Chinese Trade in the Early Essay

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The fact that China tried to cut off exports of tea to the British -- unless the British would stop bringing in opium to China -- shows again that laws and morality in China were of higher importance than the economy. The war that ensued in 1839 (the first "Opium War") because the Chinese attempted to blockade the factories and keep the foreigners out. The British also won the second "Opium War" in China and the law changed in China to allow opium as a legitimate trading item. It took a war to get the Chinese in the right frame of mind to change the law.

This is a key to the argument put forward in this paper. The Chinese didn't seem at all bothered when their trading partners were banned from coming into the country due to laws and morality. So the economy has been hampered, so what? The Chinese seemed to say we have our rules, our values, our laws, and we're not going to back down even if it means a curtailing of the financial benefits that trade (even trade in opium) can bring to us.

Hong Kong was actually a colony, "a frontier boomtown," in Perdue's words. It was ruled by the British and frequented by the Americans and other foreigners. But Canton was a place that was owned by and ruled by the Chinese, and while it is easy to understand that they had a perfect right to protect their city, their population and their way of life, going to war to protect their values (at the risk of harming their economic system, i.e., their country's financial lifeline) shows the reader that it was more about laws than about economics.

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Meantime the Chinese products were trading well and being marketed on the global marketplace, Perdue writes. Foreigners lived on the outskirts of China's cities, not knowing much about the culture inland. To wit, Westerners in the Canton factories "peered out at the population of a giant empire, tantalizingly close, but mainly inaccessible." How strange it must have seemed for a person from England or the United States to be engaged in a trading relationship with the Chinese but only being allowed a tiny peek into the countryside, the culture, and the way of life that the average Chinese person led at that time. "Foreigners by and large celebrated their own lives in sequestered enclaves on the China coast" and "collected elegant Chinese artworks, all the while remaining largely silent about the fact that the funds that supported their exotic connoisseurship often rested on illicit trade in opium."

And not coincidentally, those foreigners had to go to war with the Chinese to get the law changed in order to profit from the opium trade.

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