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BRITAIN’S CENTURY LONG OPIUM TRAFFICKING AND CHINA’S CENTURY OF
HUMILIATION (1839–1949)  
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Stansfield Smith
May 30, 2024
Monthly Review
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_ In 1500, India and China were the world’s most advanced
civilizations. Then came the Europeans. They eventually looted and
wreaked havoc on both, just as they were to on the Americas and
Africa. _

History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, Ca. 1600 –
1950, Hans Derks

 

For the Chinese, the trauma of the Century of Humiliation continues as
a blunt reminder of their past defeat and neo-colonial servitude, as
well as a reminder of the West’s self-righteous hypocrisy and
arrogance.

In 1500, India and China were the world’s most advanced
civilizations. Then came the Europeans. They eventually looted and
wreaked havoc on both, just as they were to on the Americas and
Africa. For India and China, Britain was the chief culprit, relying
on state-sponsored drug-running backed by industrialized military
power. The British Empire was the world’s largest producer and
exporter of Opium—the main product of global trade after the gradual
decline of the slave trade from Africa. Their “civilization”
brought the Century of Humiliation to China, which only ended with the
popular revolution led by Mao Zedong. This historic trauma and the
struggle to overcome it and re-establish their country is etched in
the minds of the Chinese today.

Before the British brought their “culture,”
[[link removed]] 25% of the world
trade originated in India. By the time they left it was less than 1%.
British India’s Opium dealing was for the large part of the 19th
Century the second-most important source of revenue for colonial
India. Their “Opium industry was one of the largest enterprises
[[link removed]] on the
subcontinent, producing a few thousand tons of the drug every year—a
similar output to Afghanistan’s notorious Opium industry [during the
U.S. occupation], which supplies the global market for heroin.”
Opium accounted for about 17-20% of British India revenues.

In the early 1700s, China produced 35% of the world GDP. Until 1800
half the books in the world were printed in Chinese. The country
considered itself self-sufficient, not seeking any products from other
countries. Foreign countries bought Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain,
having to pay in gold and silver. Consequently, the balance of trade
was unfavorable to the British for almost two centuries, like
the situation the U.S. and Europe face with China today.

This trade slowly depleted Western reserves. Eventually, 30,865 tons
of silver flowed into China, mostly from Britain. Britain turned to
state sponsored drug smuggling as a solution, and by 1826 the
smuggling from India had reversed the flow of silver. Thus began one
of the longest and continuous international crimes of modern times,
second to the African slave trade, under the supervision of the
British crown.

(The just formed United States was already smuggling Opium into China
by 1784. The U.S. first multi-millionaire John Jacob Astor grew rich
dealing Opium to China, as did FDR’s grandfather, Warren Delano,
Jr.)

The British East India Company was key to this Opium smuggling. Soon
after Britain conquered Bengal in 1757, George III granted the East
India Company a monopoly on producing and exporting Indian Opium.
Eventually its Opium Agency employed some 2500 clerks working in 100
offices [[link removed]] around
India.

Britain taxed away 50% of the value of Indian peasants’ food crops
to push them out of agriculture into growing Opium. This soon led to
the Bengal famine of 1770, when ten million, a third of the Bengali
population, starved to death. Britain took no action to aid them, as
they did almost a century later with their orchestrated famine in
Ireland. Another famine hit India in 1783, and again Britain did
nothing as 11 million starved. Between 1760-1943,

As per British sources, more than 85 million Indians died in these
famines which were in reality genocides done by the British Raj
[[link removed]].

At its peak in the mid-19th century, the British state-sponsored
export of Opium accounted for roughly 15% of total colonial revenue
in India [[link removed]] and 31% of
India’s exports. The massive revenues from this drug money
solidified India as a substantial financial base for England’s later
world conquests.

In 1729, the Chinese emperor declared the import of Opium illegal. At
the time it amounted to 200 chests a year, each 135 pounds, a total of
14 tons. The emperor in 1799 reissued the prohibition in harsher
terms, given imports had leaped to 4,500 chests (320 tons). Yet
by 1830 it rose to 1100 tons
[[link removed]], and
by 1838, just before the British provoked the First Opium War
[[link removed]] (1839-1842), it
climbed to 40,000 chests (2800 tons).

