Trade with China (1) Opium Wars

The efforts to negotiate a trade deal between the US and China seems to be failing. Many Americans are angry because they believe that the Chinese are cheating and ripping off their businesses.

Before judging, we should read a bit of history. The early Chinese experience in dealing with the nations of the West was not that great. (The quotes come from Making China Modern by Klaus Muhlhahn).

In the nineteenth century, British merchants were importing exporting opium from India and selling it in China. The Chinese government was concerned about their impact that opium was having on their people, so they closed the border to British merchants. The British were upset by this action, so they sent gunboats.

In June 1840, with the arrival of a British fleet at the mouth of the Guangzhou River, the first Opium War began- The war lasted almost two years and was a complete disaster for the Qing empire. By the summer of 1842, the British fleet celebrated victory as it reached the Yangzi, and prepared to shell the old capital, Nanjing, in central China. The Qing court capitulated shortly thereafter. Negotiations with the British were held onboard a British ship and in a small temple just outside of the city walk of Nanjing. (94)

The Treaty of Nanjing (August 1841), the first of the so-called unequal treaties, opened China to the West and marked the beginning of a growing western dominance in the nation. According to its terms, the Qing had to open Guangzhou and tour other ports for direct trade between foreigners and Chinese. The island of Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in perpetuity and China agreed to pay twenty-one million silver dollars in reparations British merchants who had been driven out of Guangzhou. Twenty-one million silver dollars represented a considerable burden for the already strained Qing treasury. A supplementary treaty signed the following year gave Britain extraterritoriality—that is, full exemption from local laws for all its subjects in China. In 1843, France and the United States, and in 1858, Russia, negotiated treaties similar to England’s Nanjing Treaty, including provisions for extraterritoriality (94).

A second Opium War was fought between 1856 and 1860.

After the first Opium War, the city of Guangzhou became a center of anti-European agitation. The literati of the city’s great academies protested against “barbarians” entering the city. A movement emerged in Guangdong province, promoting the fortification and militarization of villages and small towns for self-defense.., Local society rose up against the European presence, to protect their economic interests and their homeland. (95)

When a British ship was captured, the government did not hesitate to start planning a reprisal.

What happened next was unprecedented. France and Great Britain formed an armada the likes of which the world had not yet seen. The fleet that departed for North China in the summer of 1860 numbered 41 war vessels and 143 transporters, carrying 24,000 Indian, British, and French troops artillery, and engineers; thousands of horses and mules; and thousands of support personnel. (98)

The Chinese lost all the ensuing battles.

The empire had to watch helplessly as even the capital Beijing was occupied in mid-October 1860, driving the Xianfeng emperor out of the city to his summer palace at Chengde. The Qing army lost over five thousand men...

After occupying Beijing, the troops set out for a palace complex on the outskirts of Beijing called Yuanmingyuan (the Garden of Perfect Brightness) built by the Qianlong emperor at the height of the Qing empire. In revenge for the Qing military’s violence against the thirty-nine English and French prisoners it had captured, Lord Elgin ordered the British army to destroy and burn Yuanmingyuan to the ground. It took two full days of burning and demolition to destroy the hundreds of exquisite palaces and buildings in Yuanmingyuan. Ironically, this had been a palace complex, perhaps the only one in the Qing empire, that featured a section of European-style buildings, fountains, and formal gardens. Called “Western Mansions” (Xiyang Lou), it was modelled on Italian baroque architecture, which the Chinese had become acquainted with from drawings and descriptions by Italian and French missionaries At the center of Western Mansions was a Mediterranean-style landscape of fountains, basins, and waterworks surrounded by a palace, pavilions, aviaries, and a maze. This section of the palace reflected Qing China’s curiosity about foreign objects and interest in foreign civilizations. The gardens also had hundreds of Chinese-style palace buildings—art pavilions, pagodas, temples, and libraries—as well as Tibetan and Mongolian-style buildings.

Before burning the rich and lavishly appointed palaces, British and French soldiers and officers carried away as much loot as they could. A French soldier wrote: “I was dumbfounded, stunned, bewildered by what I had seen, suddenly Thousand and One Nights seem perfectly believable to me. I have walked for more than two days over more than 50 million worth of silks, jewels, porcelain, bronzes, sculptures and treasures! I do not think we have anything like it since the sack of Rome by the barbarians.” (99)

Imagine if the Chinese had sailed up the Thames and looted Windsor Castle of all its treasures. Would that ever be forgotten?

The 1858 and 1860 treaties extended the foreign privileges granted in the first Opium War and confirmed or legalized the developments in the treaty-port system. Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States would die right to establish embassies in Beijing, marking the first opening of and France of eight million taels of silver each, and compensation to British merchants of three million taels of silver. Eleven additional ports were opened to foreign residence and trade, including Niuzhuang, Tamsui (Taiwan), Hankou, Nanjing, and Tianjin. The lease of the Kowloon peninsula was ceded to Great Britain. Foreigners, especially merchants and missionaries, were allowed free movement throughout the interior. Hardest to swallow for Qing authorities were not necessarily the economic rights given to western governments, such as trade and the opening of treaty ports, but the non-economic political privileges that affected the stability of social order. Chief among them was the legalization of opium, which would all but guarantee a deepening of the social and economic problems caused by opium addiction. (101)

The British and French used military power to get the monopoly over drug dealing in China.