Q.

Critically analyze the various views on the origins of the Opium War of
1839-42. Which view do you agree with and why? What were the
immediate consequences of the war for China?

The Opium War of 1839-42, or as Tan Chung prefers to call it, the Anti Opium
and Anti-Anti Opium War was fought between the imperial Manchu
government of China and the Western trading powers in Asia, led by the
British. Traditionally, it has been explained as the response of the British to the
rigid enforcement of the ban on opium by the Manchu government and as an
attempt to open free trade with China. However the origins of the Opium War
have become a source of great controversy amongst historians. While some
view it as part of a deliberate imperialist attempt to open up the economy of
China to Western capitalist exploitation and transform it into a colony, others
see it as an unfortunate consequence of the xenophobic and Sinocentric
policies followed by the Manchu government.
The Communist line of argument adds the perspective of the common people
who, it maintains, were fearful and resentful of “piratical foreign merchants”
(Hu Sheng) and their aggressive behaviour. The Communists also discredit the
Manchu regime for its soft approach to the Western powers and go so far as to
assert that the government, through its policy of concessions and
appeasement, colluded with the foreign aggressors in the exploitation of the
people. They assert that the Opium War was an unjust war forced upon the
Chinese by Britain to expand its economic sway and had the effect of
intensifying internal contradictions and creating an anti-Manchu political
sentiment.
Other scholars, such as John K. Fairbank, while agreeing that the British
went to war for reasons beyond opium, tend to also view the war as a sort of
cultural conflict, blaming Sinocentrism and the Chinese superiority complex
for the outbreak of the war. In particular these scholars draw attention to the
role of Commissioner Lin in the War and accuse him of exacerbating a conflict
that could quite easily have been resolved without taking military action
against the foreign merchants. Writers such as Michael Greenberg and Hsin-
pao Chang also hold Lin Tse Hsu to account, emphasizing on his blunders and
the limitation of his powers within the larger Chinese political tradition.
Tan Chung, in his book ‘Triton and Dragon’ critically assesses the merits and
demerits of these various perspectives on the origins of the Opium War. He
tries to balance the account by emphasizing on the destructive character of the
opium trade itself and the influence of the opium interests on the British
government in his analysis of the Opium War.
THE COMMUNIST PERSPECTIVE

According to Hu Sheng, at the turn of the century the Manchu regime was
undergoing an internal crisis. Rural impoverishment found expression in a
series of peasant revolts while bureaucratic corruption had paralyzed the state
apparatus. The attempt of the British to force open the Chinese economy acted
as an external stimulant, interacting with the internal contradictions of the
state and giving rise to the Opium War. The inability of the Manchu
government to implement the strictures introduced against opium due to
corruption and disaffection combined with the growing dissatisfaction of the
common people with the Manchu regime in the face of Western exploitation
resulted in the gradual erosion of the power of the Manchus and in the long
run reduced China to the status of a semi colony of the Western imperialist
powers. The Opium War is assessed as both symptomatic of, and a catalyst in
this process.

The aggressive intentions of the British are attributed by Communist

historians to the expanding interests of the capitalist class which guided state
policy in Britain. Yan Zhongping asserts that the bourgeois interests in Britain
consisted of two components: 1) the opium interests who sought to extract
profits from China through illegal opium smuggling and which bore vestiges of
the era of primitive capitalist accumulation and 2) the industrial capitalists,
import and export merchants and shipping entrepreneurs who were
interested in the China market for British commodities. This is analyzed by Yan
Zhongping as the result of a crisis of overproduction in the British economy. He
adduces evidence from Marx’s Das Kapital to argue that Britain was at the time
passing through a period of great economic instability and fluctuation. 1840,
the year of the Opium War, Zhongping observes, was a year of “great
depression” in Britain. Tan Chung dismisses this line of argument by arguing,
somewhat speciously, that if the Opium War is to be seen as a response and
solution to economic crisis in Britain then the British cotton-textile economy
should have embarked upon an era of great commercial prosperity from 1842
onwards.
‘The Opium War’, the Foreign Language Press booklet on the war, connects the
British expansion of opium exports to China to the expansion of the cotton
textile market in India. It is argued that the opium trade increased the
purchasing power of the Indian cultivators for British cotton textiles (which is
patently incorrect), contributed a large sum to the revenues of the Raj and
altered the adverse balance of Britain’s China trade. In his analysis of the
Britain-China-India trade triangle, however, Tan Chung points out that the
Indian exports to China in the form of raw cotton more or less balanced is
imports in the form of tea and silk. The Opium War therefore was nothing
more than a trade offensive aimed at draining away the silver bullion of China
and forcing her to contribute to the expenses of British empire building in
India.

