This article is from the RCP’s pamphlet The Crimes of British Imperialism.
To fight imperialism, we must scientifically understand what it is, and where it came from. This pamphlet is therefore aimed at arming communists in the revolutionary struggles to come, to end the system which caused these heinous crimes.
Order your copy today at Wellred Books Britain.
For much of human history, China has been the largest and most advanced economy in the world. It was famous for its world-changing inventions and highly sophisticated education system. Its state encompassed more territory and people than any other. It was a proud civilisation.
This all changed dramatically in the Opium Wars of the mid 19th Century, in which Britain violently dragged the Chinese state into the world market, beginning what is known in China as its ‘century of humiliation’.
This criminal episode revealed to a shocked, traumatised China, British imperialism’s breathtaking hypocrisy, arrogance, greed and ruthlessness. This champion of Christian morality was in fact the world’s biggest drug dealer, employing the methods of the mafia: violent extortion and drug addiction as a means to corrode and demoralise.
Even William Gladstone thought Britain’s crimes in China were “most infamous and atrocious”, so much so that he was “in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China”.
The Opium ‘trade’ between British India and China was, in the words of the renowned China scholar John Fairbank, “the most long-continued systematic international crime of modern times” after the slave trade.
China’s stagnation
Given that Britain was, by the 19th Century, the most economically advanced country in the world, it might seem strange that Britain had to use violence to get China to agree to trade with it.
Britain produced more manufactured goods than any other country, and they were cheap. Surely there was a demand for them in China, just as there was a demand for Chinese tea, spices and silk in Britain?
Unlike Britain, China’s economy was not dependent on external trade. From an early stage, China was much more insular than European countries. The Chinese state was also far more stable, a fact revealed by its more or less continuous existence across a very large area for thousands of years.
Unlike European countries, China was always bounded by much more backward economies.
To its east, there is only Japan (which is much smaller than China and for most of its history was more backwards) and the vast Pacific Ocean. To its north and west there lies only the sparsely populated nomadic peoples of Siberia and central Asia.
India lay far away over the Himalayas in the southwest. Vietnam and Thailand were relatively developed, but they too were far away and much smaller than China.
In human history, the traditional and easiest means of transporting goods for trade were always the waterways on which merchant ships could be laden.
Yet east Asia has no mediterranean sea at its centre to connect different peoples and foster their trade. The famous trade route associated with China, the Silk Road, was a long and dangerous overland route through deserts and mountains, over which only small caravans could travel.
This fostered an economy much less trade based and much more under the control of a central state. “Ancient China’s lack of sea trade left the merchants less important and disesteemed ideologically” (Fairbank and Goldman, China: A New History, 2006, p42).
Thus, the Chinese state exhibited an unusual degree of continuity and stability. For most of its history, it had little to fear in terms of economic and political competition.
Although dynasties did fall, the Chinese state fundamentally remained intact, and it was at no point under foreign domination, exploitation and break up in the way that European peoples so often were. Both the Manchurian and Mongolian conquests of China resulted simply in the adaptation of their rulers to the Chinese culture, state and economy.
It is for these reasons that when vessels from a new, extremely remote people arrived in the early 17th Century, it seemed of little significance to the emperors of the Qing dynasty. As they traditionally saw it, China was the ‘middle kingdom’, surrounded by barbarians.
So inferior were all the surrounding peoples in their eyes, that the Chinese had usually referred to them in generic terms: they were simply ‘northern barbarians’ (Di), ‘southern barbarians’ (Man), ‘western barbarians’ (Rong), and ‘eastern barbarians’ (Yi). The British and other Europeans were simply more Yi, since their boats arrived from the east.
This relatively self-contained economy is the reason for China’s disastrous economic stagnation vis-a-vis the west.
Precisely because of this insularity, the Chinese ruling class had no idea that it had fallen behind technologically and economically. It kept on assuming it was the centre of everything, and these European upstarts remained barbarians.
Thus, it felt no impetus to adapt to these new traders and find a way to spur the economy to compete with them. They had no idea of what these barbarians were capable of.
Britain’s trade deficit
In the 18th Century, the British, via the British East India Company (EIC), had taken control of much of India. From there, they attempted to wrest control of the lucrative European trade with Asia away from their competitors, mainly the Dutch.
Chinese luxuries, such as tea, silk and porcelain, were highly coveted in Europe; if British ships could monopolise it then Britain would grow very rich.
The problem was that British goods were not highly coveted in China. As the industrial revolution took off, British manufacturing began to outgrow the home market. Their textiles and other commodities were very cheap.
