The Opium Wars
The Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) were a series of wars by Great Britain and their monopolistic East India Company against Qing China over the sale of opium in China. During the time, the Qing Chinese empire was being torn apart by taxes and regulations which were causing economic depressions and insurrections. Many Chinese subjects were using opium in order to escape their depressed lives. The Qing government blamed their problems on the opium trade and sought to abolish it to revive the economy. Now China is doing the same thing to the West, particularly Great Britain’s former colonies in the United States of America, with fentanyl.
Trade in the early 19th century between Britain and China was often the British trading silver for silk, tea, and other Chinese products. Chinese traders in turn would buy opium produced in British India with their silver profits.
As the East India Company increasingly produced opium, it became cheaper and more available to the Chinese public. Simultaneously, the Qing Empire was in decline and the parasitic elites were impoverishing the Chinese people through excessive taxes and regulations, like the monopoly on the salt trade. This led to several insurrections further weakening China, such as the Taiping Rebellion led by Hong Xiuquan, which led to the deaths of around 20 million people between 1850-1864.[1][2]
Britannica.com notes the deterioration of China between the reigns of the emperors Qianlong (1735-1796) and his son Yongyan (1796-1820) leading up to the opium wars.[3]
“The Qianlong reign (1735–96) marked the culmination of the early Qing. The emperor had inherited an improved bureaucracy and a full treasury from his father and expended enormous sums on the military expeditions known as the Ten Great Victories. He was both noted for his patronage of the arts and notorious for the censorship of anti-Manchu literary works that was linked with the compilation of the Siku quanshu (“Complete Library of the Four Treasuries”; Eng. trans. under various titles). The closing years of his reign were marred by intensified court factionalism centred on the meteoric rise to political power of an imperial favourite, a young officer named Heshen. Yongyan, who reigned as the Jiaqing emperor (1796–1820), lived most of his life in his father’s shadow. He was plagued by treasury deficits, piracy off the southeast coast, and uprisings among aboriginal groups in the southwest and elsewhere. These problems, together with new pressures resulting from an expansion in opium imports, were passed on to his successor, the Daoguangemperor (reigned 1820–50).”
The Qing attempted to ban the import of opium to solve their societal and economic problems, leading to them losing both Opium Wars and worsening economic conditions on top of the preexisting taxes and regulations. For example, Hong Kong was officially ceded to Great Britain from 1842-1997. The failed Boxer Rebellion against Western occupiers (1899-1901) weakened the Qing government. These conditions led to the eventual downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and decades of civil war between the Chinese Nationalists (now only controlling Taiwan) and the Chinese Communists (1927-1949) while Japan simultaneously invaded (1931-1945). The Japanese lost the war and then the Communists defeated the Nationalists.
The economy of China did not recover after the wars were over. The Chinese Communist Party instead enacted Socialism. For example, one of their economic policies, the Great Leap Forward, resulted in the deaths of around 50 million people instead of creating prosperity.
To quote Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute,[4]
“How many died as a result of persecutions and the policies of Mao? Perhaps you care to guess? Many people over the years have attempted to guess. But they have always underestimated. As more data rolled in during the 1980s and 1990s, and specialists have devoted themselves to investigations and estimates, the figures have become ever more reliable. And yet they remain imprecise. What kind of error term are we talking about? It could be as low as 40 million. It could be as high as 100 million or more. In the Great Leap Forward from 1959 to 1961 alone, figures range between 20 million to 75 million. In the period before, 20 million. In the period after, tens of millions more.”
China’s economy only became the world’s powerhouse after US President Richard Nixon opened up trade with the country in 1972 following the abandonment of the US gold standard in 1971 (inflation). By the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Chinese market had begun to replace Japan as the new place for companies to export their productive businesses to escape from the increasingly unprofitable taxes (including inflation) and regulations of the USA.[5]
Over the past 50 years, American workers have been left with progressively fewer economic opportunities, higher prices, more taxes, more debt, and welfare. Like Chinese subjects during the Qing dynasty, US citizens are using opiates to escape their depression. The number 1 and number 2 cause of death for Americans 18-45 years old is the opiate fentanyl followed by suicide. China is America’s largest supplier of fentanyl.[6][7][8]
The US government has been blaming American economic problems on drugs ever since the war on drugs ramped up the same year that Nixon ended the gold standard in 1971. Instead of addressing the unaffordable prices caused by printing money, progressive taxes, and regulations, the government instead put potentially unemployed people to work arresting drug users and using drug users as slave labor in prison. The US has the world’s largest prison population for a reason.[9][10][11]
The only reason that the USA and China have outlasted the Soviets is because the USA prints and exports the world’s reserve currency to China in exchange for their goods and services and the Chinese Communist Party uses the profits to stay in power. If the arrangement becomes unprofitable as the US government prints money without end, then the dollar savings of China’s new middle class will disappear along with the government’s popularity.
Opiates just help keep the money flowing to China.
God willing, the USA will readopt the Constitution instead of pretending that authoritarian governments create wealth. Socialism does not work because it does not allow for the freedom to keep the fruit of your labor which is the basis of free trade in free markets and capital production (so called capitalism). Wealth is made common as the amount of goods and services increases relative to the supply of money. People tend to work harder for their family than for the Chinese word for the government: nation-family (guo-jia 国家).
Printing money, taxes, and regulations concentrate wealth in the hands of the ruling elite. Just as the Qing did, the USA can blame our economic depression on opiates or we can acknowledge that opiate use is a direct consequence of depression caused by the government’s policies.[12][13]
As Evergrande is showing, China too is on the brink of economic collapse… again. Evergrande is one of China’s largest property developers. Whichever country becomes the freest will become the richest.[14][15]
[1]https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hong-Xiuquan
[2]https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19977188
[3]https://www.britannica.com/place/China/The-Qing-empire
[4]https://mises.org/wire/horrors-communist-china
[5]https://www.hamiltonmobley.com/blog/august-15-1971
[6]https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0szR2Ua9v0Sr91YhDD7gPrXsDkHxDvP/view
[8]https://www.hamiltonmobley.com/blog/r9tu385c22azkxuycdia7o3kludljh
[9]https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs
[11]https://www.hamiltonmobley.com/blog/c9x2o6yamrtdl91s8msgtr2rosf7lr
[12]http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1000bce_confucius_intro.htm
[13]https://www.hamiltonmobley.com/blog/husbandry
[15]https://www.hamiltonmobley.com/blog/a-black-swan-in-china