Tan Chung also views the Communist historians’ view of war as the highest
form of aggression and the logical result of capitalist and colonial expansion
with some suspicion, arguing that the British had no need to resort to war to
colonize China so long as it carried out legal commercial activities.

WESTERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

According to Qi Sihe, who argues for the role of British aggression alone in the
outbreak of the Opium War, there has been a concerted effort on the part of
British and American bourgeois historians to convey the impression that the
Opium War was not caused by opium. Writers such as H.B. Morse and H.F.
MacNair argue that the Opium War was fought by the British not to uphold the
trade in opium but instead to decide commercial relations between Britain and
China. Fairbank concurs with this view and contends that the British went to
war to secure privileges in the general commercial and diplomatic discourse
with China on Western terms and not to further the opium trade. Fairbank
draws a distinction between “occasion” and “sole cause” contending that while
the illegal opium trade was certainly one of the factors, it was really just the
pretext for war and little more. Michael Greenberg also seems to believe that
for the British merchants the issue went beyond just the trade in opium. All of
these scholars cite the provisions of the Treaty of Nanking, which did not insist
upon the legalization of opium. Tan Chung maintains that this was not because
the British were not concerned with opium after all; he argues that it was only
the staunch resistance of the Manchu government which prevented the
inclusion of a clause to this effect in the Nanking Settlement. On the other hand,
it might be argued that the very fact that the British should have capitulated on
this issue indicates that the larger gains of the treaty were of greater
significance to them. Tan Chung contends that with the Opium War the Manchu
government’s desire to suppress opium traffic had been quashed permanently.

Tan Chung challenges the idea that the British should have waited one and a
half centuries to establish satisfactory commercial and diplomatic relations
with China after they had begun to trade with her. This, he argues, was
therefore clearly not the main issue. Hu Sheng’s suggestion that the Manchu
Emperor’s fear of political instability from external conflict led the state to
adopt a more seclusionist policy could be used however to corroborate
Fairbank’s point.

Tan Chung argues that until Commissioner Lin’s crackdown on opium trade in
Canton, the British had dealt quite cautiously with the Manchu officials, even
sending pseudo-tributary missions and focusing on the purchase of goods from
China rather than transforming her into a market for her goods. He asserts that
there is nothing to prove that the British were contemplating war before the
status quo of the opium trade was disturbed. There was no crisis in Sino-
British relations prior to Commisioner Lin’s attack on opium trade in Canton.
It might be noted that these criticisms against the Western scholars might
equally be extended to the Communist historians who also view the Opium
War as part of a larger process of the imperialist penetration of China. This line
of argument lays the foundation for Tan Chung’s own hypothesis which focuses
on the opium trade itself as the cause for the conflict.

Tan Chung is also fiercely critical of Fairbank’s approach to the Opium War
which seeks to explain all events through China’s cultural superiority complex
and asserts, according to Tan Chung, that it was China’s “white peril”
xenophobia that set her on an inevitable collision course with the West. It is
interesting to note, however, that this is not a perspective confined to Western
historians. Li Chien-nung, who views the Lin Wei-hsi incident as the immediate
cause of the war, emphasizes on the difference between the Chinese and the
British on judicial conceptions and practices. Tan Chung however notes that
conflicts over extraterritoriality and judicial procedure between the British
and the Chinese had not sparked wars in the past.

TAN CHUNG: ‘Triton and Dragon’; China and the Brave New World’

Tan Chung restores the focus of the Opium War to the opium trade itself which
he believes to be the central issue. He notes that nowhere in the history of the
world do there seem to have been so many opium addicts as in China in the
19th century. On the eve of the Opium War, seven out of every thousand in
China were opium addicts. He repudiates the suggestion that the expansion of
the opium trade in China was a simple demand-supply equation, drawing
attention to the nature of the commodity itself which creates an addiction. The
demand for opium therefore could only expand once the habit had been
formed.
He attributes primacy to the detrimental effect of opium on Chinese society
and economy.
He notes, along with Fairbank, amongst others, that opium addiction had eaten
its way into even the ranks of the scholar gentry and the government officials.
Officials in the judicial and financial departments who were supposed to
control opium addiction themselves extorted opium and became addicts.
Traffic in opium frequently brought officials into contact with smugglers,
leading to corruption and debasing public office. Tan Chung observes that the
Chinese loss in the opium traffic was twofold. On the one hand, they paid a high
price for a commodity which not only provided no utility but also damaged
public health, morality, efficiency, harmony and law and order. Secondly, as the
payment was made in silver, a large amount of silver was drained away from
China creating a scarcity. The scarcity of silver resulted in the depression of
economic conditions in China for while taxes were paid in copper coins, they
were assessed and collected in silver. The depreciation of copper currency as a
result of the scarcity of silver had negative implications for various sections of
society. Petty merchants, who purchased goods from the wholesale market for
silver, exchanged them for copper coins only to find that they had in fact
earned a loss. The greatest burden of inflation of course, was borne by the
consumers.

