Opium Addiction Plagued 19th-century China

Imagine that the powerful drug cartels of Colombia, major cocaine suppliers to the United States, asked the United States to legalize the drug. Imagine, still, that the United States refused, and that the drug cartels then sent heavily armed members to American airports. Once at the airports, the drug lords then forced American authorities, at gunpoint, to admit cartel couriers carrying cocaine into the country.

This is more or less what happened to China in the mid-19th century. The Opium Wars, instigated by Great Britain, forced China to allow British traders to bring opium into China. Britain needed the opium trade to finance its tea imports from China. Opium addiction became rampant in China.

This episode shows how different world-wide standards were 150 years ago. Would the world stand by today if the United States tried to force China at gunpoint to buy American automobiles?

The Opium Wars caught China at a time when the country was in a steep decline. Isolated from and ignorant of western industrial and military technology, China had been inward-looking for far too long. Militarily and technologically, it was easy for western countries to take advantage of China. And 19th-century mores did nothing to protect China.