Anxious Lin Zexu
01
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A major circle
In 1600, a group of young grassroots entrepreneurs from England came to the office of Queen Elizabeth I, hoping to open up an agency business overseas, and the queen looked at the world map on the table and drew a circle on the map with her finger. So, this group of young people took the "agency contract" and "franchise license" issued by the queen and set up a company, which became the famous British East India Company. They did not know that the company they had founded would cause fatal damage to the finances of the Qing Dynasty 240 years later, and they could not imagine that an official named Lin Zexu would become part of the butterfly effect.
The East India Company boarded the ship
In the early days, because they did not have enough start-up capital, they began to absorb merchants, nobles, landlords, and adventurers as shareholders.
After the prosperity of "Zheng He's Seven Voyages to the West", the gold and silver jewelry, porcelain, tea, silk and other high-end products of the Ming Dynasty made the eyes of this group of British adventurers full of essence. So, with their own family base and the start-up capital they had absorbed, the entrepreneur sailed from the mouth of the Thames to the far East. What they did not know was that the distant Ming Dynasty only allowed official tributary trade, and private trade was still not allowed, mainly because the Wokou from Kyushu in Japan plundered and smuggled trade along the coast of Daming.
Zheng He
Faced with a formidable competitor, the Dutch Trading Company, later the Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company's first deal in the early stages of its founding, chose to rob a Portuguese merchant ship on the west coast of Africa. As they brought all kinds of rare treasures back to Britain, the company's profits became higher and higher, and the scope of its operations continued to expand, from the Indonesian archipelago to Kyushu in Japan to Fujian in the Ming Dynasty.
Interestingly, 10 years after the opening of the branch in Kyushu, Japan, the British East India Company had to withdraw from the Japanese market under great pressure from rival Dutch East India Company, and only sporadic transactions with the Ming government, and eventually the company chose to focus its business on the South Asian subcontinent, mainly Mumbai and India.
Since the main clothing raw materials in Britain at that time were linen and wool, after seeing the excellent texture of Indian cotton fabrics, Europeans who had been wearing linen and woolen clothes for thousands of years finally discovered the value of cotton. Indian cotton, which has a long-lasting color, is easy to rinse and lightweight, has become popular, and cotton textile products have become popular in this "country on sheep's back". With the smooth development of the business in India, the British East India Company began to transport cotton fabrics, wool fabrics, indigo, spices, sugar, jewelry, grain, and medicinal herbs to Europe, and the journey of excess revenue officially began.
However, in the Chinese market, it was still a helpless situation, and it was not until Zheng successfully recovered Taiwan that the Dutch East India Company ended its operations in Taiwan, and the dutch owner, after constantly being hit by Britain and France, fell into a financial crisis and gradually withdrew from the Asian market. British companies took the opportunity to establish their first trading front station in Guangzhou, and from then on, the British East India Company and the Qing government began a two-century entanglement.
02
Profit-seeking, crazy capital
After China's three major pieces of tea, porcelain, and silk swept the world, China, as the world's largest producer of luxury goods at that time, mastered the wealth code in foreign trade, and only tea was worth about 100 million taels of silver per year.
The British East India Company was not a pioneer of trade between China and the West, but soon surpassed the Netherlands to become the largest patron and monopolist of trade between China and the West. As the British East India Company seized the pricing power of these luxury goods in western markets, the deal with the Qing government brought huge benefits to the British government and the East India Company, of which tea became the core commodity. Tea became a mass consumer product in Britain, and the amount of tea consumed was huge, with the average price of tea imported into the British Empire each year about 20,000 pounds, an average of more than two pounds per person per year.
Uk Imports of Chinese Tea Quantity Table 1 (Unit: Quintal)
Uk Imports of Chinese Tea Annual Average Quantity Table 2 (Unit: Quintal)
Capital is profit-seeking, 100% profit can make people desperate, 300% profit makes people dare to trample on everything, the maximum annual profit reached about 3.3 million pounds, once close to 10% of britain's GDP that year. In the face of such high profits, the British East India Company was not satisfied, and decided to "steal the art" and expand profits.
