The Opium Wars, transpiring in two distinct phases – first from 1839 to 1842 and

later from 1856 to 1860 , hold a paramount significance in Chinese history, leaving
an indelible imprint on the annals of China's past, international relations, trade,
and British capitalist's endeavours .The Opium Wars have been subject to extensive
historical analysis, and while some scholars raise objections, the scholarship on
China's history often marks the genesis of modern China with the Opium war . Karl
Marx was among the first academics to view the Opium Wars as a turning point .This
perspective on China's transformation, challenged by Professor Tan Chung, is also
held by J.K. Fairbank and subsequent scholars who have built upon this framework.

The history of opium in China can be traced back to between the late 7th & early
8th century when opium poppy was first brought into China by the Arabs and Turks
for medical purposes. Acc to earliest available records , opium was used as a
narcotic in China as early as the 1620s, but it wasn't until the British acquired
monopoly of the opium trade from the Portuguese in 1773 that its devastating
effects on society and public morale became apparent. Bengal and Malwa in British
India were the two places where the opium that was shipped to China was grown. The
Canton restrictions could not stop the inflow of opium because of the opening up of
the Lintin area for trading activities where illegal smuggling with the collusions
of the locals took place.in the face of British superiority in terms of its naval
power and the Chinese smugglers, The Manchu government lost its control over
trading activities . Given that opium was a profitable commercial commodity, the
British boosted its export to China, which led to a widespread opium addiction
among the Chinese populace, with estimates ranging from 0.33 percent in the 1820s
to 0.7 percent in the 1830s.The Chinese populace protested the "flowing poison,"
the emperor issued edicts against opium, and Canton received orders to halt opium
imports. The Chinese aristocracy was divided into two lobbies. The soft liners
demanded the legalization of the opium trade because of three important reasons.
First, a ban on the opium trade would lead to war with Britain; second, the outflow
of silver could be stopped if tea is bartered for opiumi ; and Third, poppy
cultivation in China to compete with foreign imports However, the hardliners, Huang
Chueh-tsu being a key figure, countered the soft liners, gained the upper hand, and
instigated a war against opium in China. In order to end the opium scourge in
Canton, Lin Tse-hsu was appointed the Imperial Commissioner in 1839. This put him
in a direct conflict with George Elliot, the British Chief Superintendent of Trade.
In 1840, the British hit back at the Chinese anti-opium campaign. Tan Chung refers
to the British response as the Opium War or a "anti-anti-opium war."

One of the earliest Communist Chinese studies on the Opium Wars is The Opium War
(1976), which was published by the Foreign Language Press and also reviewed by Tan
Chung in the China Report Vo. XIV. No. (1978). Lenin, whose view of capitalism was
that it thrived on colonizing non-capitalist countries and bringing them under the
control of the global economy, had a significant influence on this work. According
to the historian of the Chinese Communist Party, opium was exported to China in
order to further British capitalist interests, and after Chinese retaliation, the
British launched a counteroffensive in 1840. According to them, the Opium Wars
represented a form of British imperialism that stripped China of its sovereignty
and reduced her to the status of a semi-colony. Tan Chung's review of the Opium War
(1976) refutes the book's assertion that the opium trade served three purposes:
(1) to increase the Indian peasantry's purchasing power for British cotton
textiles; (2) to increase revenue for the British Raj; and (3) to correct the
imbalance in Britain's China trade.

There is no disputing the fact that the opium trade had disastrous effects on
Chinese society; historians differ, however, on the substance's significance in the
first Opium War. Three perspectives can be used to categorize discussions about the
Opium War's causes: the cultural war theory, the trade war theory, and the opium
war theory. Additionally, Chinese historians and western academics approach the war
in different ways. According to Qi Sihe, the western scholarship's claim that opium
was not the cause of the Opium Wars is an effort to conceal the Anglo-American
government's aggressive China policy and the ensuing narcotic trade, which had a
terrible effect on China.

