Drugs, Gunboats, and China’s Score to Settle
China’s decline from a self-absorbed great empire to an abject victim of global powers was one of the swiftest and most psychologically devastating in history, and it remains a driving force behind the country’s modernization. And all of it began with the Opium War.
The First Opium War (1839-1842) marks the official beginning of China’s so-called century of humiliation, a period in which the Celestial Empire lost a series of wars to technologically superior Western powers (including Japan). By the early nineteenth century, what was once the world’s largest economy had fallen woefully behind the West in terms of economic development and technological capabilities.