The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  In some respects, the whole business was terribly mundane for the People’s Republic of China, which executes somewhere between 1,700 and 10,000 people every year. In its superficial particulars, the sentencing would have looked uncontroversial. Smuggling any quantity above fifty grams of heroin automatically incurs the death penalty; the condemned man had brought into the country a suitcase containing over four kilograms of the drug.

  But in other ways, this was an unusual occurrence. The man, Akmal Shaikh, was an ethnically Pakistani British citizen, and hence the first European to be executed in China in almost sixty years. He was, moreover, a Briton whose legal responsibility for the crime in question was hotly contested by his family and friends. Shaikh, his British defenders argued, was mentally ill, suffering from bipolar disorder and manic depression. (He had originally travelled to China in 2007 planning to become a pop star, bringing peace to the world with his atonal debut single, ‘Come Little Rabbit’; his personal deposition in the Chinese court was so rambling and incoherent that his judges laughed at him.) He should, representatives of the British government had demanded, be given an independent psychiatric assessment by the Chinese authorities, a request that for months was stonewalled by the judges in the case.

  Shaikh’s death swiftly became a major international incident. ‘I condemn the execution of Akmal Shaikh in the strongest terms,’ said the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, ‘and am appalled and disappointed that our persistent requests for clemency have not been granted.’ Ivan Lewis, a Foreign Office minister, pronounced himself ‘sick to the stomach . . . it’s a deeply depressing day for anyone with a modicum of compassion or commitment to justice in Britain and throughout the world.’2

  Chinese opinion responded with similar anger. The parallels were too obvious: a new British attempt to meddle with Chinese legal handling of an opiate-smuggling case. The media and Internet bubbled over with references to 1840 and all that. ‘In China,’ went the official government response, ‘given the bitter memory of history . . . the public has a particular and strong resentment towards [drug smuggling]. In a recent web survey, 99% of the public support the decision of the Court.’3 ‘The execution of Shaikh is like the burning of opium stocks in Humen in 1840 during the Opium Wars’, analysed one academic. ‘This time, though, “gunboat diplomacy” could not work.’4 ‘England waged an Opium War against China’, raged an anonymous Internet commentator. ‘Does it feel “sick to its stomach” about having invaded us? . . . Lewis stands alongside Charles Elliot and Henry Pottinger: with the enemies of China.’5 ‘The words “England” and “opiate” equal “Opium War”,’ explained a blogger, ‘the start of China’s modern history of being bullied and humiliated. The English have forgotten that in 1840 their forebears began blasting open China’s gates with opium. But the Chinese still feel the pain acutely.’6 ‘Kill kill kill kill’, summarized another anonymous commentator.7 The Chinese, it’s worth pointing out, did not have a monopoly on memories of the Opium War. The same idea came to a handful of British commentators, one of whom denounced the fuss as ‘hypocritical and insensitive’.8

  This was the third piece of alarming news to come out of China in December 2009. The first concerned the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change summit, following which European participants – bitterly disappointed that their hope for binding agreements on reductions of emissions had come to nothing – cast around for someone to blame, and found China. ‘China wrecked the talks,’ one impassioned environmentalist revealed, ‘intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so Western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.’ China’s only aim, he concluded, was to safeguard its own economic rise (reliant on free use of filthy, cheap coal), while encouraging the declining West to incinerate itself. The Chinese premier had not, moreover, even deigned to sit in the same room as leaders of the Western world – including Barack Obama – but had posted an underling to relay the negotiations back-and-forth by telephone.9 To anyone with a touch of historical memory, this looked like an ominous return to the style of pompous, sino-centric diplomacy that had so enraged men like William Napier and Harry Parkes in the run-up to the first and second Opium Wars, as the emperor’s officials refused to meet them in person, delegating instead the hapless Hong merchants.

