On December 28, 2009, Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen of Pakistani ethnicity, was executed in China — the first European to be executed in China in almost 60 years, as Julia Lovell informs us in her well-researched book, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China . The event unleashed a wave of reactions, on predictable lines, in Britain and China. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was “appalled and disappointed” at the execution of the man who stood accused of smuggling four kilogrammes of opium into China. The reaction in China showed that, nearly 170 years after the Opium War, the issue still rankles its people. And it is not just a perceived sense of nationalism that comes to the fore, but also a feeling of hurt at the war imposed on the country as a culmination of the famous gunboat diplomacy.
Back then, the Opium War was considered a “traumatic inauguration” of China's modern history and, significantly, the Chinese were forced to defend themselves. Cut to 2009, and the opinion changes on both sides. As Guardian reminded its readers, “The Opium War is a pretty shameful story. Perhaps it slipped your memory? It certainly hasn't slipped [China's] and is still unravelling.” Reacting to Shaikh's execution in the face of British protests, the Chinese authorities said, “Given the bitter memory of history … the public has a particular and strong resentment towards it [drug smuggling].” And an academic commented: “The execution of Shaikh is like the burning of opium stocks in Humen in 1840 during the Opium War.”
Indeed, the Opium War has evoked almost as many opinions as the sacks burnt during that period — some shades of them do find their way into Lovell's book too, who even otherwise uses Anglophone accounts as well as the Chinese sources to give a multilateral presentation in this 450-odd page volume. Lovell walks a tightrope, trying to accommodate the British viewpoint by making out that the war itself — and indeed the trust deficit between the West and China — was the result of a lack of awareness about the Chinese ways of working, and the rulers' preoccupation with their domestic affairs.
Main cause
However, Lovell is not the only one to give a new shade to the war. Much like Karl Marx, Tan Chung, a highly respected academic, believed opium was the main cause of the war. On the other side, there was Michael Greenberg, who held that, for the British, the issues in contention were not limited to the drug. There were also concerns about the regulatory framework for the mode of contact between the West and China in the future. Then there was Li Chien Nung who subscribed to the cultural war theory. With the likes of Beckmann and Chesneaux adding their differing voices, determining the causes of war has turned into a task akin to that of finding a needle in a haystack.
Cast a shadow
Giving her own spin to the argument, Lovell notes: “For 170 years, the Opium War and its afterlives have cast a shadow over Sino-Western relations, both sides tampering with the historical record for their own purposes. Influential Nineteenth century Britons worked hard to fabricate a virtuous casus belli out of an elementary problem of trade deficit: to reinvent the war as a clash of civilisations triggered by the ‘unnaturally' isolationist Chinese … Chinese nation-builders in turn transformed it into the cause of all their country's troubles … the reality of the war itself … illuminated deep fault lines in the messily multi-ethnic Qing empire.” Incidentally, this so-called insular Qing empire was expanding through a mixture of conquests and commerce, mocking at the West's stereotypes of a ‘closed' China.
One may not agree with the “insular” appraisal. Yet, it will be worthwhile to know why and how opium came to the country where a whole generation of people was ruined by it. William Naiper, through a deadly mix of obduracy and arrogance, might have forced the Chinese hand, but the origins of the drug go far back in time to the years immediately preceding the war, the period of his high-handed ways. It came from the West — principally Greece and Italy — Afghanistan, Turkey, and Syria. Its uses ranged from fighting ailments like arthritis, diabetes and diarrhoea to enhancing sexual pleasure. Interestingly, a few years after attaining Independence when the Chinese authorities excavated the tomb of emperor Wanli, they found the bones saturated with morphine.
Lovell's approach may not be justifiable throughout. But she does manage to make a pertinent point: the Opium War was a shameful episode in the West's relations with China, and indeed a tragic one for the people of China; it may not have thrown up a real victor from a long-term perspective, but it does hold lessons for charting the future course of Sino-Western relations.
