70. The Opium Wars

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We've been hearing a LOT of red scare language lately, this time- directed at China. Tennessee gubernatorial hopeful Marsha Blackburn, released a campaign ad smashing fortune cookies so that we could know she would be tough on China (ok Marsha). So WHY does China have beef? It turns out, China has a very good reason to resent and distrust the UK and its rogue stepchild, the United States.

In the 19th century, Britain needed Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea and China needed nothing Britain made. The trade deficit was embarrassing. And while Britain kept spending money, China kept getting richer. So the British East India Company found a solution: flood China with opium grown in colonized India (using forced labor and leaving people in abject poverty of course). As China fell to addiction the silver that purchased the opium funneled through the East India Trading Company and into the British governments coffers.

By the 1830s, an estimated 12 million Chinese people were addicted. Silver was flowing out of China to pay for the drug, destabilizing the entire economy. When the Chinese government saw the population hollowing out in real time, they seized and destroyed 1,400 tons of British opium in 1839. Britain declared war under the guise of free trade, national honor and to protect it citizens and property. It was actually to protect its drug trade and poison China.

The military mismatch was obscene. British gunships dismantled Chinese coastal defenses built for a different era. China had no answer for industrial-age firepower. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking forced China to pay Britain the equivalent of billions in reparations (for the drugs Britain had illegally smuggled into their country), hand over Hong Kong, and open five ports to foreign control. Britain had gone to war for the right to keep selling heroin to a country that was begging it to stop.

A second war followed in 1856 had the same results but added granting legal immunity from Chinese law on Chinese soil. For breaking laws like, smuggling drugs.

The Chinese call this the beginning of the "Century of Humiliation." A sovereign civilization was militarily forced to accept mass addiction as a trade term. China was flooded with drugs intentionally, brutalized with war, robbed and told they were in the wrong. They have a DAMN good reason to distrust the west, and most of us, never hear this story.

Sources: (full list on patreon)

CDC/National Center for Health Statistics. (2026). Drug overdose death statistics https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm

Dikotter, F., Laamann, L., & Zhou, X. (2004). Narcotic culture: A history of drugs in China. University of Chicago Press.

Fay, P. W. (1975). The Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire University of North Carolina Press

Gladstone, W. E. (1840). The Gladstone diaries (M. R. D. Foot & H. C. G. Matthew, Eds., Vol. 3). Oxford University Press.

Gordon, C. G. (1860). Letters from China [Primary source correspondence]. In D. C. Boulger, The Life of Gordon (1896). T. Fisher Unwin.

Hanes, W. T., III, & Sanello, F. (2002). The Opium Wars: The addiction of one empire and the corruption of another. Sourcebooks.

Hansard. (1840, April 8). War with China: Adjourned debate. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 53, cc. 818-920.

Hansard. (1870, May 10). East India (opium revenue). Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 201, cc. 489-512.

Lin, Z. (1839). Letter to Queen Victoria [Primary source document]. In S. Y. Teng & J. K. Fairbank (Eds.),

Lovell, J. (2011). The Opium War: Drugs, dreams and the making of China. Picador.

Platt, S. R. (2018). Imperial twilight: The Opium War and the end of China's last golden age. Alfred A. Knopf.

Porter, J., & Jick, H. (1980). Addiction rare in patients treated with narcotics. New England Journal of Medicine, 302(2), 123. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM198001103020221