  Then, on Christmas Day, the Communist government (following months of illegal detention, and despite waves of international attention) sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment the celebrated veteran dissident Liu Xiaobo on charges of ‘state subversion’, as revenge for his authoring ‘Charter 08’ – an Internet petition calling for democracy and human rights for China. (Less than a year later, a group of Norwegians would enrage China by awarding Liu the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in protest at his sentencing.) Eleven years earlier, Bill Clinton had lectured the Communist Party on its human-rights record, in person, in China. We’re on the rise, the tune now seemed to run out of Beijing, and from now on you’d better get used to doing things our way.

  The British press panicked. The foreign policy editor at the Daily Telegraph was swiftly grinding out invasion scenarios. ‘The year is 2050, and a diplomatic dispute between China and Britain risks escalating into all-out war . . . At the flick of a switch elite teams of Chinese hackers attached to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launch a hi-tech assault on Britain’s computer systems, with devastating consequences.’ Recent clashes, he concluded, have laid bare ‘the cold reality of China’s attitude to the outside world.

  Rather than being a partner that can be trusted to work with the West . . . the Chinese have demonstrated that their default position is that Beijing’s only real priority is to look after its own interests . . . Much of China’s reluctance to engage constructively with the West on issues of mutual concern dates back to the psychological trauma the country suffered during the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, when British gunboats routinely humiliated the Chinese government of the day . . . To ensure that there is no repeat of a time when foreign powers could push the Chinese people around with impunity, Beijing is today investing enormous effort into developing technology that would render the West’s superior military firepower useless.10

  Drugs, revenge and Chinese plots for world domination: it was the Yellow Peril all over again.

  Beneath the clash-of-civilizations rhetoric, things were more complicated. British commentators quickly assumed China’s hard line was exclusively directed at them. But there was a domestic subtext to the government’s lack of interest in compromising over Copenhagen, Liu Xiaobo or Akmal Shaikh. China’s rulers are, for good reasons, intensely nervous of doing anything (such as restricting cheap coal emissions) that will jeopardize economic growth: their absolutist mandate to rule is predicated on their ability to deliver prosperity to their 1.3 billion subjects. The CCP’s nervousness about domestic opposition showed in their grotesque treatment of Liu Xiaobo: China’s Internet seethes with potential dissent and capacity to organize against the regime, with Liu only one representative of contemporary China’s sizeable awkward squad.

  Neither should it be forgotten that Akmal Shaikh’s conviction and execution took place in Urumqi – the epicentre of violent clashes between Muslim populations and Han migrants in July 2009 that left 140 dead and many hundreds injured; it remained, as of January 2010, under tense paramilitary control. For years, China’s preservers of law and order have connected drug-smuggling into Xinjiang via Central Asia with Islamic separatist terrorism. And in the couple of months preceding Akmal Shaikh’s execution, Chinese newspapers were scattered with indications that Communist law and order was malfunctioning up and down the country: at least five deranged killing sprees, several of which involved multiple murders of family members – a sign that under the helm of the CCP, the moral fabric of society seemed to be in disintegration.11 Look at us now, the Communist Party told their citizen subjects as they stood firm over Akmal Shaikh, we can keep domestic and international order. Where the West repeatedly saw deliberate, provocative
defiance, the Chinese government also saw internal security issues. The whole sequence suggested another Opium War parallel: while seemingly at war with the West, China is also at war with itself.

  It was worrying, though. It showed how edgy relations are, at base, between the West and a China that is clutching at superpower status; and how troubled these relations still are by a highly politicized historical memory.

  One of the great clichés of non-specialist reporting on post-Mao China is that the place is changing, and fast. But through the transformations of the past thirty years, at least two things have remained reassuringly the same. One is the Communist Party’s untiring claim to lead the country. Another is the airless account of modern Chinese history that the party constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, with significant help from the Nationalists, to shore up its own legitimacy and demand sacrifices from the Chinese people: namely, that the history of modern China is a history of imperialist victimization (from which only the party can save the country).

