Chinese Opium Wars

Introduction

The Opium Wars is the name given to two nineteenth-century wars between China and Western countries. The military confrontations that occurred between China and Britain from 1839 to 1842 are known as the first Opium War. Historians refer to the war that transpired from 1856 to 1860 between China and joint Anglo-French forces as the second Opium War. This paper discusses Chinese opium wars in a concise and comprehensive way.

Chinese Opium Wars

Fay (pp. 67-89) mentions Britain had established the East India Company in 1600 in part to gain access to the Chinese market. Thereafter the company enjoyed a monopoly over Britain's trade with China. Given Britain's growing demand for tea, porcelain, and silk from China, trade between China and Britain remained in China's favor down to the early nineteenth century. In order to find money to pay for these goods and cover the trade deficit, the company started to import opium to China in large quantities starting in the mid-eighteenth century. The size of these imports increased tenfold between 1800 and 1840 and provided the British with the means to pay for the tea and other goods imported from China (Fay, pp. 67-89). By the 1820s the trade balance had shifted in Britain's favor, and opium became a major commercial and diplomatic issue between China and Britain.

The opium trade was illegal in China. The Qing state had banned opium sales that were not strictly for medical purposes as early as 1729. But the law was not rigorously enforced. A century later more Chinese people had become opium smokers, which made enforcement of the ban more difficult (Fay, pp. 67-89). By the mid-1830s growing drug addiction had created such serious economic, social, financial, and political problems in China that many Chinese scholars and officials were becoming concerned about the resulting currency drain, moral decay, and diminishment of the military forces' fighting capacity. They argued that China had to ban the opium trade once and for all.

The emperor agreed and in 1838 decided that the opium trade must be stopped. He sent an official named Lin Zexu (1785-1850) to Guangzhou with a special mandate to solve the opium problem. Lin launched a comprehensive attack on the opium trade, targeting users as well as providers of the drug. In his dealing with British opium traders, he used a combination of reason, moral suasion, and coercion. He even sent a letter to Queen Victoria to argue his case. In his carefully phrased letter, Lin tried to appeal to the British queen's sense of moral responsibility and legality. When reason and moral suasion did not work, Lin blockaded the residence compound of the foreign opium traders, including the British superintendent in Guangzhou, to force them to give up more than twenty thousand chests of opium (Polachek, pp. 45-53).

The goods from China carried away by your country not only supply your own consumption and use, but also can be divided up and sold to other countries, producing a triple profit. Even if you do not ...