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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Julia Lovell
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March 23 - May 3, 2023
‘Why, the slave trade was merciful compared with the opium trade’, Karl Marx quoted a radical anti-opium pamphleteer in 1856. ‘We did not destroy the bodies of the Africans … we did not debase their natures, corrupt their minds, nor destroy their souls.’
Through the middle decades of the century, the British also went on liberally eating and drinking the drug.
In time, then, the guilt that had originally generated the anti-opium movement morphed into denigrations of the ‘Chinese national character’.
to understand how this had come about requires a brief diversion into the paranoid world of European racial science in the second half of the nineteenth century.
But by the close of a nineteenth century that in many respects appeared to have belonged to Great Britain, confidence was seeping out of the imperial enterprise and its sense of racial triumphalism.
One of the clauses of the 1860 Treaty of Beijing had forced the Qing emperor to legalize emigration of his subjects.
Local violence against European missionaries in north-east China had steadily grown through the 1890s until around 1898 anti-Christian feeling coalesced into a secret society identified in foreign press reports as ‘the Boxers’ (for the style of martial arts that, its members claimed, rendered them invulnerable to bullets).
The deepest fear was that the Chinese would infect with their ‘hideous vice’ those on whom the protection and well-being of the empire and the white race as a whole depended: fertile white women and their vigorous sons.
racism was depressingly normal in early twentieth-century European and American writing.
thoroughly established the Chinese predilection for mass poisonings (by germ warfare especially) during the first decade of the twentieth century.
The bribery was necessary, for in late-nineteenth-century China a Western education remained a disreputable life choice.
he fell in love with the West – and not just with the iron-plated steamers and guns that he was supposed to be studying, but also with its thinkers, writers and political and legal institutions. This, Yan concluded during his years abroad, was the foundation of Western strength.
it was during these years that opium was reinvented in Great Britain as a social pathology: as China’s own special disease of the will that it was threatening to export to the West.
‘They will enslave us and hinder the development of our spirit and body’, Yan Fu worried. ‘The brown and black races constantly waver between life and death, why not the 400 million yellows?’
the West owed its global supremacy to the two principles of ‘truth in learning’ and ‘justice in politics’. In comparison, almost everything about Chinese tradition struck Yan as hopeless.
Others again treated smokers with morphine pills, which the locals promptly christened ‘Jesus opium’;
always been in the past, to repress the traffic – never the desire to gain revenue from such a source.’47 Nonetheless, during the 1870s south-west China alone began to produce more opium than the country was importing. Anti-imperialist passions in late-Qing China were often directed at issues other than opium. Through the 1900s, many regions of China were in the grip of a passionate Rights Recovery Movement, opposing European and American attempts to buy up the country’s nascent railway system and Qing willingness to sell it: students threatened to starve themselves to death, soldiers wrote
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The one novelty that Marx added to the standard racist repertoire of Victorian commentaries on China was a similarly intense disgust for Western imperialism.
Preoccupied by war with Japan, Li did not make time to see him. This snub seems to have been enough to convince Sun that he must concentrate his energies on bringing down the entire edifice of Qing rule,
By the 1920s, China had been suffering from foreign aggression for some eighty years; the past decade alone had been studded with new outrages.
The Chinese, editorialists complained through the 1910s and 1920s, had a serious national humiliation attention deficit disorder: ‘an enthusiasm for things that only lasted five minutes’.
May Fourth nationalists (just like their radical predecessors from the turn of the century) worshipped Western ‘civilization’: its science, its democracy, its literature and culture. The basic task, proclaimed Chen Duxiu, one of the movement’s intellectual leaders, ‘is to import the foundation of Western society, that is, the new belief in equality and human rights.’
But the occupying Japanese and their Chinese collaborators also made use of the Opium War as a rhetorical tool to distract attention away from Japanese atrocities.
Mao Zedong did not have long in the job. Within another two years, there would be no place for a Communist like him anywhere in the Nationalist Party organization.
Despite their vicious political rivalries, China’s new political parties concurred perfectly on how China was to be manipulated into an effective nation-state: through ideological discipline and unity.
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.
Our gravest failure has been in [political] education. We did not provide enough education to young people, including students.
‘the youth of today aren’t very patriotic’, as the teacher I saw in action complained. ‘They’re selfish. They have no sense of responsibility
