Twitter
Advertisement

China’s opiate highs and lows

Julia Lovell, British scholar and author of a book on the Opium Wars, tells Apoorva Dutt how the 19th century wars between China and Britain marked the beginning of China’s troubled relationship with the West.

Latest News
article-main
FacebookTwitterWhatsappLinkedin

Opium War: Drugs, Dreams And The Making Of China is more than just a history book. It is British scholar Julia Lovell’s attempt to understand how the two opium wars in the early 19th century shaped China’s national narrative, while remaining historical foot notes for other nations such as India, Hong Kong, Singapore, and most importantly, Britain. By dividing the book into two parts — one about the wars themselves, and the other about modern China’s understanding of the wars — the text is able to offer insights into an Asian superpower that is still uneasy with the West, and suspicious of anything seen as an impingement on its sovereignty.

Lovell was a Cambridge freshman when she watched the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. After learning that Bond had acquired his Japanese skills at Cambridge, Lovell decided to study Chinese, and spent half a year as an exchange student at Nanjing University. Another event which triggered her interest was watching the state-commissioned film The Opium War in 1977. “It was filmed to coincide with the handing back of Hong Kong to the mainland. It was a very dark, almost depressing film about a time that the whole country knows as the ‘era of humiliation’. The Opium War is the shorthand with which Chinese people understand this era of Western oppression.”

Different nationalist truths
Opium War doesn’t shy away from the bureaucratic fumbles, greed and racist stereotyping on both sides. “What was most interesting to me was how the different nationalistic accounts varied dramatically,” recalls Lovell. “The Opium Wars were taught with a depressing Power Point presentation about the British pushing deep into China,” she said of a high-school class she attended in Beijing. “It was highly emotional in tone, and was accompanied by gloomy music. It was portrayed as the tragedy of modern China.” Lovell finds that, possibly due to a sense of guilt, the details of the Opium War are often glossed over in British textbooks.

But the modern Chinese reactions to ‘patriotic education’ are perhaps, the most interesting of Lovell’s findings. She recounts an experience where she sat in at a high school level class. “So many students had openly fallen asleep!” she laughs. “In fact, the only way I could keep myself awake was to sit in the back and count the number of bobbing heads.” Lovell believes that contemporary Chinese reactions to the Opium War have shifted their focus to what the Chinese did wrong. “Young people are more prone to blaming the Chinese leadership of the time now; they believe they were lazy, corrupt, and perhaps smoking too much opium.”

The Opium War button
In another incident, she remembers a man who spoke angrily against the West’s sins against China in the 18th century. “He told me he was ready to send an army to the British Museum to take back looted treasures. In practically the same breath, he asked me for advice, because he had an interview the next day for attending a British university. I found this fascinating: there is an interesting contradiction, a deep resentment battling a desire to benefit from what the West has to offer.”

Lovell also found that the Opium War provided an “important source of political legitimacy” to the Communist Party of China.

“The Opium War represented this unprecedented crisis in their history that the Communist Party resolved. It was a factor in their continued success, as a call to be strong and united in the face of perceived threat.” Even state-sponsored media could press what Lovell calls the “Opium War button”. She explains, “By referring to the war, any Western move could be reinterpreted as just the latest attempt to oppress China.”

Lovell points to three recent events: the Chinese execution of Akmal Shiekh for supposed drug trafficking, the detention of Liu Xiabo, and the failure of the Cancun Treaty as recent manifestations of Chinese paranoia. “China fears Western intrusions into their internal matters, and the West continues to misunderstand the very pragmatic rise of China, seeing it as a xenophobic nation that will ultimately seek revenge against its once-oppressors,” she explains. Lovell believes that “Western, non-specialist reports” paint China as anti-free trade, anti-America, and so on. It all becomes a ‘yellow peril’ kind of situation. Such narrow thinking blocks us from understanding the rising influence of China.”    

Find your daily dose of news & explainers in your WhatsApp. Stay updated, Stay informed-  Follow DNA on WhatsApp.
Advertisement

Live tv

Advertisement
Advertisement