Visitors to Times Square in New York will find that in the easternmost part of Times Square, there is a bronze statue of Lin Zexu, the hero of Chinese national anti-smoking. Many people are difficult to understand, why did Americans choose to cast a bronze statue of Lin Zexu here? To know that the land in New York is as expensive as gold, there is no reason why it must be so indispensable, and the United States will certainly not go to such great lengths.
background
When it comes to the decline of China's modern history, everything must start from the policy of the Qing Emperor Qianlong to "close the country and close the country". Many people have always believed that this was the result of the arrogance of the Qianlong Emperor, but in fact, Qianlong issued this order for another important reason: to restrict the ideological development of the people. He was deeply afraid that the cultural and economic influence brought by the Western powers would seriously threaten the rule of the Manchu Qing royal family, which led to the emergence of a closed country.
Unfortunately, the Qianlong Emperor would never have thought that when a certain country stuck in its own way, the country would lag far behind other countries. Both militarily and economically, progress on both sides is no longer an order of magnitude. Sure enough, within a few decades of Qianlong's death, the Qing Dynasty fell into an unprecedented crisis.
Judging from the actual data of Sino-foreign trade at that time, China, as a traditional agricultural power, has always sold tobacco, silk and other products to Western countries, while Western countries mainly sell industrial products to China. This kind of trade transactions, which on the surface seem very normal, actually puts western countries completely into the dilemma of trade deficits. Especially in britain, the British market needed tea, silk, etc. provided by the Qing government, but the backward and decadent Qing government did not need any industrial products.
Non-smoking campaign
Under such circumstances, many British merchants thought of changing this situation with other commodities, and opium officially entered the stage of Chinese history. After that, opium was like a fire in the wilderness, and while changing the economic curve of trade between the Qing government and Britain very quickly, it also caused serious harm to many ordinary people at that time. Seeing this situation, Lin Zexu was obligated to stand up and determined to fight opium to the end.
In 1839, when Lin Zexu banned smoking in Guangdong, he ordered foreign opium merchants to hand over opium and concentrate all the opium received in Humen for destruction, which became an important trigger for the first Opium War between the late Qing Dynasty and the British Empire. Unfortunately, in the eyes of the British Empire, the Qing government at this time was as weak as a child, and the two sides were not on the same order of magnitude at all. After a short confrontation, China gradually changed from a feudal society to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society.
The reason for casting bronze statues in the United States
In the whole process of Lin Zexu's anti-smoking campaign, there has never been a us-related incident, so why do Americans still cast a bronze statue of Lin Zexu in New York? To understand this problem, we have to start with the history of drug control in the United States. Judging from the development of the United States in the last century, the 1960s was the era of the first large-scale drug outbreak in the United States. Due to the proximity to Mexico and Colombia, coupled with the influence of certain indigenous cultures, drugs have spread unbridled in the United States.
In the beginning, the White House administration did not take this matter to heart. But in the 1980s, the number of people who regularly used drugs in the United States was as high as 25 million, more than 14% of the total population of the United States, and the White House could no longer sit still. Imagine what a terrible sight it is when one out of ten people in a country is associated with drugs.
Under such circumstances, while vigorously controlling drugs, the United States also hopes to find a representative figure who can express the determination of the United States to prevent drugs. Unfortunately, the History of the United States itself is relatively short, and there are no representative figures at all, so it finally chose the image of Lin Zexu, a national hero of our country, as the "anti-smoking ambassador" to express the government's determination to prevent drugs. It can be said that this is also a different kind of "cultural transmission".