  In the 1980s, though, this familiar narrative played to something of an empty house. For sure, the textbooks carried the old tune about ‘the hideous sufferings’ inflicted by the ‘shameful opium trade’, and ‘the Chinese people’s resolute will to resist foreign invasion.’12 But this was a decade in which the government had trouble persuading anyone about anything. For many Chinese people, the volte-face from the Cultural Revolution was too dramatic for the regime to maintain its old credibility – former enemies of the people were suddenly rehabilitated; the vicious energies expended in persecuting and humiliating them were dismissed as an unfortunate mistake; the years that millions of urban intellectuals had spent ‘learning from the peasants’ were redefined as a waste of time. Even the once-deified Mao was pronounced in 1981 to have been only 70 per cent right.

  A key element of the post-Mao change of heart was to admit that learning from the West – or parts of it, at least – was acceptable. But even as the government tried desperately hard to pick and choose what it imported – foreign investment, science and technology were fine; democracy less so – control proved elusive. ‘Once you open the window,’ as Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping famously commented, ‘it’s hard to stop the flies and mosquitoes coming in.’ And when the party tried to block certain imports, ridicule resulted. In the early 1980s, it focused its energies on eradicating ‘Spiritual Pollution’: not only pornography and smuggling, but also less obviously criminal manifestations – long hair, flared trousers, slightly modernist poetry whose meaning was not as transparent as road-signs. By this point, although such campaigns could still chill the Chinese people with memories of the Cultural Revolution, they were far less successful at actually convincing anyone. Many urban Chinese recall the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign as the single event that – through its sheer pettiness about things like hairstyles and clothing – destroyed their final shreds of intellectual respect for the CCP. ‘Where shall we go and get polluted tonight?’ mocked Yang Xianyi, one of the country’s most famous literary intellectuals, down the phone to his friends as propaganda chiefs in the People’s Daily railed against contamination by ‘vulgar individualism’. Writers targeted by the campaign responded by cultivating Western support. ‘Everyone I knew was disgusted with China, with the government’, remembered Bonnie McDougall, a celebrated translator of post-Mao Chinese writing into English, and a resident in Beijing through the 1980s. ‘I would be approached all the time by people asking me to get them invitations abroad . . . they wanted to get out.’13 The West was becoming no longer the root of all China’s problems, but its saviour.

  The authorities also seemed to lose some of their appetite for brainwashing the populace, through propaganda offensives, about their own infallibility. Many things were allowed to become publicly uncertain in the 1980s: how Marxist principles fitted with economic liberalization; how outrageous the government’s vocal critics would be in their next essay or public lecture; how much cooking oil would cost next month. But as China stumbled towards a market economy and as inflation rocketed, one general conviction grew: the government’s reforms weren’t working and the leadership had not found a way to persuade the populace that they could lead. It was a decade in which almost everything and everyone Chinese seemed vulnerable to mockery and attack, and often from within the establishment. In 1988, as criticism fever ran high, Central China Television screened – not once, but twice – a six-part historical documentary entitled Deathsong of a River (Heshang), that scorned thousands of years of Chinese history and ridiculed the country’s national symbols (such as the Great Wall and the Yellow River), while extolling Western-style trade, freedom, capitalism, science and democracy. The most avant-garde rebels – such as the 2010 Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo – speculated that China could only experience ‘great historical change’ if it were colonized as Hong Kong had been.

  The Opium War industry went into decline. The decade was littered with missed opportunities for commemorating Sino-British conflicts, with the neglected ruins of the old Summer Palace, to Beijing’s north-west, a perfect example. During the Maoist period, the palace’s pleasure gardens had become a treasure trove for pilfering farmers, questing for stone and bricks for pigsties and other useful buildings. Through the 1980s, administration of the place – crowded, as a couple of visitors noted, ‘with heaps of rubbish, vegetable plots, pigsties and beancurd presses . . . fly- and mosquito-infested ditches’ – was so slack that no one could be bothered to charge an entrance fee.14 Fictionalized memoirs of the 1980s recalled a new, creative use for the dilapidated precincts: as a trysting location for the privacy- and sex-starved students of nearby Beijing and Qinghua Universities.

