Balancing tea imports with opium exports
Until the end of the 18th century, opium was only used as a medicine in China. It was British merchants who promoted its use as a drug to solve the problem of overproduction on their vast poppy plantations in India and to pay for the tea they were buying in huge quantities from China.
It was British desire to control this profitable business that sparked a war. Britain wanted China to open up its market, but the Chinese government was severely opposed to the import of opium, whose trade was banned by several decrees in 1796, 1800, 1814 and 1815.
Even the Imperial Commissioner Lin went to the port of Canton in 1838 and ordered to close the foreign factories and confiscated all the opium cargoes in the warehouses.
When the Chinese authorities seized more than 20,000 crates of opium from India in the port of Canton in March 1838 and threw them into the sea, they could not have foreseen that the measure to protect the physical and moral health of their fellow citizens would set off a series of chain reactions, each of which would deeply and severely humiliate the immensely proud Celestial Empire.
The cargoes were destroyed and the British colony was expelled. The London government was not going to stand idly by. The Opium War (1840-1842) was about to break out.
The response of Queen Victoria´s representative, Mr Elliot, was swift and astonishingly bizarre: he demanded a compensation for the loss of the goods with which his country’s traders were poisoning China. Naturally, the Chinese authorities did not agree. Moreover, the Viceroy of Canton stopped all trade with Britain, which was an intolerable affront, whether to honest British trade or to national dignity is uncertain, but His Gracious Majesty’s (Queen Victoria) squadron took matters into their own hands and began hostilities against the insolent city of Canton in June 1840. It was the so-called Opium War.
The irresistible argument of the obvious superiority of British arms led Beijing to accept the first major affront in its millennia-old history: it had to bow its head to the «white devils» and, in the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), open the ports of Canton, Amoy, Fucheu, Ningpo and Shanghai, the so-called «treaty ports», to the market-hungry British. Apart from that, China had to cede ownership of Hong Kong Island, which overlooks the mouth of the Canton River.
Treaty of Nanjing (1843), the beginning of the cutting up
The provisions of the Treaty of Nanjing and subsequent treaties, especially the 1843 Treaty, which obliged China to pay an enormous indemnity, a truly international debt that could not be repaid given China’s existing tax system, and granted Britain the most favoured nation clause, completely changed the international status of the Celestial Empire by limiting its independence and allowing foreigners to control its finances and thus its political activities. China remained independent, albeit to a lesser extent.
Other Western powers pushed through the gap opened by Britain. The treaties signed at Wampoa in 1844 between China, France and the United States expanded the possibilities of trade with China, a huge market that made Western mercantilism pulse with greed, then as now. But the inherent blindness of arrogance of the Chinese rulers prevented them from realising that their country, anchored in the past, was in danger of being mediatised, partitioned and eventually colonised. China’s ruse of not abiding by the signed treaties led foreign countries to increase pressure and send expeditionary forces in 1858 and 1860 to bring the Chinese – after the occupation of Beijing and the burning of the Summer Palace – to their senses.
While the West tightened its grip on the maritime flank of China, which had not been a maritime power since the 15th century, Russia, which had been a maritime power since the 16th century, built up its own territory. By the Treaty of Aigun (1858), Russia obtained the cession of the territory on the north bank of the Amur, and by the Treaty of Peking (1860), the territories between the Usuri River, the Sea of Japan and Korea, where the flourishing cities of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok are located. Finally, Russia incorporated part of Chinese Turkestan with the Treaties of Chuguchak (1864) and Ili (1881). To complete this picture of territorial humiliation and mutilation, Chinese customs were reordered, indeed interfered with, by the European administration under the 1858 treaties.
But the Manchu dynasty did not only have to deal with the outside world. It also had to deal with the Taiping Rebellion (1848-1865).
Taiping Rebellion, China's first revolutionary war
The rebellion broke out in 11 southern provinces and along the Yangtze River. Half rural agitation and half popular uprising against the Manchus and their capitulation to foreigners, the Taiping Uprising can be described as China’s first revolutionary war, and certainly as a precursor to the political and social revolution that would overthrow the Thousand Year Empire in 1912 and later lead to communism.
This broad-based Taiping movement did not succeed, partly because the Western powers saw fit to play the card of the empire they supported. From then on, the Tsing dynasty, for which the Chinese had always had little sympathy, survived with more or less indirect foreign aid, which at the same time considerably weakened its already weakened authority.
The Sino-Japanese War (1895) dealt it a severe blow and forced China to ask the European powers for help. Despite this renewed humiliation, China could not prevent the Treaty of Shimonoseki from losing the island of Taiwan or Formosa as well as the Liaotung Peninsula and Port Arthur to Russia, while Germany (1898) introduced the system of leased territories or «zones of influence», which were effectively protectorates.