A chest of Opium cost only £2 to produce in India but it sold for
£10 [over $1,000 in today’s prices] in China, nearly an £8 profit
per chest.

About 40,000 chests supplied 2.1 million addicts in a Chinese
population of 350 million. China was losing over 4000 tons of silver
annually. Addicts were mostly men, twenty to fifty-five years old,
which should have been their most productive years. Smoking Opium
gradually spread to different groups of people: government officials,
merchants, intelligentsia, women, servants, soldiers, and monks.

Just before the First Opium War the Chinese “drug czar,” Lin
Zexu, wrote to Queen Victoria, “Where is your conscience? I have
heard that the smoking of Opium is very strictly forbidden by your
country; this is because the harm caused by Opium is clearly
understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country,
then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other
countries.” In standard imperialist arrogance, Britain ignored the
letter and challenged the very legality of China’s sovereign
decision to prohibit Opium imports.

Britain provoked this First Opium War in retaliation for China seizing
and destroying 1300 tons of Opium held by British drug dealers off
Canton (now Guangzhou). This had a value equal to one-sixth of the
British empire’s military budget. British Foreign Secretary
Palmerston demanded an apology, compensation for the Opium, a treaty
to prevent Chinese action against British drug-running, and opening
additional ports to “foreign trade,” their euphemism for drug
dealing.

The British India Gazette reported on the sack of one Chinese city
during the war:

A more complete pillage could not be conceived than took place. Every
house was broken open, every drawer and box ransacked, the streets
strewn with fragments of furniture, pictures, tables, chairs, grain of
all sorts–the whole set off by the dead or the living bodies of
those who had been unable to leave the city from the wounds received
from our merciless guns… The plunder ceased only when there was
nothing to take or destroy.

Once Britain defeated China, the Treaty of Nanking gave Hong Kong to
the British, which quickly became the center of Opium drug-dealing,
soon providing the colony most of its revenue. The treaty also allowed
the British to export unlimited amounts of Opium.

In 1844, France and the U.S. forced China to sign similar unequal and
unjust treaties, with the same unrestricted trading rights.

In the wake of the First Opium War, a devastating famine hit southern
China, causing mass starvation among millions of poor Chinese
peasants. Soon the Taiping Rebellion against Chinese imperial rule
broke out, claiming 20 million Chinese lives between 1850 and 1864. As
with many later civil wars, as in Syria a decade ago, the European
states financed the rebels to undermine the national government.

Karl Marx
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how Britain provoked the Second Opium War (1856-1860). France joined
in the looting. The Times of London, propagandists for their
state-sponsored drug mafia, declared,

England, with France . . . shall teach such a lesson to these
perfidious hordes that the name of Europe will hereafter be a passport
of fear, if it cannot be of love, throughout their land.

In October 1860 the British and French military attacked Beijing.
Despite French protests, British commander Lord Elgin destroyed
Yuanming Yuan, the emperor’s summer palace, in a show of contempt
for the Chinese.

“The Summer Palace
[[link removed]] was
the quintessential treasure house of China. No such collection of
wealth and beauty had ever existed anywhere on earth. Nor would it
ever again.… in some 200 fabulously decorated buildings, thirty of
them imperial residences, lay riches beyond all dreams of avarice.
Jewels, jade, ceremonial robes, the court treasures, bales of silk,
and countless priceless artifacts represented the years of accumulated
tribute placed before the Chinese emperors. There were splendid
galleries of paintings and irreplaceable libraries…For three days
British and French troops rampaged through the palace’s marble
corridors and glittering apartments, smashing with clubs and rifle
butts what they were unable to carry away.” When the robbery and
destruction was finished, they burned Yuanming Yuan to the ground. An
estimated 1.5 million Chinese relics
[[link removed]] were
taken away, many still filling museums and the homes of the wealthy in
the West today.

Britain and France forced China to legalize the import of Opium, which
reached 5000 tons by 1858, an amount surpassing global Opium
production in 1995. China had to agree that no Westerner could be
tried in Chinese courts for crimes committed in the country, and,
ironically, to legalize Christian missionary work.

