Lola’s Reviews > The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China > Status Update

In nearly every speech given by Xi Jinping the point is made to stick to their ancestors traditional values. Rather than viewing the Opium Wars as a huge economic loss for China, I see this as a shift in Chinese political ideology, which can be still seen to this day.

Which was embraced throughout the world, it was the key to allow civilizations to advance and world powers to blossom. After the Opium War until present day China makes a strong point to stick to their traditional ways of their ancestors and have become “conservative” in their beliefs regarding the world.

As I’m reading this book I can see a lot of relations to Xi Jinping’s collection of speeches I read. The Opium War is so important to Chinese history not because it was a war but because this war set the stage for China’s current political ideologies. Prior to the opium war, some would consider China to be a somewhat liberal nation, trying to borrow ideas and ways of living from other cultures

I think it’s really interesting how in the introduction it repeatedly claims that chinas internal conflicts were more detrimental than the war and its external issues not just “imperialism and its running dogs”(Lovell 13).

Quote response #3: I think it’s interesting the way China values “true history”. In US history my teacher is constantly teaching lessons on things that may have been overlooked or portrayed inaccurately and we tend to spend a lot of time questioning text books. In this way China and America are similar in trying to work towards fixing their history classes in school and replacing it with more accurate information.

Quote 3: “Around this same moment, the government decided to replace the soporific lectures in Marxism-Leninism compulsory across undergraduate courses with classes in modern Chinese history — beginning, of course, with the Opium War — enduring that Chinas brightest and best emerged from their university careers with a correct understanding of the past, and its relationship to the present” (Lovell 11).

Quote 2 response:
Although Napier attempted to bring peace between Britain and China I’m debating whether or not Napier is a good person. He mentions this alliance was an act of charity for him rather than just doing it because it was the right thing to do. This brings into question: what were his true motives?

Quote #2: “Napier succeeded superbly in two respects: first, in moving Anglo-Chinese relations closed towards the possibility of armed conflict, as relatively peaceful pragmatism was ousted by economic self-interest and pompous national principle; and second, in the recasting the British impulse towards war as a moral obligation, an ‘act of Charity towards the Chinese” (Lovell 8).

Response to quote 1: it’s interesting to see the European perspective of China. I think this situation is a microcosm for the overall belief behind European colonialism, maybe they really thought they were doing good for the lesser developed countries.