But the Chinese economy was more or less self-sufficient, and merchants were under the thumb of the centralised Chinese state which had no interest in inviting in cheap British goods that would destroy its home industries.
Lacking a market for British goods within China, the only thing British merchants could offer in return for the tea, silk and porcelain they craved, was silver, which was the currency of the Chinese state.
Consequently, silver was draining out of the British empire and into China, which created problems for its home economy and meant the British were in danger of running out of means to pay the Chinese for their luxuries.
Opium was consumed medicinally and recreationally in China at this time. It was also grown in India under the Mughal empire, and so the EIC inherited these fields. The British imperialists spied a golden opportunity to end their trade deficit with China. They had found the one commodity they could produce that there was genuine demand for in China.
Like the serious drug dealer it was, Britain cultivated a serious habit in its punter. The emperor banned the drug in 1729 because of the dangerous effects it was already having.
But this did not deter the East India Company.
Opium smuggling rose from around two hundred chests a year at the time of its criminalisation, to one thousand by the mid 18th Century, to four thousand by the early 19th Century, and then thirty thousand around the time of the Opium Wars in the middle of the 19th Century.
By this point, it was seriously big business, providing fifteen to twenty percent of the British empire’s entire revenue. Now it was China’s turn to experience a serious drain of silver.
Social poison
This drug trade was disastrous not only for China, but Britain’s new colony of India as well. Realising how lucrative opium production was, it coerced Bengali farmers away from producing their food and into growing opium poppies.
According to Amitav Ghosh, this led to the Bengal famine of 1770, when seven to ten million people, a third of the Bengali population, starved to death. British imperialism had tied the fate of India and China together and to the world market it was forging.
Britain stoked the world’s first opiate epidemic, and it had devastating consequences on China. Millions upon millions of Chinese were addicted. And it was not confined to the down-and-out layers. Merchants, intellectuals, workers, monks and soldiers used it in droves.
But its use by one other layer was even more significant.
Chinese civilisation was, more than any other, distinguished by its ‘officialism’ (as opposed to its religion or military). As Stuart Schram said, “The state was the central power in Chinese society from the start, and exemplary behaviour, rites, morality and indoctrinations have always been considered in China as a means of government” (quoted in Fairbank and Goldman, op cit, p45).
By the 1830s, swathes of Chinese officialdom were addicted to opium. Marx understood the profoundly demoralising, corroding effect this had on the Chinese ruling class,
“Besides this immediate economical consequence, the bribery connected with opium smuggling has entirely demoralised the Chinese State officers in the Southern provinces. Just as the Emperor was wont to be considered the father of all China, so his officers were looked upon as sustaining the paternal relation to their respective districts. But this patriarchal authority, the only moral link embracing the vast machinery of the State, has gradually been corroded by the corruption of those officers, who have made great gains by conniving at opium smuggling” (Marx, Revolution in China and in Europe, 1853)
By 1905, twenty five percent of Chinese men were addicted. In 1906, 41,000 tons of opium were produced globally. 39,000 of that was for China. The Great British drug dealer had transformed once mighty China into the world’s addict. Like any other heroin addict, China was dependent, unproductive and prostrate before the world.
War
This was becoming a life and death question for the Qing government. The emperor launched a campaign against the drug, stating that “opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality.”
He appointed Lin Zexu, who was known for his hardline anti-opium stance, to run this campaign. His first act was to write an open letter to ‘the Ruler of England’ (i.e. Queen Victoria), in which we find the following,
“The purpose of your ships in coming to China is to realise a large profit. Since this profit is realised in China and is in fact taken away from the Chinese people, how can foreigners return injury for the benefit they have received by sending this poison to harm their benefactors?
“They may not intend to harm others on purpose, but the fact remains that they are so obsessed with material gain that they have no concern whatever for the harm they can cause to others.
“Have they no conscience? I have heard that you strictly prohibit opium in your own country, indicating unmistakably that you know how harmful opium is. You do not wish opium to harm your own country, but you choose to bring that harm to other countries such as China. Why?”
Lin did not reckon with the astonishing cynicism, avarice and propensity for violence of the British imperialists, for he did not know the nature of capitalism, so new to China’s shores.
In 1839, Lin had the British merchants in Guangzhou (then anglicised as Canton) barricaded into their warehouses, holding them hostage until they surrendered their opium that was held offshore, which they eventually did. He then had this opium destroyed, a vast quantity worth millions.
Once again, Lin had underestimated the ruthless brutality with which the British imperialists would defend their profits, which as we have seen, were heavily dependent on opium.
