive by dollars, francs, pounds and yen. Sun owed the West not only an intellectual and emotional debt, but also his life. In London in 1896, he had been kidnapped by the Qing legation and threatened with deportation to China (and certain death), until a British media campaign on his behalf surrounded the embassy with crowds threatening to demolish the building unless the prisoner was released. (In Beijing in 1984 for fraught negotiations over Hong Kong, Mrs Thatcher took care to remind her Chinese counterparts of this merciful British intervention.) But his ambivalence also sprang from a realistic assessment of the relative importance of internal and international politics, and from a matter-of-fact refusal to blame foreigners for most of China’s difficulties.