https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/ar ... umiliation
Today, the century of humiliation remains etched in the consciousness and minds of the Chinese people. The emotions of humiliation and anger, as well as a deep sense of historical injustice, linger and can be dangerously exploited.
While the century of humiliation may not say much about the ambitions of the Chinese leadership and what kind of great power a rising China aspires to be, it certainly tells us what it does not want to be: a second late-Qing government.
It also suggests that, how China responds to geopolitical developments regarding Taiwan and the South China Sea, just to name two issues, depends largely on whether the country’s old wounds risk being exposed again.
Should Chinese leaders perceive China to be treated the same way and be humiliated like the late-Qing government was 100 years ago, I wager that Beijing will consider all possible options to safeguard the country’s dignity, even if this leads to war.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/07/31/op ... on-history
"China had a really strong economy in the early part of the 19th century and the Americans were able to tap into that by exchanging tea for opium," he says. "Opium was really a way that America was able to transfer China’s economic power to America’s industrial revolution."
But among merchants, there was a robust debate about the morality of selling opium in China, where at least 2 million residents -- and 10 million by some estimates -- were addicted to the drug by the mid-1800s. New York merchant David Olyphant refused to trade opium, calling it "an evil of the deepest dye." Partners at Perkins and Co. made fun of Olyphant.
"There was an unwitting dependency in Boston on profits from the opium trade," says Towson University associate history professor Elizabeth Kelly Gray.
But today, that history is largely buried. Most institutions contacted for this story did not know their benefactors got rich selling an illegal drug in China.
Perkins School research librarian Jennifer Arnott did some digging into Thomas Perkins’ business history. He behaved like many merchants, she reasons, and followed demand.
"It really was a sort of awareness that you did the trade that was there and that you looked for the opportunities that made sense for your business at that point," Arnott says.
The Boston Athenæum said, in part, in a statement:
Our own legacy, like that of many historic institutions, reveals inherent contradictions. We acknowledge that the Perkins brothers built their fortune at the expense of the lives of others ... while supporting a great number of educational, medical, and cultural causes through their generous philanthropy.
... We encourage our members, researchers, and visitors to engage critically with our rare materials by asking important and sometimes difficult questions.
Many Chinese opium traders became pillars of the Boston community. In his eulogy, Perkins is remembered as "one of the noblest specimens of humanity to which our city has ever given birth."
Arnott says the fact that Perkins was trading in opium was probably not a secret in Boston, but the question, “'Is this trade good for the people we’re trading with?' is a more recent philosophical concept.”
There are signs opinion shifted as Perkins aged, which may help explain why opium is not mentioned even once in a memoir compiled by his son-in-law and published in 1856, two years after Perkins' death.
Jonathan Goldstein, a research associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, says Boston merchants defended the trade, "even though they knew it was a debilitating drug that ruined lives." Their thinking, says Goldstein, was that opium was no worse than alcohol and better than other forms of trade, namely: slaves.
Opium was seen as "mild by comparison," Goldstein says.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/08/01/op ... -addiction
In the early 1800s, many Boston merchants became millionaires in part by selling opium illegally in China. The profits funded Boston-area schools, libraries, hospitals and early ventures into the industrial revolution, creating a financial dependence on the opium trade.
The author, a doctor, says he asks the question on behalf of a young woman who was prescribed opium to treat "a slight nervous irritation." She's become "a bound and servile slave" to the drug, and alarmed to realize she must increase her dose to avoid feeling sick. For almost a year, the doctor has tried everything he can think of, including substituting other drugs and attempting to wean the patient off opium. But she, "whilst under a course of gradual reduction or of substitution, convulsed for hour after hour in every muscle, and vomiting almost with intermission."
"In the 19th century, China was widely seen as a drug consumer nation. Now, in the early 21st century, it is a producer nation, especially when it comes to drugs like fentanyl," Courtwright says. "There is a kind of bitter irony in that."
“Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; - Exodus 20:5