In response to the destruction of their merchandise, the British sent numerous warships to attack China, and had the nerve to demand the legalisation of the opium trade, compensation for the destroyed opium, the granting of Hong Kong as a British possession, the opening of several more ports throughout China to British trade, and finally, that China pay reparations for the British war effort!
Thanks to the development of capitalism and the industrial revolution in Britain, the British navy featured advanced and destructive steam powered ships with which the Chinese could not contend.
They sailed their ships up the Yangtze river almost unimpeded, and unloaded their shells onto Chinese cities such as Nanjing:
“The British capture of the port of Jinhai in early October 1841 provides a useful example of the character of the conflict. The port was bombarded by the Wellesley (74 guns), the Conway and the Alligator (28 guns each), the Cruiser and the Algerine (18 guns each) and another dozen smaller vessels each carrying ten guns. In nine minutes they fired 15 broadsides into the effectively defenceless town before landing troops to storm the ruins.
“According to one British participant, “the crashing of timber, falling houses and groans of men resounded from the shore” and when the smoke cleared “a mass of ruins presented itself to the eye”. When the troops landed on the beach, they found it deserted, save for “a few dead bodies, bows and arrows, broken spears and guns…” With the bombardment of the town still under way, the troops moved in to rape and pillage.
“According to the India Gazette, “A more complete pillage could not be conceived…the plunder only ceased when there was nothing to take or destroy”. It was during this war that the Hindi word “lut” entered the English language as the word “loot”. The taking of Jinhai cost the British three men killed, while the number of Chinese dead was over 2,000. Close behind the warships came the opium ships, restarting their trade.” (John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried)
The opening up of China
Whilst the opium trade was extremely lucrative on its own terms, this remained a means to an end for British imperialism. It weakened the Chinese state by draining it of silver (which meant that Chinese tax revenues, which were paid in silver, began to dry up, causing a fiscal crisis), and provided the pretext for war.
Having defeated China with its superior, industrialised killing machines, the British won their demands that China open up to trade with Britain in general.
The effects were even more destructive than that of opium. In this destruction, the seed of the Chinese revolution was planted. As Marx explained at the time,
“Thousands of British and American vessels sailed towards China, and in a short time the country was filled to excess with cheap British and American factory wares. The Chinese industry based on hand labour was subjected to the competition of the machines.
“The hitherto unshakeable Central Empire experienced a social crisis. Taxes ceased to come in, the State fell to the edge of bankruptcy, the population sank in masses into pauperism, broke out in revolts, maltreated and killed the Emperor’s mandarins and the priests of the Fohis. The country came to the verge of ruin, and is already threatened with a mighty revolution.
“And there is even worse. Among the masses and in the insurrection there appeared people who pointed to the poverty on the one side and the riches on the other, and who demanded, and are still demanding, a different division of property and even the entire abolition of private property”.
The mass of paupers, created from those who formerly produced the goods now supplied by British imperialism, and from peasants impoverished by debt slavery to landlords enriched by trading with the foreigners, provided the basis for the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war which tore through China from 1850 to 1864, claiming the lives of around twenty million people, making it the most destructive war of the 19th Century.
The rebellion was accompanied with land seizures by peasants. Within its conquered areas attempts were apparently made to stimulate an internal market, agricultural production, develop exports and to suppress the opium trade.
In other words, it had elements of a potential bourgeois revolution within it, the main tasks of which should be to establish national sovereignty and a national market, and thoroughgoing agrarian reform, precisely those tasks most desperately needed in China at the time.
Whilst the rebellion was ongoing, Britain and France launched a second opium war against Beijing, in 1860. They felt unsatisfied with the way in which the ‘unequal treaty’ imposed after the first war was being carried out by China.
When a Chinese official boarded a boat with an expired British registration, docked in Guangzhou, to arrest Chinese smugglers who were working on it, the British used this as a pretext.
As always with imperialism, the hypocrisy is astounding: if a British ship, staffed by British criminals, but with a lapsed Chinese licence, were docked in Southampton, the British government would think nothing of boarding it and arresting the criminals onboard.
The French and, particularly, the British, attacked China once again with utter contempt for its people, culture and civilisation. The Reverend John Liggins wrote a pamphlet in 1881, titled Opium: England’s Coercive Policy and Its Disastrous Results in China and India, in which we find the following description of the British assault on Guangzhou in the Second Opium War:
“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.’”
The Summer Palace, the spectacular residence of the Chinese emperor containing one of the most extensive and beautiful collections of art in the world at the time, was sacked and looted.
