“I do not care if it is a white cat or a black cat…It is a good cat so long as it catches mice.” – Deng Xiaoping, CCP leader from 1978-89 [i],[ii]
China’s leaders, over the last one hundred years, bluntly desire to rectify China’s place on the world stage, namely: its lead imperialistic status with communist characteristics.[iii] At the backend of the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912), as the Xinhai Revolution occurred and ended over 2,000 years of former imperialistic rule, their country’s plights foreshadowed their closest imperialistic neighbor, Russia, own revolutionary fires, a mere five years away from consuming their Czarist imperial rule. China’s revolution was complicated by a prolonged power struggle, compared to the relatively short one in the 1917 Russian Revolution(s). China’s revolution spanned nearly the entire first half of the 20th century where major world events relegated the Chinese to an afterthought status in most 20th century historian’s recounting.
In the 19th century, Chinese military forces were routinely dominated in battles against the British, French, Russian and Japanese Empires. The British Empire was particularly pernicious as the Opium Wars of mid-19th century left China in a state of chaos, that invited challenge from others in the global “empire and colonization” game. What drove such opium conflicts was “the introduction of a new method of ingestion – smoking – at the end of the 17th century. This habit, linked with the spread of tobacco smoking, presented greater addiction potential than when opium was eaten…In contrast to India, where opium eating had a long history, smoking proved popular in China…Both the tobacco and opium trades in Asia were controlled in this year by the Dutch East Indian Company, which took over the Portuguese trading posts in India in 1602 (1).”[iv]
By 1729, Chinese Emperor Yongzheng outlawed importation and sale of opium with threats of confiscations of cargos. But with such enforcement came black-market smuggling. Through third-party entities, this visibly addictive thorn grew through the British East India Company monopoly. The opium trade operated throughout the Sino-India region with India becoming the largest opium producer by the 19th century (2).[v]
Opium touched off a multi-nation trade war – as China preferred a closed-off trade system, desiring little of Western goods – but opium’s usage captured China’s elite class and as an addicting and corrupting force into the lower classes as well. Seizures of foreign imports by the Chinese government, including British’s interest, became the Brits casus belli.
The British navy laid off the coast of China, and soon made quick work of Chinese defenses in the First Opium War (1839-42). With China’s defeat, the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 gave the British inroads through acquisition of Hong Kong, then barely inhabited, and more importantly: opened five trade ports with contractual indemnification against the destruction of British imports, namely: opium. Thereafter, Chinese smugglers exploited this treaty as well to garner their opium market segment via flying British “colors” on their smuggler’s ships.
The next two decades saw continued confrontations. With the Second Opium War (1856-60), the French enter into the military fray. The Chinese again resisted smuggler’s duplicity on opium and garnered reprisals from the British navy and French troops. This time: Beijing was seized; and their summer palace set ablaze. The Treat of Tientsin (1858) made opium legal for importation to China.
Other treaties subdued China’s interests throughout the 19th century. The Treaty of Kulja (1851) signed with Russia; and the Convention of Peking (1860) signed with Britain and France alongside Russia. The United States, in 1858, joined in with Russia, Britain and France to impose the Treaty of Tientsin on China. Sweden, Norway, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and the Austro-Hungarian empire all participated in such treaties spanning the years 1847 to 1901.
Japan, the long-standing and bitter enemy of China, went to war against China on August 1, 1894. The Chinese were humiliated militarily, in great part due to the Japanese intelligence gathering on Chinese strategic outposts and anticipated battlefields (255).[vi] On April 17, 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed between the parties. The Shimonoseki treaty formalized Korea independence, ceded all Ryukyu Island claims southwest of Japan, allowed cession of Formosa (Taiwan) and levied substantial reparations.[vii] Additionally, four treaty ports for Japanese trade interests were opened that gave rights to build factories to both the delight and consternation of other nation-state regimes (255).[viii]
China was not without its own imperialistic efforts. Their tributary and vassal states were a direct casualty in these 19th century wars stemming from trade policies, addictive drugs, and the colony-based chess match had amongst world powers, both existing and emerging (United States).
