My Take | Hey, weren’t the opium wars good for China, too?
- The anti-Chinese yellow-ribbon crowds don’t care whether the controversial question about the Japanese invasion of China was appropriate for a public exam, but only about embarrassing the authorities in Hong Kong and the mainland
In 1853, Karl Marx wrote an interesting opinion piece in an American newspaper on the first opium war.
The old revolutionary thought the war and humiliation was the best thing that could have happened to the Chinese.
“It would seem as though history had first to make this whole people drunk [i.e., high on opium],” he wrote, “before it could rouse them out of their hereditary stupidity.
“The Celestial Empire [was forced] into contact with the terrestrial world. Complete isolation was the prime condition of the preservation of old China. That isolation having come to a violent end by the medium of England, dissolution must follow …”
Interestingly, Marx then speculates – correctly, it turns out – whether China, with its backward agrarian undeveloped economy, might have a revolution with the dissolution of its dynasty before Britain, then the most advanced capitalist and industrialised economy in the world, which on subsequent orthodox Marxist theory, should be the first to have a communist revolution.