Opium's legacy

The first chapter of James Bradley’s The China Mirage (Little, Brown, 2015) and the second chapter of Zheng Wang’s Never Forget National Humiliation (Columbia University Press, 2012) tell the sad story of how Europeans forced China to accept opium, and how Americans profited from that immoral pressure.

In 1839 Chinese official Lin Zexu was successfully suppressing the sale of opium. He seized opium from British and American traders and employed workers to shovel it into water-filled gullies, throw in salt and lime, and flush the mixture into the ocean. He sent a letter to young Queen Victoria that noted Britain’s fight against opium use at home was “strong proof that you do not permit it to injure your own country, [so] you ought not to have the injurious drug transferred to another country.”

Good logic, but money talked. Soon British ships bombarded China’s coast in what became known as the First Opium War. Military power forced China to allow opium; and when Chinese officials pushed back in the 1850s, the Second Opium War made their humiliation complete. Over the years Europeans and Americans forced the Chinese to grant them “treaty ports” where foreigners were immune from Chinese laws. Opium contributed mightily to the great fortunes of families with names like Delano, Russell, Cushing, Low, Forbes, and Green.

Just as some northern institutions had profited from slavery, so Bradley shows how others—including Yale, Columbia, and Princeton—grew on the bodies of opium users. Delano was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s middle name. Secretary of State John F. Kerry owes his middle name, Forbes, to opium seller Francis Blackwell Forbes. The United States also treated the Chinese as inferiors when Congress in 1882 passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which stopped immigration from China until 1943.

The rest of Bradley’s book includes attacks on Western missionaries and is not convincing, but Zheng’s work is fascinating throughout. He shows how Chinese Communist leaders 25 years ago began using their flag to wipe from their hands the blood of Tiananmen Square: Nationalism and patriotism replaced communism as China’s ideology. Statements that “the Chinese Communist is the firmest, the most thoroughgoing patriot,” won applause. The new narrative de-emphasizes class struggle and focuses on one-party rule as the way to have national unity against the arrogant descendants of those who forced drugs on the innocent.

And what of the future? Jonathan Freedland’s new novel, The 3rd Woman (Harper Collins), has Chinese soldiers stationed in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities to collect the debt the United States owes, in a reversal of 19th-century tragedy. (Warning: a sex scene and some vulgar language.)

Jobs and votes

Disinherited: How Washington Is Betraying America’s Young, by Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Jared Meyer (Encounter, 2015) describes how the feds are taking from young people to get votes from their parents and grandparents. Parts of the critique are obvious: Poor education leaves many fit only for minimum-wage jobs, and higher minimum wages will eliminate some of those jobs. Less obvious are licensing requirements that keep the young from becoming florists, hair braiders, or (name your trade).

Joblessness is a problem for not only the young but the middle-aged as well: In Clearing Obstacles to Work: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Fostering Self-Reliance (Philanthropy Roundtable, 2015), David Bass notes that the real unemployment rate is about twice the one bandied about, because so many able persons have dropped out of the workforce. He then gives lots of examples of private groups like Jobs for Life, First Things First, and the WorkFaith Connection (one of WORLD’s Hope Award winners) that help previously alienated men and women to drop in. Bass also has a helpful list of opportunities for philanthropic groups that can provide a few thousand dollars of support or much, much more. —M.O.