Tan Chung also describes in great detail the extraction of revenue from China
through the opium trade. He argues that Chinese exports in the form of tea and
silk were paid for through the profits of the opium trade and thus the balance
of trade was tilted against China. In comparison to the goods they purchased,
the British expenses on their exports were virtually negligible for the prices of
Indian opium and cotton-textiles were depressed to the minimum level. The
British traders thus earned a massive profit on their trade with China while the
Chinese failed to benefit from their rich export trade to Britain

The fact that proposals to deal with the opium trade were taken so seriously by
the Manchu Emperor and various solutions devised by officials in the course of
the famous Opium Debates establishes beyond doubt that opium was the
primary concern in the minds of the Chinese at any rate. Tan Chung also notes
the influence of the British opium trading concerns on the conduct and
direction of the war. It was on the advice of William Jardine, the owner of the
prominent British opium concern that Palmerston (the Prime Minister of
Britain) launched into the Opium War. Directions and commands to the fleets
dispatched to China were also based on the information provided by ‘Old China
Hands’, often opium traders. The actions of Commander Elliot of Macau in
committing the British government in the opium issue and the tacit
encouragement offered to the opium traders by the home government well
before 1839 establish beyond doubt the anxiety of the English towards their
opium concerns.

The initiation of an anti-opium campaign by Commissioner Lin Tse Hsu and the
frustration of the British opium interests in China, according to Tan Chung,
constituted both the immediate provocation and the main issue in the Opium
War.

In the opinion of this student, while Tan Chung’s attempts to reorient the
debate and focus on the opium trade are not unwelcome, to view such an
explanation of the Opium War in isolation or in opposition to the alternative
explanations advanced by scholars such as Fairbank would be a mistake. The
perspective offered by the Communists which, while it does not always stand
up to close examination as Tan Chung has proved, also enables us to place the
Opium War in a specific historical context and view it as part of the larger
narrative of imperialism in Asia. While the Opium War may have been
originally a military conflict over the opium trade, its ramifications were
tremendous for China. Although one must not go so far as to locate the origins
for the War in its consequences, the implications of the Opium War cannot be
neglected.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE OPIUM WAR

By the Treaty of Nanking, the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and
Shanghai were opened up to the Western trading interests. Consuls were
appointed at each port and a uniformly moderate tariff was imposed on both
imports and exports. An indemnity was extracted and the island of Hong Kong
was ceded to the British. However the consequences of the Opium War of
1839-42 go far beyond the Treaty of Nanking.
According to Lai Xinxia, a Communist historian, the Opium War led to the
intensification of contradictions between the peasantry and landlords but also
created new social forces----“the comprador, plebeian and proletarian classes”.
There was a drastic realignment of social forces in China with the peasants,
plebeians and proletarians emerging in opposition to the alliance of the foreign
capitalists and the Chinese ruling elite and feudal classes. Hu Sheng also takes
this angle, emphasizing on the growing disaffection towards the Manchu
regime which was to manifest itself in uprisings like the Taiping rebellion. For
the Communist scholars therefore, the Opium War might almost seem to have
had positive consequences for China as it upset the status quo and set the stage
for a revolution (albeit one that did not surface).
It is interesting to note that writers such as Fairbank are accused by Tan Chung
of adopting a similar approach to the OpiumWar. He alleges that the Western
scholars have emphasized on the civilizing and benevolent influence of the
West upon China, ignoring the exploitative behaviour of the Western trading
companies. To Fairbank and others, Tan Chung says, the Opium War was
significant for the opening up of China to Western civilization, which brought
with it capitalism, nationalism and Christianity.

Above all, however, the Opium War ended once and for all the anti-opium
campaign and placed the Manchu regime at the mercy of the Western powers.
New terms of trade were established which favoured the British and were to
the detriment of China. The Opium War initiated the process of the steady
conversion of China into little more than a dependent colony of the Western
imperialist powers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1) Immanuel Hsu: The Rise of Modern China

2) Nathaniel Peffer: The Far East

3) Foreign Language Press: The Opium War

4) Hu Sheng: Imperialism and Chinese Politics

5) J.K. Fairbank (ed): The Cambridge History of China

6) Tan Chung: China and the Brave New World

7) Tan Chung: Triton and Dragon