Robert Fochon, as a horticulturist, stepped onto the stage of history. With the assistance of a comprador in China, he successively went to Huangshan and Wuyishan to learn tea-making skills, took away more than 20,000 tea saplings and more than 10,000 tree species, and secretly took away 8 tea-making workers at great expense. In the Foothills of the Himalayas, in the Darjeeling Plateau, Fuqiong planted the first seeds, and successively cultivated Darjeeling black tea, Ceylon black tea, etc., reducing the import of Chinese tea, and greatly expanding profits from self-production and self-sales.
Since the self-sufficient smallholder peasant economy dominated during the Qing Dynasty, the Qing government did not find necessities in the list of goods brought by British companies, and the export data of the British East India Company was not so good compared to the huge import data. Even in the face of similar products, although the production cost of industrial society has decreased, after adding transportation costs and tariff costs, the market price of British products is much higher than that of similar products in China, so it is seriously slow to sell.
For British companies, the huge trade deficit is not their intention, but the huge profits of imports are also acceptable to them. But spurred on by the constant stream of cotton raw materials from the East India Company and the North American Virginia Company, the first industrial revolution in England, which had already completed a bourgeois revolution, began. For these new bourgeoisie, it is intolerable that the products produced by industrial society that are proud enough to be proud of them cannot enter the Chinese market, which also indicates that the crisis of the Qing Dynasty is coming.
03
An evil smile, a trembling Qing government
For the emerging bourgeoisie in England, it was not to collect the taxes paid by the East India Company every year, but to pass on its industrial crystallization to every corner of the world. Therefore, at strong demand, the British government tried to reverse the trade deficit.
First, the British government tried to use diplomatic means to solve the trade problem. On September 23, 1792, the British government appointed George Macartney as a special envoy to visit China under the name of the Qianlong Emperor HeShou and made a request for free trade to the Qianlong Emperor, but was rejected. In 1816, the British envoy Amiest visited China again, the main purpose was still to hope that the Qing government could open the market and allow free trade activities, and finally did not even see the Jiaqing Emperor.
The failure of diplomacy led the British government to seek irregular trade methods. On the advice of a domestic financial think tank, the East India Company decided to implement "arbitrage trade". The main process is to use silver to buy gold from China, and then transport gold back to the country, buy silver from the country, and then buy gold from China, this set of logic is based on the premise that the gold price in China was about two-thirds of that of Europe at that time, and there was a huge arbitrage space. Although the profits are very profitable, the cost of arbitrage trade activities is high, a lot of money needs to be invested in the early stage, and gold is very risky in the process of shipping, and the scale of trade cannot be expanded. More importantly, for the Uk government, the desired benefits are not desirable from the arbitrage trade.
At this time, the capitalist economic crisis broke out in Britain, British industry was hit hard, a large number of commodities were surplus, and only by opening up new markets could we survive the difficulties.
The British government strongly demanded a solution from the East India Company, and just when the East India Company was at a loss, they looked at the poppy plantations outside the house and showed an evil smile, which was enough to make the Qing government tremble and Lin Zexu was about to be pushed onto the stage of history.
04
The last line of defense was breached
Although the people of the world are aware of the harm of opium, stimulated by high capital profits, a large number of port merchants were pushed to the front by the East India Company, and they came to Guangzhou with the opium distributed by the company, starting from retail, and even more spectacular was that there were fifty large ships of 30 tons to 300 tons outside Humen, and there were more than 30 ships in the inland river, from Humen in the east of the city to the flower fields in the west of the city, all of which were ready to unload opium. Generally through two discount channels, one is to exchange opium for silver, and then transport these silver to India and Bangladesh, exchange it for gold and then transport it back to China, and the other is to use opium to pay for tea, porcelain, and silk. The opium trade reduced the cost of arbitrage, expanded the scale of arbitrage, and at the same time continued to consume the Qing government's currency reserves, and more importantly, trade began to run a surplus.
