the british and chinese governments are both against the drug trade the extremely rich anglo smugglers have a goodbye dinner for a guy who's retiring. the guy gives a speech about how the governments are the real smugglers, man
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there was an initial attempt at a peace treaty by chinese and british representatives, neither of whom really wanted a war it was FURIOUSLY rejected by both emperor of china and lord palmerston, british foreign secretary, both of whom saw it as too weak for their side sigh
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chinese emperor did not think it was worth a major effort to fight the war and didnt do any large-scale mobilization what on earth was he thinking
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british just absolutely ruin the coasts the war is depressing, demoralizing to the royal navy sailors who mostly find it pathetic and sad to blow up defenseless chinese coastal cities
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eventually the war is won after the whigs are driven from power and the exasperated conservative ministry orders the royal navy to sail up the yangtze and threaten to bombard Nanjing, at which point the Qing capitulate everyone is depressed, mortified about the entire affair
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hilariously and i imagine this is often missed, the war was not fought to make sure they could keep selling china opium they didnt even really expect the trade to survive the smugglers certainly didnt want it legalized in china would cut into their comparative advantage
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meanwhile in the united states the sjws were comparing opium to slavery, while the south was pointing to opium to demonstrate that in comparison slavery wasnt bad at all
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also we completely ate britains trade during the opium war and everyone in china was pissed at them about blowing up their country so the US advantage continued after as a consequence we won without lifting a finger
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afterward we won favorable terms just by bringing some military technology which they had become more interested in but i wonder if chinas weakness was due to not having a civilizational concept of a "technology level" (is this possible?)
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like maybe if you spend a lot of time with consistent technology maybe you don't really consider that other things are not just "different" but "qualitatively superior" i have no idea whether this is true
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apparently the western contemporary conception of the opium war as the west just forcing opium down chinas through was an early 20C chinese nationalist propaganda effort chinese writers didnt associate it with opium until 1910
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this was actually the first case of china using western media as propaganda outlets (I do not say this critically) the drug czar was complaining to victoria about her unwillingness to help in the chinese drug warhttps://twitter.com/passacagliostro/status/1337962320555859970 …
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anyway hell of a book in the end, the layering on of a Message is working to its detriment went from liminal to superliminal at times but the history is masterfully done
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