Tag: Julia Lovell

When President Donald Trump talks about China, he tends to focus on two things: trade imbalances and his high regard for China’s leader, Xi Jinping. It’s an unusual sight, to say the least: the leader of the world’s dominant economic power flattering China’s powerful ruler while attacking the foundations of an enormously valuable economic relationship. Imperial Twilight By Stephen R. Platt Knopf, 556 pages, $35 The first Opium War (1839-42) is perhaps the best-known event in China’s imperial history: a violent confrontation between the British Empire, which foisted the addictive drug on the Chinese people, and a supposedly hidebound, insular China. Mr. Platt devotes little attention to the fighting itself or to its subsequent symbolic meaning in China, where it is cast as the start of a “Century of Humiliation” that the Chinese Communist Party brought to an end. Many of Mr. Platt’s vividly drawn characters swung from one of these extremes to the other, such as the first British emissary to the Qing court, George Macartney. Awe-struck and eager to impress in a mulberry velvet suit and plumed hat, Macartney had an audience with the Qing emperor in 1793 to ask for broader economic openness and a permanent embassy in Beijing but left empty-handed, grumbling: “The empire of China is an old crazy first-rate man of war.” The central issue that tripped up Macartney was the Qing court’s demand that he perform the kowtow, a ritual series of kneeling bows. Trade was what Mr. Platt calls a “stabilizing power”—until suddenly it wasn’t. An imperial official named Lin Zexu destroyed millions of pounds’ worth of the drug, shut down trade at Canton, and even threatened to take action against the British subjects who were complicit in the drug smuggling. In response, the British attacked the Chinese coast. Mr. Platt gives particular attention to complicating our understanding of Lin Zexu, now revered as a moral hero in Chinese textbooks for standing up to the British.