1. Cambodia (1863)
2. Ryukyu Islands (1879)
3. Vietnam (1882)
4. Burma (1885)
5. Laos (1893)
6. Taiwan (1895)
7. Korea (1896)
8. Tibet (1911)
9. Outer Mongolia (1912)
10. Manchuria (1931)
Thereafter, China conceded, making domestic opium growing ‘legal enough’ to offset its importation. By 1890, the number of opium smokers reached 15 million, roughly 3% of its 350 million inhabitants. Just twenty years later, opium users numbered between 21.5 to 40 million, with 20% of Chinese males opium addicted. China’s consumption of the world’s opium trade reached at least 85% by the start of the 20th century (5).[ix]
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) remarked on China’s 19th century opium struggle: “Never before or since has the world known a drug problem of this scale and intensity.”[x] By modern comparison, the United States’s opioid crisis is measurably on the same order – as thousands of tons of fentanyl flow into the U.S. – with opioid-related deaths rising from under 10,000 in 1999 to over 80,000 by 2021, according to the NIH and the CDC.[xi] These opioids are driven by China through Mexico with similar “elite” and “US Agency” overt complicity.[xii]
Fentanyl, an opioid, is 50-100 times stronger than heroin and morphine, and according to CNN’s 2023 reporting: “Online commercial records suggest ties between [China-] sanctioned companies, Hebei Atun Trading Co., Ltd., and another China-based company called Shanxi Naipu Import and Export Co., Ltd., … continues to sell fentanyl precursors legally.”[xiii] These precursors are aptly named “China White.”
For China, the bitterness born out of these social, military and financial defeats, is defined as “their century of humiliation,” a nationalistic outcry that grew in intensity as Qing Dynasty folded in 1912. The decades-long internal battles in China – a country of over 400 million by 1915 – saw nearly all of their future frontline leaders molded by these precursory events, ongoing struggles, and remembered well by their families, fueling deeply-held resentments into their political DNAs. These future leaders were hierarchically well-placed – Mao Zedong[xiv], Deng Xiaoping[xv], later, Jiang Zemin[xvi] – and well-educated for the Chinese of their time. Many Chinese became leading communist (and nationalist) leaders from the mid-20th century onward from their educational polish garnered through communist Moscow, starting in the 1920s.[xvii]
As Elizabeth McGuire, professor of history at California State University noted in her book Red at Heart, “What began as a trickle in the ’20s still represented a significant proportion of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) membership at the time and by 1928, as much as 15 per cent of Politburo members had been educated in Russia. In total, up to the 1950s, 8,000 or more Chinese students passed through Russian revolutionary institutions, typically staying for about two years.”[xviii]
Though China’s revenge plot was slow, as internal strife continued throughout the 1920s through 1940s with healthy assistance from the Japanese hyper nationalists in Tokyo invasion in Manchuria, the CCP’s plan finally found its shaky legs when the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalists were defeated, left for Taiwan, and Mao Zedong became the well-known paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Mao, China’s leader for over a quarter century, relied on struggle sessions to keep the people inline; expert propaganda to hide his atrocities, like the Great Leap Forward’s 45 million dead[xix]; and targeting of the youth for his adoration, as they were useful, in keeping hidden enemies and powerplays in check. But all of these tactics were ways to keep on schedule a single-minded, century-long march out of humiliation. That 100-year plan: to take over the world by 2049 as its sole superpower.
References
[i] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2496090
[ii] https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1976/PR1976-16e.htm (asserted the phrase was uttered in 1961.)
[iii] https://archive.org/details/20210413_20210413_2352/page/n27/mode/2up
[iv] https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2008/WDR2008_100years_drug_control_origins.pdf
[v] https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2008/WDR2008_100years_drug_control_origins.pdf
[vi] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmjw8.16 Ch. 13: Russia, Japan and the Chinese Empire
[vii] https://china.usc.edu/treaty-shimonoseki-1895
[viii] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmjw8.16 Ch. 13: Russia, Japan and the Chinese Empire
[ix] https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2008/WDR2008_100years_drug_control_origins.pdf
[x] https://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2008/WDR2008_100years_drug_control_origins.pdf
[xi] https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates
[xii] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/fentanyl-and-us-opioid-epidemic
[xiii] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/30/americas/fentanyl-us-china-mexico-precursor-intl/index.html
[xiv] http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_early.htm
[xv] https://sites.asiasociety.org/chinawealthpower/chapters/deng-xiaoping-one/
[xvi] https://www.scmp.com/topics/jiang-zemin
[xvii] https://akarlin.com/2014/05/a-very-brief-history-of-chinese-russian-relations/
[xviii] https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2130584/how-chinese-communists-fell-love-russians-and
[xix] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html