Term Papers on The Opium Wars

Term Paper Title	The Opium Wars
# of Words	3772
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	15.09

The Opium Wars

The Dragon and St. George:

A Discussion of the Political, Economic,
and Cultural Implications of the Opium War

        Any attempt at an analysis of the issues surrounding such a symbolically-loaded event as the Opium War between Great Britain and the Chinese Empire in the mid-nineteenth century is an exercise inevitably complicated by the convergence of cross-cultural interests involved. This applies no less today than in the nineteenth century, for the past often serves the needs of the present, and the Opium War has recently become a useful device employed by the Chinese government to divert attention from their domestic policies by playing to the patriotic fervour of their people.
     However, the Opium War, while having opium as its central point of contention, was - and is - about far more significant matters than the sale of drugs. The war marked a moment when global power shifted irrevocably from East to West, in a clash of cultures amid an atmosphere of ignorance and arrogance on both sides. To better understand the complex vortex of issues and ideology that is the Opium War, it would perhaps be useful to begin in the present, sifting through current revisions of the events of time to better illustrate the significance of the past.
     The Opium War has been recently given new life by the historic handover of the British colony of Hong Kong back to China
sovereignty, for Hong Kong was originally ceded to the British under the Treaty of Nanjing which ended the first Opium War in 1842. To mark the occasion, the Communist Party has been going to great lengths to exploit the importance of the Opium War in Chinese history; even going so far as to memorialise a Chinese general's horse that kicked an Englishman and starved to death rather than eat the poppies that are the source of opium (Economist  38). In Western eyes this may seem excessive - after all, the Opium War was only one of many small colonial wars that the Western imperial powers fought throughout the nineteenth century, and it did not, at least for Westerners, attain the same level of significance as, say, the Indian Mutiny. However, this illustrates the importance of perspective in history; for this minor war on the fringes of the British Indian Empire and the French sphere of influence in Indo-China was, undeniably, a pivotal moment in Chinese history.
     On June 11, 1997, the most expensive Chinese movie ever made - "The Opium War" - premiered in Hong Kong. The outgoing British governor of Hong Kong was, significantly, not invited to the premiere; the reason being given that the film was intended "to be seen by Chinese first" (Economist  43). While it would be an error to interpret a movie as an historical text, it must be acknowledged that popular culture often shapes perceptions of history and that -with particular regard to the controversy surrounding the Opium War - perception has always been reality.
     The (re)vision of the Opium War on film, in the eyes of director Xie Jin, "is not propaganda. It looks frankly. . .at China's inept administration of the time" (Economist 43). However, it is not surprising that the current Communist Chinese orthodox version of the events of the War dominate the film. Nor is it unexpected to see Westerners being portrayed as drug traders; a depiction which, though superficially true, is anachronistic in that it does not take into account the fact that drugs have only been "controlled substances" in the West in the twentieth century. Of course, from a Chinese perspective it could be argued that their government officials who attempted to stamp out the opium trade and so "provoked" the war were more advanced than their Western counterparts in that they perceived the enormous damage the widespread use of narcotics can do to a society (Economist 43).
     In short, the vision of the Opium War in China today is one of the Chinese as the "good guys" and the British as "the bad guys". The official Chinese histories of the war also possess this skewed view of the events of the War. For example, in the H...

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