  The neglect of political education had a direct effect on popular views of the CCP’s legitimacy. From the mid-decade onwards, urban China was given pause, every year, by student protests: over the lack of government transparency; over the rising cost of food; over the rats in their dorms. Admittedly, some of these demonstrations seemed to be set off by anti-foreign feeling: most notoriously, the 1988 riots in Nanjing triggered by racist fury that African students were consorting with Chinese girls. But at bottom, these xenophobic eruptions were driven by acute domestic tensions. By the close of the decade, the leadership was unable to agree even in public on what it should be doing about the country’s looming political and social crisis. Between 1986 and 1989, two of the men – Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang – appointed by Deng Xiaoping to manage his socialist market economy were sacked for failing to come down hard enough on dissent (what the establishment had now started calling ‘bourgeois liberalization’). The sudden death of Hu in April 1989 provided a focus for student dissatisfaction that led directly to the massive demonstrations of that spring and summer. After Zhao blanched at Deng’s decision to send in the People’s Liberation Army against the demonstrators, he would spend the next sixteen years (until his death in 2005) under house arrest, allowed out only for the occasional round of golf on one of Beijing’s courses.

  When a triumvirate of student leaders knelt on the steps to the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square on 26 April 1989, to present the Communist leadership with a petition demanding democratic reforms, they had no idea that over the next two months their protests would fill the square with hunger-striking protestors, infect every major Chinese city, mesmerize the world’s media and almost bring their Communist government down, before ending in bloodshed. (As the movement advanced, it became apparent that the students were clear about few of their aims, including democracy – many were distinctly lukewarm about the idea of giving the vote to the country’s uneducated masses.) But whatever they did anticipate, no one could possibly have imagined – given how much emphasis the traditional Communist narrative of the Opium War had placed on taking the moral high ground over Western aggression – that it would be the government’s most public act of violence against its own civilians (the suppression of the demonstrations on 4 June) that would restore the Opium War to its old, illustrious p
osition as Pre-Eminent National Wound.

  They were busy days in Beijing, just after 4 June 1989, just after the People’s Liberation Army soldiers had lowered their rifle muzzles to chest height and begun firing at will on the people of Beijing. The military forces needed congratulating on national television on their triumph over the ‘counter-revolution’; civilian bodies needed clearing from the streets; leading protestors who had not managed to smuggle themselves out of the country needed rounding up. But it was also a time for the leadership to reflect on what had gone wrong ideologically over the past ten years; on why the Chinese populace had seemed to stop believing in what the Communist Party told them; on why urban China had been on the brink of declaring war on the government; on why even the staff of the government’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, had joined the protestors, parading through the streets waving banners demanding ‘No More Lies’.

  Two answers were found – one public, one private. The public explanation was a reliable favourite: the turmoil was the result of foreign manipulation. ‘Some political forces in the West’, explained Chen Xitong, the Mayor of Beijing, ‘always attempt to make socialist countries, including China, give up the socialist road, eventually bring these countries under the rule of international monopoly capital and put them on the course of capitalism. This is their long-term, fundamental strategy.’15 A small group of counter-revolutionaries, he went on, had colluded with plotting foreigners, who had ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into splitting the country.

  In their more honest moments, though, China’s hardliners might have concluded that they had brought it on themselves. Since Mao began his career in the Nationalists’ Propaganda Office, the Communist Party had prided itself on its mastery of spin; on its understanding that in politics, surface is more important than substance. (In 1935, almost as soon as the ragged, starving remainder of Communist troops on the run from the Nationalist army limped into a new headquarters in the north-west, Mao had ordered underlings to get to work telling heroic tales about the trek, transforming it from a year-long rout into a triumph over adversity: the Long March.) But through the 1980s, that lesson had been sidelined in the interests of introducing fresh air into Chinese society: controlling public opinion had seemed less urgent than the drive towards a vigorous market economy. In spring 1989, as discontent climaxed, the party’s propaganda chief extraordinarily lifted an initial media ban on reporting the protests, instructing newspaper editors to present ‘the actual state of affairs’ – to let the people make up their own minds; following which, journalists streamed into the square to join the demonstrations.16