It was this covert partition of China that the United States attempted to counter with the Open Door Policy in 1898, but having previously established itself in the Philippine archipelago, the purity of its intentions were not obvious. It can thus be said that from 1895 until the First World War, China became a battleground for rival Western powers, where businessmen and diplomats fought bitterly for mining concessions, spheres of influence and trade advantages.
Not surprisingly, the empress either encouraged or allowed the violent actions of the secret society of the «Boxers» (1900). The uprising against the foreign colony in the capital led to an international punitive expedition, which resulted in a renewed increase in compensation payments to China and the permanent presence of European garrisons in Beijing and Tien-tsin. But Russia was the power that ultimately benefited most from this terrible uprising: it occupied Manchuria, where it established a de facto protectorate, and turned a deaf ear when other nations asked it to vacate this Chinese territory.
The First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) was fought between the Chinese Qing dynasty and the emerging Japanese empire primarily for control of Korea. After more than six months of continuous victories by the imperial army and Japanese navy and the capture of the Chinese port city of Weihai, China asked for peace in February 1895. The war was a clear sign of the failure of the Qing dynasty’s attempt to modernise its armed forces and defend itself against threats to its sovereignty.
For the first time, regional dominance in East Asia shifted from China to Japan, and the prestige of the Qing dynasty and the classical tradition in China suffered a severe blow. These trends were later to manifest themselves in the 1911 revolution that ended the monarchy.
In March 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed between Japan and China, ceding Taiwan, the Pescadores and the Liaodong Islands to the Empire of Japan. Japan’s conquest of China was to indirectly trigger the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which brought not only the Manchu dynasty but also the empire to its knees.
China's millenary empire sinks to its knees
For the first time, regional dominance in East Asia shifted from China to Japan, and the prestige of the Qing dynasty and the classical tradition in China suffered a severe blow. These trends were later to manifest themselves in the 1911 revolution that ended the monarchy.
In March 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed between Japan and China, ceding Taiwan, the Pescadores and the Liaodong Islands to the Empire of Japan. Japan’s conquest of China was to indirectly trigger the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which brought not only the Manchu dynasty but also the empire to its knees.
China cedes to Japan in perpetuity and full sovereignty the following territories, together with all fortifications, arsenals, and public property thereon: (a) The southern portion of the province of Fêngtien . This cession also includes all islands appertaining or belonging to the province of Fêngtien situated in the eastern portion of the Bay of Liao-tung and the northern portion of the Yellow Sea. (b) The island of Formosa (Taiwan), together with all islands appertaining or belonging to the said island of Formosa. (c) The Pescadores Group, that is to say, all islands lying between the 119th and 120th degrees of longitude east of Greenwich and the 23rd and 24th degrees of north latitude.
For the first time, regional dominance in East Asia shifted from China to Japan, and the prestige of the Qing dynasty and the classical tradition in China suffered a severe blow. These trends were later to manifest themselves in the 1911 revolution that ended the monarchy.
In March 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed between Japan and China, ceding Taiwan, the Pescadores and the Liaodong Islands to the Empire of Japan. Japan’s conquest of China was to indirectly trigger the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which brought not only the Manchu dynasty but also the empire to its knees.
By 1914, three-quarters of the globe were seized by European powers. The psychological effects of the suppression were devastating in countries like China. The sense of civilization that the Chinese used to have was immediately replaced with a sense of weakness and humiliation.
Sense of weakness and humiliation lead to uprisings
Gradually a movement that had only just begun, that of Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomingtang, later called the Kuomintang, or National People’s Party, which called for a socialist republic with the will to radically change the established order, was able to gain momentum.
Therefore, the May Fourth Movement was an intellectual revolution and socio-political reform movement oriented towards China’s independence from the occupying European forces, the emancipation of the individual and the reconstruction of society and culture.
In May 4, 1919, the “May Fourth Movement” began with mass student protests against the government’s response to the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed unfair treatment on China and sabotaged the country’s sovereignty after World War I. The May Fourth Movement was launched in 1921.
In 1921, twelve men, including Mao Tse-tung, in the presence of two delegates from the Komintern, founded the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, heir to the failed «May Fourth» movement.
This century of external humiliation may be the roots of current China’s ‘Never Again’ Mentality, or not. Let historians of one ideology or another, of one side or the other, more or less objective, think about it…
… as that is another story and we come to the end of another of our travel notes. But our Journey to the East continues so…
… If you want to know how our journey to the East continues, be sure to read the next post carefully … If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or input, please email us at info@danielecheverria.com. We will be happy to answer them.
