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    Sun Yat Sen and the birth of modern China: 20th Century China: Volume One
    Sun Yat Sen and the birth of modern China: 20th Century China: Volume One
    Sun Yat Sen and the birth of modern China: 20th Century China: Volume One
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    Sun Yat Sen and the birth of modern China: 20th Century China: Volume One

    By Nick Shepley

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    About this ebook

    As the increasingly powerless Qing Dynasty in 19th Century China struggled to defend itself from European, American and Japanese colonial control, and bloody civil wars and rebellions fought by an angry and desperate people raged, a new revolutionary force emerged.Sun Yat Sen's Tongmenghui, later known as the Kuomintang adopted the revolutionary ideas of the west, but in a bid to sweep away not only the weak Qing Dynasty, but the western powers that had brought China to her knees. This is the first ebook in a series of three that explores the dramatic changes that have shaped the Chinese 20th Century, and look set to shape the 21st. Explaining History Ebooks are a series of short, concise, detailed and in-depth ebooks that examine each chapter of the 20th Century in totality, ideal as an introduction to new historians, or a companion to regular history readers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAUK Academic
    Release dateDec 7, 2015
    ISBN9781783330898
    Sun Yat Sen and the birth of modern China: 20th Century China: Volume One

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      Sun Yat Sen and the birth of modern China - Nick Shepley

      China.

      Opium

      Since the mid 18th Century, British traders had been attempting to crack open the lucrative markets they knew existed deep in the Chinese interior. China had been fighting a rearguard action against such intrusions, the insular kingdom had also sought to regulate trade with the newly independent USA from 1783 onwards with the establishment of the Old China Trade Agreement. The agreement, in many ways, tells us more about the astonishing early dynamism of the USA, than about China per se. Following the signing of the second Treaty of Paris in 1783, American traders, freed from the constraints of British control, recognised that in China, lucrative markets existed. Britain, seeing the newly liberated America as a dangerous trading rival, managed to shut her out of much world trade in the rest of the Americas, Caribbean and the British Isles, forcing US traders to look further afield for their wealth.

      The Americans were late comers to the trading game with China. Ever since the establishment of the Silk Road and the voyages of Marco Polo, there had been Sino-European commerce and the British were busy in Canton province, as the Portuguese were in Macau.

      The Chinese appear to have had a strangely optimistic, if slightly naive attitude towards the Americans. They saw the British traders as colonisers, recognising that wherever they went, the military might of their government followed. The Chinese did not believe that the newly independent US traders were backed up by governmental power, and left them to their own devices, not seeing them even as an economic threat.

      The ambivalence towards American commercial interests at the end of the 18th Century allowed them to gain a strong hold over the Chinese economy in the south. In many instances, China’s rulers, far from being ambivalent, were excited by the prospects of what American traders could offer, particularly when they sold gold and silver bullion in Canton. This, along with ginseng grown in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and furs caught in the great interior of the US all made American traders very wealthy.

      The decline of British power in the Americas that enabled an expansion of US trade to the east, also resulted in a growth of British interest in Asia; American independence didn’t result in the end of the British Empire, it resulted in the end of one phase of imperialism, and saw the beginning of another.

      The next half century from the 1780s to the 1840s saw a rapid expansion of British power in Asia with India as a commercial staging post, and Burma, Malaya, Siam, the East Indies and Southern China being the principal markets for a new, aggressively mercantile seafaring power.

      As British hegemony over India grew, her need for trading rights in China emerged, not as a separate and parallel phenomena but as an extension of the mercantile imperialism that would make Britain the world’s wealthiest nation by 1850. Prior to the advent of the drug trade, India was a loss making enterprise for the British, but it was also a tool for resolving a growing British trade headache. The British had discovered their taste for tea at the start of the 19th Century, in much the same way they had found a taste for coffee and sugar in the mid 18th Century. The demand of Chinese tea saw a net outflow of wealth from Britain, not matched by British imported manufactured goods to China. The growing trade deficit in China’s favour was resolved by the introduction of opium, which proved to be far more popular than the output of Britain’s industrial revolution.

      Opium would account for much of this wealth and its use as a recreational drug had been first banned by the Qing emperors in 1729. Since the start of the 18th Century European traders had been mixing it with tobacco and shipping it into China, where its medicinal properties had been known for at least a thousand years.

      The opium and other import trades had their epicentre in the ‘Thirteen Hongs’ or factories that were established by western trading nations in Guangzhou, outside the city’s walls, with the connivance of China’s emperors.

      The appetite for opium in China tells a familiar and predictable story, from some 200 chests of the imported drug in 1729, the market 130 years later was 70,000 chests per annum, an increase in demand that can only be explained by its addictiveness, it was small wonder that the British were willing to fight to keep the lucrative trade going, they were now operating the largest narcotic distribution network that has ever had official state sanction, and it was worth untold millions.

      The catastrophic effect it had on the Chinese was widely documented at the time, and the use of opium burrowed deep into Chinese society and culture, with addicts and users becoming ubiquitous across mainland China. The effect on the Chinese economy was equally damaging, British traders took payment for their consignments of drugs in silver, causing a powerful drain on silver coin within the Chinese Empire, leading to a deflationary crisis. The emperor Daoguang could see in this the weakness of his own rule and of China’s position in the face of her enemies, her inability to police the opium trade, coupled with the backwardness and weakness of her economy was not only deeply shameful, but also it gave cues to her enemies that China was ripe for further exploitation.

      By the 1820s the British began to strip away China’s comparative advantage in tea by planting their own tea crops in Assam and Darjeeling and in other parts of their Indian colony. This once again saw a net flow of monies out of China, and an impoverished imperial throne was a vulnerable one, China’s one constant was rebellion and the Qing emperors were no exception, they needed a wealthy state in order to hold the country together. The crises of the early part of the 19th Century were really systemic shocks to China’s antiquated economy as she began to process of becoming more deeply connected to the global economy.

      Daoguang, who also aggressively attempted to stymie the inroads that Catholicism was making into southern China, sent his most trusted advisor, the venerable Lin Zexu, to Southern China to wage the campaign against the opium trade, and it would be

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