By Elizabeth Young

In the early 19th century, traders from Britain and America bought porcelain, silk and tea from China. Allegedly, the problem was the “traitors” could find nothing to sell in exchange and the trade balance went negative. China then built up substantial monetary reserves in silver.

In 1830, according to our “accurate” history books, the British finally found something the Chinese would buy: Opium.

“The fruit of the poppy was popular in many countries but, as usual, the Chinese over-did it. First, it was a favorite of the leisure classes, then, it trickled down to ordinary workmen.”

Soon, the “coolies” were neglecting their labors and China was in crisis.

When the authorities tried to stop the drug trade, the British opened fire, humiliating the government and almost bankrupting it. People lost confidence in Manchu rule.”

By the mid-19^th Century, nearly half the country was in open revolt and saw the end of the oldest civilization in written history and a culture that may have influenced the Sumerians, Babylonians and the Persians. The Chinese are responsible for the four inventions that make life as we know it possible: Printing, papermaking (toilet paper?), gunpowder and the compass.

Is that Story Possible?

Are we to believe that all of a sudden “Hop Sing” is addicted to a psychotropic drug (more likely to get you constipated than high), moves to America and becomes a stereotypical Chinese house servant for Ben Cartwright at the Ponderosa?

Mike Jay in Emperors Of Dreams, realizes the Opium story is false information, which is deliberately intended to change the “dispositions and beliefs” of a population:

“The image at the core of this Opium belief has rarely been examined, either at the time by contemporaries or more recently by historians because a variety of interests intersect to replicate it in different contexts.”

In 1839, in spite of the so-called uncontrolled demand for opiates, rather than coffee or cannabis, the British traders found themselves with 20,000 chests of unsold opium on their store-ships, just below Canton. Then in one of those chance occurrences that don’t happen very often, like the same person winning the lottery three weeks in a row, the Chinese had a “tea party.”

The British now had an excuse and the historians an explanation, for the start of the first Opium War.

The Plight of the Chinese People

Lin Zixu, commissioner to the Emperor of China, allegedly sent a letter to Queen Victoria appealing to the British sense of justice for the plight of the Chinese people:

“We have heard that in your own country opium is prohibited with the utmost strictness and severity:---this is a strong proof that you know full well how hurtful it is to mankind.” [1]

The letter, which cannot be authenticated, was allegedly written to invoke sympathy for the Chinese people hooked on Opium.

Samuel Wells Williams, noted diplomat and missionary to China, in The Middle Kingdom writes:

"The conflict was now fairly begun; its issue between the parties so unequally matched --one having almost nothing but the right on its side, the other assisted by every material and physical advantage-could easily be foreseen" and again, after speaking of it as being unjust and immoral, he concludes "Great Britain, the first Christian power, really waged this war against the pagan monarch who had only endeavored to put down a vice harmful to his people.”

The tears are making it difficult to read Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China by Frank Dikötter, Professor of the Modern History of China, University of London. Professor Dikötter believes the Opium Myth is about prohibition:

“An essential first step in demythologising the Chinese opium problem is to understand the [lack of] scientific evidence about the drug's impact… upon the health of the individual consumer' and as the historian of India Richard Newman writes: The China field “should be criticized for uncritically reproducing the anti-opium stance adopted by prohibitionist missionaries in the late nineteenth century.” [2]

It Was A Lie. The Question Is Why?

The revolutions in Europe and American had ended. The world was about to enter the Industrial Age.

The Global Financial Elite (TGFE, a non-conspiracy acronym [3]) needed an excuse to invade the country and overthrow the Manchu dynasty, just in case the rest of the world decided to emulate China; like they almost did during the McCarthy era. [4]

Under the enlightened monarchies of the Manchu and Ming Dynasties, the country thrived and worked together and was sustainable before it was “in” to recycle and farm without pesticides.

What would our world look like today if the U.S. emulated the China in 1850?

Answer: The United Nations would not have written the massive report, the GEO4, that says all of humanity is at serious risk due to “the dangers of climate change, water scarcity, dwindling fish stocks and the pressures on the land and the extinction of species.”

Written by Elizabeth Young, based on the research left by the late Robert Armstrong, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Drake University. [5]

Endnotes:
[1] Source: From: Chinese Repository, Vol. 8 (February 1840), pp. 497-503; reprinted in William H. McNeil and Mitsuko Iriye, eds., Modern Asia and Africa, Readings in World History Vol. 9, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 111-118.

[2] Newman shows that opium rarely undermined the health or shortened the lives of the majority of smokers in nineteenth-century China. Others have underlined that in England, where opium was widely available from local shops during the nineteenth century, frequent and chronic users did not suffer detrimental effects from opium: many enjoyed good health well into their eighties. In South Asia a diversity of evidence offered by both Indian and British physicians in the nineteenth century showed that opium pills were commonly taken throughout the subcontinent without creating serious social or physical damage, in contrast to the strong spirits imported from abroad in the face of opposition from both the Hindu and Muslim communities.

[3] The Global Financial Elite (TGFE, a variation of TPTB).G. William Domhoff, a Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz first coined the non-conspiracy acronym TPTB. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Miami. He has been teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz, since 1965. Four of his books are among the top 50 best sellers in sociology for the years 1950 to 1995: Who Rules America? (1967); The Higher Circles (1970); Who Rules America Now? (1983); and the non-"conspiracy" critique and theory of the U.S. power structure, The Powers That Be (TPTB) in 1979.

[4] 1949, according to the authors, was a pivotal year for McCarthyism this system. Our irrational fear of communism and Castro never made sense. McCarthyism is a term used to describe the making of accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, coincides exactly with the period the communist experiment in China was successful.

Mistakes? Consider the Communists First Five-Year Plan

When Communism became the ideology of the people in 1949, they fought pollution during the successful First Five-Year Plan from 1953-57 and were moving towards 100% recycling until 1958 when the Great Leap Forward became the Great Leap Famine and between 16.5 million and 40 million people died before the experiment came to an end in 1961.

During the Five-Year Plan, Chinese articles and journals extolled the benefits of recycling. “When a case of pollution arose, there was scientific and collective action to undo the damage. The most harmful industrial wastewater is that which contains phenol. If this kind of poisonous industrial water is drained into a body of water (such as a river, lake, or sea) before treatment, it will pollute the water, kill the fish, and endanger the health of the people. And if such poisonous waste water is drained into the farmland, it will badly affect the normal growth of the crops.”

The “Mistakes” explanation requires you believe no one in China read or studied the industrialization of the Western Countries. “Cost-benefit analyses in the U.S. show that emission reduction programs have provided much greater benefits than their costs, by a ratio of up to 40 to 1. Air pollution damage not only impacts the ecosystem but imposes major economic costs as well as, from premature mortality, increased health care and lost productivity and, more importantly, decreased crop yields.”

[5] Elizabeth Young is a Hollywood screenwriter and the domestic partner of the late Robert Armstrong, a retired associate professor in the Department of Economics at Drake University. Professor Armstrong, who received his economics degree from Harvard in 1958, was a commercial and instrument-rated pilot who died in 2006 after leaving an Oregon air show in his beloved Hawker Hunter Mk. 5. The plane went down in a residential neighborhood, and, instead of ejecting to safety; he died when he stayed with the aircraft to avoid any casualties on the ground. Armstrong thought of himself as a pilot whose hobby was teaching economics and studying history. He was an FAA instructor for the Hawker Hunter and was authorized to certify and re-qualify pilots after lapse of proficiency. Robert's aeronautical field expertise as commercial and instrument-rated pilot led him into a full investigation of the events surrounding 911.