The War *for* Drugs

"Opiumkrigen" is a book in Swedish by Bertil Lintner, a foreign correspondent now living permanently in Thailand. His articles have appeared in Svenska Dagbladet, Far Eastern Economic Review, and Asia Times.

"Opiumkrigen" gives a short (150 pages) overview of Chinese 19th and early 20th century history, with the main chapters dealing with the Opium Wars. While Lintner never takes a side in the Hong Kong conflict, the book as a whole could certainly be used by those who believe that the territory should be an integreted part of China.

Today, opium is mostly associated with China and the Chinese. Lintner points out that the opium poppy probably comes from the Eastern Medditerranean region, and was cultivated there by humans already during the Neolithic. The Muslim invaders introduced it to India. When India was subsequently conquered by the British, they took over the poppy fields and the opium production. There was just one problem: who should they sell it to? For obvious reasons, the British didn't want people in *their* colony to become opium-addicts! Bad for social stability, you see.

The solution was to export (or rather smuggle) the opium to China, where opium had never been used on a massive scale before. This was also good for the British terms of trade, since the mercantilist policy of China had soaked Britain of its precious silver, used to pay for Chinese tea (the Chinese more or less refused to import anything from the British colonies). This sounds vaguely familiar somehow...

By large-scale smuggling operations, aided and abetted by corrupt local officials in southern China, the British gradually turned the Chinese into a nation of opium addicts. When the Manchu emperor in Beijing ordered the illegal opium destroyed, the British got their causus belli and the "Opium Wars" were on.

The First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Second Opium War (1856-1860) were both resounding victories for Britain. The Chinese were essentially massacred by superior British fire power. Hong Kong became a British crown colony, China was "opened up for foreign trade" and other colonial powers saw their chance and started preying on the Chinese. And, of course, the opium trade continued, even more profitable than before.

Colonial wars are seldom moral, but the idea of turning an entire nation into junkies just to adjust the trade balance strikes me as one of the more evil ideas in human history (and let's face it, the competition for that title is pretty stiff).

After opium followed morphine and then heroine, both Western opium-derived products that were dumped on the Chinese market.

Eventually, large scale domestic poppy growing and opium production was established. On the one hand, this lowered the fabulous profits of the Western colonialists, who suddenly became more amenable towards liberal-philantropic demands to suppress the international opium trade. On the other hand, the opium crisis simply continued, now with Chinese warlords and crime gangs as the main culprits.

Lintner clearly knows his Chinese and Asian history, and manages to mention almost everything in this book: Christian missionary activity, the Boxer Rising, the Shanghai International Settlement, opium trade and ditto addiction in French Indochina and the Philippines, and even the recent Hong Kong protests. Ironically, he says relatively little about the Communist Party of China, although he does point out that they clamped down hard on poppy-growing and opium addiction after taking power in 1949.

A very curious oversight is that the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) is treated as a mere episode. But surely this was one of the bloodiest conflicts in Chinese and 19th century history?

I also spotted some typos, but that's because I'm a nerd!

Overall, I would rate "Opiumkrigen" very high. The book must have been published in January of this year, and feels very current due to the ongoing conflicts between the People's Republic of China and the United States.

And while it never mentions the opiate crisis in the United States, certain parallels seem to be discernable...