Busy Opium Shipments in Guangzhou
Quantitative changes eventually led to qualitative changes, and due to the sharp increase in opium imports, between 1820 and 1840 alone, the outflow of silver from China was about 100 million taels. In the case of the Qing Dynasty inheriting the huge silver reserves of the Ming Dynasty, there was a serious shortage of national treasury and currency circulation, and the economy of the Qing Dynasty was on the verge of collapse.
The complete change in the trade status of China and Britain alarmed the upper echelons of the Qing Dynasty. The Daoguang Emperor, under the repeated advice of Lin Zexu, made up his mind to ban smoking.
In 1838, under the expectations of the Daoguang Emperor, Lin Zexu was appointed minister of Chincha, restraining the Guangdong water division and fully presiding over the anti-smoking work. Since Guangdong was the main importer of opium, and Guangzhou was the center of opium smuggling and the largest opium trading place, Lin Zexu rushed to Guangzhou. After Lin Zexu arrived in Guangzhou, his main work was to ban smoking, pay fireworks, and sell cigarettes. In the face of the armed provocation of the British consul's righteous law, Lin Zexu solemnly declared to the world that "we are not afraid of war."
The First Opium War
In 1840, the first Opium War broke out, the Daoguang Emperor, who originally advocated war, saw that the huge British ships built under the industrial society were approaching, and the bingfeng pointed directly to the direct subordinate, facing the ship's strong guns, the Daoguang Emperor began to waver, punished Lin Zexu, and thus sought the British ships to withdraw to Guangzhou.
In fact, Lin Zexu could not control the war situation, because he could not change the difference between the huge generation relationship and productivity.
As a result, it is conceivable that the Qing government ended the war with defeat, and the first unequal treaty in modern China was signed, the Treaty of Nanjing, and the land was cut off. What is even more frightening is that Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai are treaty ports, and the East India Company has completely torn off its disguised mask and openly sold opium at major treaty ports, which aggravated the progress of the loss of silver by the Qing government, and the Chinese currency market completely lost its last line of defense.
The Treaty of Nanking was signed
05
The struggle between the gold standard and the silver standard
After the bourgeois revolution, Britain took the lead in completing the upgrading of production relations, holding a large amount of gold and silver after the boom of overseas colonial companies (the East India Company in Asia, the Virginia Trading Company in the Americas, and the African Trading Company). When trading with China, the world's largest single market, it is found that China's market is silver as the main currency, and the price of commodities has been rising, as a country that aims to "never set the sun", it must bypass silver and use other currencies (gold) as reserves to block the value of silver currency to achieve the purpose of controlling the country's finances.
The East India Company, as the absolute main force of the British government's overseas markets, rightfully assumed the role of blocking silver. So in a sense, the British government and the East India Company did not rely on guns to open the Chinese market, but relied on financial instruments to encroach on and control China's economy and trade activities for a long time, and the light cannons of the Opium War only completely tore off the true face - the gold standard replaced the silver standard.
I think that the collapse of the Qing Dynasty was that the relations of production could not keep up with the development of the productive forces, but Lin Zexu, under the premise of changing the old production relations, could not save the Qing Dynasty' big ship that had leaked water, and this big ship could not turn around, and the East India Company and the Opium War only made a big hole in this big ship.
Damaged Qing dynasty warships
The valuable experience accumulated by industrial society is that industrial manufacturing and the financial stick, these two tools are invincible in the face of the old production relations. The interplay of industrial manufacturing and the control of financial instruments has basically grasped the lifeblood of the old production relations, which is an important wake-up call for China today, the Qing Dynasty has returned to its true global status, but today's China should also return to our rightful position, because we are not allowed to claim to dialogue with us from the perspective of strength.