According to the "cultural war scholarship," opium only played an active incidental
role in the Opium War and that the conflict was caused by differences between
western and eastern cultures. The three significant issues of international
relations, commerce and foreign trade, and jurisdiction are addressed by the
cultural conflict theory. J.K. Fairbank, Hsin Pao Chang, Li Chien Nung, and W.A.P.
Martin are a few notable scholars who belong to this lobby. According to Li Chien
Nung, the war can be understood as a clash of cultures, with opium playing no
important role than being a superficial issue . 'Eastern conservatism' and 'western
progressive spirit' are at odds, according to W.A.P. Martin, and it is the cause of
the war.

The cultural conflict theory is perhaps best explained by J.K. Fairbank. Fairbank
studied under the western scholar H.B. Morse, who believed that the Opium War had a
significant impact on the development of trade and nationalist relations between
the east and the west and tht the war was not fought for opium factor . Fairbank
contends that the Opium War resulted from Confucian China's inability to adjust to
the industrial and nationalist revolutions due to China's outmoded, stagnant, and
conservative culture in contrast to the West's progressive culture.Fairbank accused
China of being Sinocentric, asserting that China's haughty Middle Kingdom concept
reduced Britain to the rank of a tributary state, considered the British to be
barbarians from outside of the country, and that China's foreign relations were
established on hierarchical and unfair terms. Fairbank also emphasized the
difference in the cultures of jurisdiction between the two empires, pointing out
that China was still clinging to its outdated idea of a penal system centered on
upholding public morality and preserving social order and harmony, whereas Britain
had advanced in its attitude toward jurisdiction by upholding the rule of law. One
of the main points of contention between the two countries was the practice of
corporal punishment in China. For the British, the war meant safeguarding their
commercial interests and establishing equality-based diplomatic relations. As a
result, the war, in Fairbank's words, " opium was only the occasion and not the
sole cause of the war "

Another branch of scholarship focused on the Opium Wars that that has close
connections with the cultural conflict theory is the trade war theory . The trade
war theory has two important dimensions: (1)China stood in the way of Britain’s
commercial expansion and (2) the Opium trade as related to the Industrial
Revolution that prompted the British capitalist to search for external markets in
the 18th and 19th centuries.

Scholars of the trade war lobby, such as J.L. Cranmer-Byng, claim that China's
conservative culture hinders free foreign trade. The merchant was at the bottom of
the social scale according to the Confucian ethics that China had long practiced.
According to E.H. Pritchard, the conflict's core issue was the disparity between
the positions of merchant classes in China and England. In contrast to England,
where the interests of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie were balanced and the
latter was influential enough to enlist the assistance of the government, he
claimed that in China the merchant class was subordinate to the ruling scholar
mandarin gentry class. Pritchard argued that if a powerful class of merchants had
existed in China who could advance their rights in politics against the domineering
and state bureaucracy, the tension between China and Britain could have been
eliminated. Hsin Pao Chang also proposed his "X war theory," according to which the
algebraic x could have been any other commodity , such as molasses or rice, and
that opium was only used as a vehicle for commercial expansion. He argued that the
conflict between British "commercial expansion" and "Chinese containment of it"—
rather than the nature of the commodity—was what really drove the war.
The trade war theory also connects the opium trade to the Industrial Revolution's
boon, which led to the overproduction crisis that prompted to look for external
markets in the 18th and 19th centuries.Yan Zhongping concluded that the Opium War
was launched by the British bourgeois class, divided into two: (1) "opium
interests," which were British traders involved in the trade with China and India,
and (2) "industrial capitalists, import and export merchants, shipping capitalists,
and bankers," who were interested in the large market of China to address the
overproduction crisis. Similarly , Michael Greenberg contends that while opium was
the crux of the war from a Chinese perspective, the objective for British traders
was to establish a means of conducting international trade in China.

