Lasting Effects of the Opium Wars (1840-1860)

After 1860, the opium trade continued in China. Oddly enough, the controversy over opium use in China eventually affected the Temperance Movement in the United States.

Members of the Temperance Movement in the U.S. in the early 1900's told the history of the Opium Wars a bit differently and perhaps less accurately, since the political imperative of temperance was at stake. Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur F. Crafts, in their book, "World Book of Temperance" (1911), wrote of a third opium war and a "World-Wide War on Opium". Most sources describe only two opium wars, the latter ending in 1860.

The Crafts, however, wrote: "Opium for vicious uses was introduced into China mostly by Portuguese and British smugglers, in defiance of China's law prohibiting the sale or use of opium except for medicinal uses. Dr. James S. Dennis, author of 'Missions and Social Progress', the highest authority on such themes, says that China, until seduced and forced by so-called Christian nations, was almost wholly free from vicious uses of opium... When the Chinese government seized the smugglers' opium, Great Britain fought to defend and reimburse the smugglers. Three Opium Wars were necessary before Britain could compel China to license the intoxicating drug. After the first Opium War, 1840-42, although China was powerless to enforce her decree, the Emperor, with a nobility that might well shame most of the so-called Christian rulers, said to those who urged the licensing of opium: 'I will not take a revenue from what represents the vices and misfortunes of my subjects.' The illegal smuggling went on, however, and another Opium War was fought in 1858, at the close of which the crushed Emperor, with only blunderbusses to resist modern gunboats and artillery, consented to license the importation of opium at a few ports. But it took yet another Opium War, in 1861, to write in blood this license of opium."

The authors explained that the controversy over opium continued through 1909 when Theodore Roosevelt coordinated the Shanghai Conference, where a number of major nations met to address the worldwide problem of opium trade.

So quite ironically, the reaction to the opium trade in China led some to support the Temperance Movement in the United States. By 1920, prohibition of alcohol had been approved in the U.S. and would be the law until 1933. In fact, a half-dozen countries enforced prohibition laws in the 1920's.

Today, trade in opium continues. Some things don't change. Opium is a highly addictive drug, and there are still a lot of users around the world. It is a big crop in Afghanistan. About twenty years ago, one attorney in Washington, DC spoke confidentially and shared his view that elements in Asia were doing the same thing with drugs in the United States that Britain had done in China during the Opium Wars.

According to a 1989 article from China Now magazine by Dr. R.G. Tiedemann, the Chinese struggled in the Twentieth Century to overcome the humiliation of the Opium Wars, and the return of Hong Kong was one part of a long national struggle. "The Chinese", he wrote, "are determined to keep the 'open door' sufficiently ajar to import vital technologies, while keeping all unwanted alien influences out. This is, of course, merely a return to entrenched ethnocentric tendencies of pre-Opium War days."

The notion that the Opium Wars permanently opened China to trade is highly questionable, as Tiedemann explained. Considering the social problem of opium addicts, the Chinese tendency to view foreigners with mistrust is more understandable. That view of the world is buttressed by the death toll of the Taiping Rebellion - some 25 million. There seems to be an ebb and flow in China between openness and a sort of radical insularity.

Of course, the British relinquished Hong Kong to China in 1997. As of 2004, the population of that city was 95 percent Chinese.