The 1881 pamphlet, Opium: England’s Coercive Policy and Its
Disastrous Results in China and India
[[link removed]], stated,

As a specimen of how both wars were carried on, we quote the following
from an English writer on the bombardment of Canton: ‘Field pieces
loaded with grape were planted at the end of long, narrow streets
crowded with innocent men, women and children, to mow them down like
grass till the gutters flowed with their blood.’ In one scene of
carnage, the Times correspondent recorded that half an army of 10,000
men were in ten minutes destroyed by the sword, or forced into the
broad river. The Morning Herald asserted that ‘a more horrible or
revolting crime than this bombardment of Canton has never been
committed in the worst ages of barbaric darkness.’

By the mid-1860s, Britain was in control of seven eighths of the
vastly expanded Opium trade into China. Opium imports from India
skyrocketed to 150,000 chests (10,700 tons) in 1880. British Opium
earnings amounted to $2 billion a year in today’s money and
accounted for nearly 15% of the British Exchequer’s tax revenue.
The London Times (Oct. 22, 1880) outrageously claimed that “the
Chinese government admitted Opium as a legal article of import, not
under constraint, but of their own free will.” Lord Curzon, later
Under Secretary for India,

denied that England had ever forced Opium upon China; no historian of
any repute, and no diplomatist who knew anything of the matter, would
support the proposition that England coerced China in this respect.

China began domestic production to curtail losing more silver to
imported Opium. After 1858, large tracts of land were given over to
Opium production, and provinces turned from growing food and other
necessities to Opium. Eventually the Chinese were producing 35,000
tons, about 85% of the world’s supply, with 15 million addicts
consuming 43,000 tons annually.

China, now greatly weakened by the British narco state, surrendered
territory to Russia equal to the combined size of France, Germany, and
Spain. In 1885 France seized Chinese Southeast Asia. In 1895, Japan
seized Taiwan and Chinese-controlled Korea.

The Eight-Nation Alliance (Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United
States, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary) invaded again in 1900 to
crush the nationalist Boxer Rebellion. An indemnity of 20,000 tons of
silver was extracted, and China reduced to a neo-colony.

By 1906, besides British India, Opium dealing also provided
[[link removed]] 16%
of taxes for French Indochina, 16% for the Netherlands Indies, 20% for
Siam, and 53% for British Malaya.

That year, the British, still exporting 3500 tons to China, finally
agreed to end the dirty business within ten years. The British crown
had the distinction of being the biggest Opium smuggler in
history—a central factor in their wrecking Chinese and Indian
civilizations.

World Opium production
[[link removed]] by 1995 was down to
4,200 metric tons (4,630 tons), mostly from Burma and Afghanistan. The
Taliban banned it in 2000, and production fell from 3400 to only 204
tons. The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan reversed this, and by
2008, U.S. occupied Afghanistan was producing 90%
[[link removed]] of
the world’s Opium, reaching 10,000 tons
[[link removed]] in 2017. After the U.S. was driven out in
2021, the Taliban quickly stopped Opium production. The United States
Institute of Peace
[[link removed]],
possibly revealing U.S. support for narco-trafficking, pronounced,
“the Taliban’s successful Opium ban is bad for Afghans and the
world” and “will have negative economic and humanitarian
consequences.”

The blight of Opium on China was not resolved until the revolutionary
victory in 1949—though it continued in British Hong Kong. Mao
proclaimed “China has stood up,” ending its Century of Humiliation
during which at least 100 million Chinese
[[link removed]] were
killed in wars and famines, with up to 35 million
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the Japanese invasion from 1931-1945.

By 1949, China had been reduced to one of the world’s poorest
countries. Just 75 years ago four out of five Chinese could not read
or write. But since 1981, China has lifted 853 million of its people
out of poverty, has become an upper middle income
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according to the World Bank, and regained its stature in the world.
The West now views China as a renewed threat, again seeking to
economically disable it and chop it into pieces. However, this time,
the Chinese people are much better prepared to combat imperialist
designs to impose a new era of humiliation on them.

_Monthly Review_ does not necessarily adhere to all of the views
conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a
variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find
interesting or useful. —Eds.

_STANSFIELD SMITH is an anti-war activist focused mostly on combating
U.S. intervention in Latin America. He was a member of Chicago
Committee to Free the Cuban Five, which has become Chicago ALBA
Solidarity [[link removed]]. He can be
reached at stansfieldsmith100 [at] gmail.com._

_MONTHLY REVIEW began publication in New York City in May 1949. The
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* British imperialism
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* political economy
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* China
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* Opium
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* India
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