British and French troops had already been helping themselves to its precious porcelain and jade artefacts, as was the tradition at the time (looting was seen as part of soldiers’ pay, which shows how routinely the British found themselves in a position to loot foreign sites), when they heard that the delegation that had gone to negotiate China’s surrender had been tortured and killed.
As a result, Lord Elgin (son of the notorious man who removed the so-called “Elgin marbles” from Greece) ordered the British troops to burn the entire complex down. This is the equivalent to Chinese soldiers burning and destroying the Houses of Parliament entirely.
In doing so, countless treasures were destroyed, including the Yongle Encyclopaedia, the world’s largest encyclopaedia ever compiled at the time.
Vast quantities of irreplaceable treasures and historic items were stolen and still to this day sit in British museums. To this day, the Chinese routinely ask for them back, but these museums “never reply”.
The British were conscious of the crimes they were committing, as the above quotations from Liggins’ pamphlet show. It was not just those soldiers with a conscience who grasped this, but the very tops of the British ruling class. This is shown by the fact that, when presented with a Pekinese dog looted from the Summer Palace, Queen Victoria named it ‘Looty’.
They knew what they were doing, but they didn’t care. Their aim was to rule the world and to open it up to British manufacturing.
We should not forget that these events took place around the same time as the Chartist movement in Britain, which took on insurrectionary dimensions. The British working class were genuinely threatening the capitalist system as a whole, and the ruling class were very conscious of this fact.
By opening up China to British capital, their profits would remain huge, British domination of the world would be secure, and they could continue using the spoils of this massive empire to lessen the class antagonisms at home.
China’s subjugation
After this traumatic crime was committed, the Qing regime surrendered. All of the British and French demands were met.
These involved paying massive reparations (which financially crippled the regime), the ceding of Kowloon peninsula (opposite the island of Hong Kong) to the British, the full legalisation of the opium trade, and the right for the British to take Chinese people as ‘indentured servants’ (essentially slaves) to the Americas.
China also had to agree that no Westerner could be tried in Chinese courts for crimes committed in the country.
Having succeeded in making the humiliated Qing government bend the knee, the British and French now worked to prop it up against the revolts from the Chinese masses. With the aid of British gunboats and generals such as ‘Chinese Gordon’, the Taiping rebellion was finally defeated after fourteen years of fighting.
But the Taiping rebellion had been fighting the same enemy, at the same time, as the British – the pre-capitalist Qing government. And it had bourgeois revolutionary tendencies. Why then did capitalist Britain join with the non-capitalist Qing to crush the Taiping? Why would the British bourgeoisie wish to halt a potential bourgeois revolution like that which had brought themselves to power in their homeland?
Because the rebellion’s threat to the lucrative status quo, the threat of Chinese capitalism developing independently, and the threat of ending the opium trade, would be serious challenges to the most powerful actor on the world market: Britain.
Imperialism has always distorted the capitalist development of the rest of the world. The world market came to China uninvited, in the person of the British drug baron. In sucking it into the worldwide division of labour, it sped up but also truncated the development of China.
Rather than repeat the history of England or France, having its own national revolution like theirs, China found itself as a subordinate part of an already existing world market.
Thus the tasks of the Chinese revolution fell to the working class. The Chinese revolution had to be part of the world socialist revolution against the imperialists who controlled the world market that China was already part of, rather than a struggle to establish a Chinese national market.
It is fitting that the twin scourges of British gunboats and opium were finally driven out of China by the revolution of 1949, which abolished capitalism and freed China from western imperialism almost exactly one hundred years after the first Opium War.
As the Chinese Communist Party’s army was crossing the Yangtze river – the very same river the British had used to maim and kill innocent Chinese people – on their way to overthrowing the government in 1949, they bombarded four British gunboats in the river, forcing them to flee for good.
No capitalist government had been able to stop the rampant spread of opium addiction in China; indeed these governments were notoriously corrupt.
How did Mao’s government defeat it finally? By abolishing capitalism.
Alongside paying for millions of addicts to receive treatment, the new regime abolished landlordism, which enabled them to replace opium cultivation with that of new, useful crops. In a short space of time, the most opium addicted country in the world went clean.
British imperialism’s crimes are many and great, but the Opium Wars certainly stand as some of the worst. That such a small country could inflict so much such suffering and exploitation on such vast countries as China and India, reflects the blind avarice of the capitalist system.
But by dragging these enormous countries into the world market, British imperialism’s actions had consequences far beyond its short-sighted intentions, and was eventually expelled with its tail between its legs.
