The tension with China goes back a long way

Left: Chinese resisting British troops importing opium

I want to follow up on this issue of the Chinese and the increasing conflict with US imperialism. I am not so naïve, to not recognize that what lies at the root of the problem is trade, the competition between nation states within the framework of a world economy.

But we cannot ignore history and national and cultural pride. It must be enough to make the Chinese, whether it is the rising Chinese bourgeois, the bureaucracy, or the average Joe, throw up when they read or hear the comments from the likes of Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton that I included in a previous blog.

The US in particular, and the European bourgeois in general are lecturing the Chinese about fairness, responsibility and caring for the needs of other nations of the world. But this has not been the history of US or British imperialism in dealing with the rest of the world, in particularly China.

The British, for example, fought a war against the Chinese, or should I say that the Chinese defended themselves in a predatory war that British imperialism launched against them for the right to sell opium and trade in their territory. The first opium war lasted from 1839 to 1842 when the treaty of Nanking was signed. Now I remember this date from school, the treaty of Nanking. In my memory it was a treaty signed between the backward colonials and the civilizing British forces.

But in actuality, it was a war and subsequent treaty that allowed British capitalism access to the Chinese market. The war began when Chinese authorities destroyed the opium stocks of foreign merchants in Canton. With victory, the British then opened up the Chinese market, or five of its ports, to British commerce. Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai were now free trade zones.

One other little by-product of the first Opium War was that Hong Kong was “ceded” to Britain for “all time”.  Ha! There’s proof that the only thing constant is change as Marx stated.

As the world’s most dominant economic and military power, British imperialism had a few more things it needed to get straight with the Chinese. In the Anglo-Chinese treaty of 1843, a sort of supplement to the 1842 treaty of Nanking, British imperialism obtained the rights for special settlements for foreigners in China that were outside Chinese jurisdiction. They called this extraterritoriality. So as occupiers on Chinese soil, there were whole areas that were outside Chinese jurisdiction and only British law applied. A British subject could murder a Chinese and was only subject to British law. You can imagine what that meant.

This extraterritoriality continued in to the 20th century. In Shanghai in the 1920’s there were areas of the city that were called “concessions”, a sort of free trade zone like we have today.  These were governed by French and British/American interests. They were actually bigger than the original old city of Shanghai. Paul Mason describes the situation, “In the concessions the powers’ ruled direct, with their own police force and their own courts. The majority of the people who lived there were Chinese but even the richest knew they were second class citizens.”  * How would we feel about his if it was taking place in Texas or California?

Most of the factories back then, like today, were foreign owned. Paul Mason again, “Body searches were obligatory, violence casual, verbal abuse routine. To visit the toilet a worker had to apply for a small bamboo permit: white to urinate, red to defecate.” You can imagine the hatred of foreigners that must have existed at the time. But what is interesting is that this same process, white and red, was used by AT&T here in the US for workers as well as in the chicken factories of the South.

The Chinese have a long history with western imperialism. Between 1824 and 1834, the opium trade increased from 12,639 to 21,785 tea chests. These are large wooden chests that carried tea also. In 1837, 39,000 chests of opium valued at $25,000,000 were smuggled in to China.The Brtish were international dope dealers and had a military to back this business up.

Most Americans however, or most Brits for that matter, have no idea of the level of exploitation and plunder that the western capitalists waged on China. I am not fan of the Chinese bureaucracy. And we can see the ruthlessness of these people not only with regard to their own working class but also in Africa where the Chinese are having a growing influence.

My point is that while as American workers our goal should always be to unite the working class domestically and internationally, we have to recognize there has been some history here, a history of exploitation from east to west. We have to recognize this just as we should sexism and racism at home. We can only imagine what it would be like for the Russians or Chinese to control a huge section of California or Texas where their rule applies and killing an American is almost an unpunishable crime. But this is what existed in China and other colonial countries for centuries.

The tension between the US and Chinese capitalist class has its origins in commerce and the quest for profit; it always did. That's why history matters.

* Paul Mason: Live Working or Die Fighting