The Opium War by Julia Lovell Picador
One of the most interesting things about the Opium War (1839-1842), as Julia Lovell argues in her 361-page account, is that it is still being fought. More than 170 years after Britain sent a fleet of warships up the Pearl River to teach imperial China a lesson in international trade, shots are still being fired.
A recent salvo, as Lovell writes in her preface, came when Prime Minister David Cameron arrived in Beijing in November last year at the head of a British trade delegation on a mission. The group was visiting at a time when Britain traditionally commemorated its war dead by wearing an imitation red poppy. This Remembrance Day ritual is 'infected by political humbug', as Lovell notes, but no public figure would be seen dead without a red poppy.
However, non-Chinese media reported that Cameron and his delegation had been asked to remove their poppies in Beijing because of the flower's alleged association with the Opium War, when Britain humiliated the Qing army and re-established trade in a drug for the sake of re-establishing a balance of trade. That controversy was a minor blip during Cameron's visit, if it did in fact happen - reports on it (at least the brief items of wire copy carried by this newspaper) attributed the matter to unnamed British officials in the delegation. Beijing's Foreign Ministry had, wisely, nothing to say on the matter (in marked contrast to the copious newsprint generated by the British press). Besides, Remembrance Day's poppies are not the same as the ones from which opium is derived.
Cameron's trade mission to sell products 'from whisky to jets, from pigs to sewage-stabilisation services' was probably successful, at least more successful than the failures of Earl Macartney and Earl Amherst in 1793 and 1816, when the former provoked the famous rebuff from the Qianlong emperor to King George III that he had 'no use for your country's manufactures'.
Nowadays, of course, China does have a use for the West's 'manufactures', whether Airbus airliners by the dozen or half-built Ukrainian aircraft carriers, in no small part thanks to the events set in motion by the Opium War.
As in the times of Qianlong, this has not prevented China accumulating a vast foreign trade surplus - worth around US$3 trillion last year - and an economy growing at around eight per cent a year. This time, of course, the West will not be sending gunboats up the Pearl or Yangtze rivers, and instead (for now) argues for amendments to China's exchange rate policy.