Tan Chung is a scholar who has dealt extensively with the Opium Wars and has
contested both the cultural conflict and trade war theories . He dealt in-detailed
with the triangular trade between Britain, India, and China and the pivotal role
played by Opium in the Opium Wars & in expansion of British hegemony over the world
economy. Any assertions that China was anti-foreign and anti-trade have been
debunked by the scholar.

The need for a market for woolen textiles initially sparked British interest in
China in the 16th century. However, starting in the 18th century, the British
turned their attention to the importation of tea, and as a result, London became
the largest entrepot for Chinese tea in the western hemisphere. While Britain's
investment in tea kept increasing, there was no corresponding increase in the
Chinese market for Britain’s manufacture.The British China trade was thus , import-
oriented . This was the catalyst for the triangular trade. In the early stages of
the triangle trade, Britain imported tea from China in exchange for silver and
British goods, and Indian goods were exported to China.After about a century, even
though export from India to China increased which made it unnecessary to export
British silver to China, Britain’s trade still remained import-oriented.Tan Chung
pointed out that the triangular trade began in India and ended in Britain and that
the engine behind this trade was the Indian interests, i.e, Britons associated with
the Indian empire (who expanded Indian exports to China) and not the manufacturing
interests based in Britain.

For the Indian interests, the British-Indian opium monopoly was pivotal.Following
the Company's annexation of Bengal , the region quickly became a major opium-
producing nation. Malwa opium evolved without the Company's involvement, but its
benefits quickly caught their attention and were brought under their monopoly.
China would soon suffer severe consequences as a result of the growth of these two
opium ventures of the EIC. The Company followed the “restricted production” of
opium till 1820; the same year in which the Malwa opium was brought under their
monopoly. The latter development led to the expansion of opium poppy cultivation
into the Bengal presidency .Opium then replaced tea as the main product in the
triangular trade. The British justification given for its assignment of this
narcotic as the primary commodity was to balance the Britain-China trade.However,
Tan Chung has drawn the conclusion by using quantitative data that Indian cotton
occupied a substantial share in the trade to balance the trade and that the opium
import to China was unnecessary. Tan Chung outlined the causes of the opium import
into China: (1) Opium required little investment, but the profit was enormous; (2)
China was a rich nation that was outside the dominance of Britain, and therefore a
perfect place for the inflow of fortunes to Britain. The opium trade helped
sustain the Indian economy as well as the British domination over India. Opium
served the dual function of profits as well as a constant source of profits.Tan
Chung has also highlighted the connection between the the opium trade and British
manufacturers. Citing the example of the year 1830, he argues that the Manchester
industrialists supported the British against the Chinese ban on the opium trade
because they feared the loss in the Indian purchasing power for British goods if
the opium trade should be put to an end.
Fairbank claimed that the rising Chinese demand of Opium was the cause of the
increase in opium imports to China. Tan Chung has responded to Fairbank's claim by
claiming that while the law of supply and demand applies to common goods, it does
not apply to opium because " opium was a habit-forming narcotic " with no
saturation point. Tan Chung points out that opium was pushed into the prime
position of the trade triangle because the Company’s earlier trading commodities-
cotton and woolen- had saturation points; that the law of demand and supply is
reversed in the case of narcotics, i.e, the creation of demand by supply and not
vice versa. China was devastated by the development of narcotic addiction in a
number of ways, including the outflow of silver, the devaluation of copper coins,
the degradation of public morale, and others. Tan Chung claims that all of these
things were done on purpose by British imperialism as part of their "British
Plastic Policy" to turn China into a semi-colony. With this strategy, the British
had the malign intent of extracting China's riches through their superficial
restraining actions .

In conclusion, the Opium War's genesis and opium's role in it have given rise to a
mosaic of contrasting perspectives among three distinct schools of thought. While
some underscore the significance of opiuim in broader cultural and trade contexts ,
scholars like Tan Chung vigorously contest such assertions. Nonethess , its
historical resonance lies in its enduring influence on China's historical
trajectory, imparting a significant chapter to the nation's intricate historical
narrative.