Published: 16 February, 2012
by ERIC GORDON

Once, the British establishment behaved not all that differently from the Columbian drug lords who are poisoning the US today. Shipments of opium by British traders to coastal cities in China starting at the end of the 18th century brought great riches to our merchants and sowed the seeds of two bloody wars as well as, ultimately, helping to create the country’s national pride of today.

This is a slice of our island’s history that education secretary Michael Gove probably doesn’t want taught in our schools.

If he were to study how history is taught in Chinese schools today he would find the Opium Wars play a prom­inent part in the curricu­lum. And the picture it paints is that the wars were engineered by bru­tal British colonialism.

It is highly unlikely the average teenager in our schools taking history would draw the same conclusion.

More likely, he would find that though the wars were something Britain could not be proud of, the causes were ambivalent in nature, and that the Chinese Emperor and his court officials were not entirely blameless.

Certainly, Julia Lovell doesn’t paint quite the same picture in The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. But as she unravels the history leading up to the wars – and the fascinating details are woven into a very readable story – the impression emerges that the stupidity and cruelty of the Emperor’s court were ingredients in the making of the wars, certainly in the first of 1839.

As China began to shake itself free of the corruption of the Emperor-worship system – nearly 50 years after the end of the end of the wars – the nationalists, and later the Communists,  blamed the backwardness of the country on the profit-hungry colonial powers.

Essentially, two themes run through the book: what led up to the war and how it is seen in modern China.

And here the style seems to differ depending on which theme is under the microscope. With the origins and immediate afterlife of the wars, Lovell picks carefully through the facts with the detachment of an absorbed historian, But when it comes to how it was seen, say, by contemporary theorists like Karl Marx, whom she airily dismisses as a “financially challenged intellectual”, or by the nationalists and later the Communists, particularly Mao, she makes the most sweeping generalisations. At that point, she is more journalist than historian.

She quotes George Orwell’s aphorism that he who controls the present controls the past in order to show how modern China is able to manipulate facts and use spin for its own ends.

There is little doubt she is right there. Ironically, it could be said that she is just as guilty of being a gatekeeper of modern Chinese history.

Lovell’s view of the Mao years, for instance, echo the conventional Western interpretation that he ran the country into the ground and that it was only rescued by the new “capitalist” Communists as well as that of today’s Communists who have their own reasons for dismissing the pre-reform years.

All this illustrates how history is often written by the victors. But certain facts are inescapable and no matter how one minutely sifts through them in broad terms Bei­jing’s verdict on the wars and their causes is, in this reviewer’s opinion, the right one.

To illustrate a view that China is a bit paranoid about US attempts to encircle it, Lovell writes how the West is now seen as “supposedly” trying to contain it.

Supposedly? In recent times Obama has announced plans to strengthen US military power in the Far East which is seen as a strategic move to counter the rising influence of China.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she repeats the one-dimensional view of the Mao years in power, from 1949-1974, that he ran a brutal failed state and that only Western “fellow travellers” were witnesses to it.

But a brief objective view of the 1950s and 1960s would show there were many witnesses who could be not described as “fellow travellers”.

In the 1950s at least one British delegation including, quite eccentrically, the great painter Stanley Spencer, visited China.

A lecturer at Beijing University at that time was the eminent poet and essayist William Empson who later returned and settled in Hampstead.

In the 1960s, the Prime Minister of China, Chou En Lai, partially as a counter-measure to Soviet economic sanctions, brought in hundreds of foreign teachers – some recent Oxbridge graduates – to teach European languages as well as Urdu.

This colony of “witnesses” lived in the main – some were sent to provin­cial cities – in a sprawling hotel complex near Beijing University. While many were critical of the system few thought they were witnessing a failed state.

Also in the 1960s, the investigative journalist KS Karol – born in Poland, domiciled in Paris – spent four months touring the country with the famous photographer Marc Riboud and wrote a widely admired book on China. Equally, Felix Greene – a relative of Graham Greene – spent a considerable time in the country and wrote a book, The Wall has Two Sides, that gave China watchers food for thought.

They were no more “fellow travellers” than Andre Malraux, then the French culture minister, but better known as a novelist, who visited China in 1965.

I met him for a short while during his tour of the country. He had been keen to take another look at Shanghai where in the late 1920s he had written a master­piece, Man’s Fate, on the massacre of the Commun­ists by the nationalist party.

Lovell has written a much-needed book that helps to explain how the Chinese feel towards the West today.

In the coming decades, it is plainly obvious that China will become the world’s leading economic super power. This turns, of course, on whether China can remain an integral whole, able to keep unified its many different parts from Tibet, Inner Mongolia to the “minority” states in the south, and equally on whether it remains a one-party state.

Warring parts of China were a feature of the Middle Kingdom  – something China’s rulers today are sensitively aware of.

• The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. By Julia Lovell, Picador £25
• Julia Lovell teaches modern Chinese history at Birkbeck College, London University; Eric Gordon worked in Beijing for nearly three years in the mid-1960s before being detained, with his family, for two years by the security police