The second condition of importance for acquiring means of production and
realising the surplus value is that commodity exchange and commodity
economy should be introduced in societies based on natural economy as
soon as their independence has been abrogated, or rather in the course
of this disruptive process. Capital requires to buy the products of, and
sell its commodities to, all non-capitalist strata and societies. Here
at last we seem to find the beginnings of that 'peace' and 'equality',
the _do ut des_, mutual interest, 'peaceful competition' and the
'influences of civilisation'. For capital can indeed deprive alien
social associations of their means of production by force, it can compel
the workers to submit to capitalist exploitation, but it cannot force
them to buy its commodities or to realise its surplus value. In
districts where natural economy formerly prevailed, the introduction of
means of transport--railways, navigation, canals--is vital for the
spreading of commodity economy, a further hopeful sign. The triumphant
march of commodity economy thus begins in most cases with magnificent
constructions of modern transport, such as railway lines which cross
primeval forests and tunnel through the mountains, telegraph wires which
bridge the deserts, and ocean liners which call at the most outlying
ports. But it is a mere illusion that these are peaceful changes. Under
the standard of commerce, the relations between the East India Company
and the spice-producing countries were quite as piratical, extortionate
and blatantly fraudulent as present-day relations between American
capitalists and the Red Indians of Canada whose furs they buy, or
between German merchants and the Negroes of Africa. Modern China
presents a classical example of the 'gentle', 'peace-loving' practices
of commodity exchange with backward countries. Throughout the nineteenth
century, beginning with the early forties, her history has been
punctuated by wars with the object of opening her up to trade by brute
force. Missionaries provoked persecutions of Christians, Europeans
instigated risings, and in periodical massacres a completely helpless
and peaceful agrarian population was forced to match arms with the most
modern capitalist military technique of all the Great Powers of Europe.
Heavy war contributions necessitated a public debt, China taking up
European loans, resulting in European control over her finances and
occupation of her fortifications; the opening of free ports was
enforced, railway concessions to European capitalists extorted. By all
these measures commodity exchange was fostered in China, from the early
thirties of the last century until the beginning of the Chinese
revolution.
European civilisation, that is to say commodity exchange with European
capital, made its first impact on China with the Opium Wars when she was
compelled to buy the drug from Indian plantations in order to make money
for British capitalists. In the seventeenth century, the East India
Company had introduced the cultivation of poppies in Bengal; the use of
the drug was disseminated in China by its Canton branch. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, opium fell so considerably in price
that it rapidly became the 'luxury of the people'. In 1821, 4,628 chests
of opium were imported to China at an average price of £265; then the
price fell by 50 per cent, and Chinese imports rose to 9,621 chests in
1825, and to 26,670 chests in 1830.[368] The deadly effects of the drug,
especially of the cheaper kinds used by the poorer population, became a
public calamity and made it necessary for China to lay an embargo on
imports, as an emergency measure. Already in 1828, the viceroy of Canton
had prohibited imports of opium, only to deflect the trade to other
ports. One of the Peking censors commanded to investigate the question
gave the following report:
'I have learnt that people who smoke opium have developed such a
craving for this noxious drug that they make every effort to obtain this
gratification. If they do not get their opium at the usual hour, their
limbs begin to tremble, they break out in sweat, and they cannot perform
the slightest tasks. But as soon as they are given the pipe, they inhale
a few puffs and are cured immediately.
'Opium has therefore become a necessity for all who smoke it, and it is
not surprising that under cross-examination by the local authorities
they will submit to every punishment rather than reveal the names of
their suppliers. Local authorities are also in some cases given presents
to tolerate the evil or to delay any investigation already under way.
Most merchants who bring goods for sale into Canton also deal in
smuggled opium.
'I am of the opinion that opium is by far a greater evil than gambling,
and that opium smokers should therefore be punished no less than
gamblers.'
The censor suggested that every convicted opium smoker should be
sentenced to eighty strokes of the bamboo, and anybody refusing to give
the name of his supplier to a hundred strokes and three years of exile.
The pigtailed Cato of Peking concludes his report with a frankness
staggering to any European official: 'Apparently opium is mostly
introduced from abroad by dishonest officials in connivance with
profit-seeking merchants who transport it into the interior of the
country. Then the first to indulge are people of good family, wealthy
private persons and merchants, but ultimately the drug habit spreads
among the common people. I have learnt that in all provinces opium is
smoked not only in the civil service but also in the army. The officials
of the various districts indeed enjoin the legal prohibition of sale by
special edicts. But at the same time, their parents, families,
dependants and servants simply go on smoking opium, and the merchants
profit from the ban by increased prices. Even the police have been won
over; they buy the stuff instead of helping to suppress it, and this is
an additional reason for the disregard in which all prohibitions and
ordinances are held.'[369]
Consequently, a stricter law was passed in 1833 which made every opium
smoker liable to a hundred strokes and two months in the stocks, and
provincial governors were ordered to report annually on their progress
in the battle against opium. But there were two sequels to this
campaign: on the one hand large-scale poppy plantations sprang up in the
interior, particularly in the Honan, Setchuan, and Kueitchan provinces,
and on the other, England declared war on China to get her to lift the
embargo. These were the splendid beginnings of 'opening China' to
European civilisation--by the opium pipe.
Canton was the first objective. The fortifications of the town at the
main arm of the Perl estuary could not have been more primitive. Every
day at sunset a barrier of iron chains was attached to wooden rafts
anchored at various distances, and this was the main defence. Moreover,
the Chinese guns could only fire at a certain angle and were therefore
completely ineffectual. With such primitive defences, just adequate to
prevent a few merchant ships from landing, did the Chinese meet the
British attack. A couple of British cruisers, then, sufficed to effect
an entry on September 7, 1839. The sixteen battle-junks and thirteen
fire-ships which the Chinese put up for resistance were shot up or
dispersed in a matter of forty-five minutes. After this initial victory,
the British renewed the attack in the beginning of 1841 with a
considerably reinforced fleet. This time the fleet, consisting in a
number of battle-junks, and the forts were attacked simultaneously. The
first incendiary rocket that was fired penetrated through the armour
casing of a junk into the powder chamber and blew the ship with the
entire crew sky-high. In a short time eleven junks, including the
flag-ship, were destroyed, and the remainder precipitately made for
safety. The action on land took a little longer. Since the Chinese guns
were quite useless, the British walked right through the fortifications,
climbed to a strategic position--which was not even guarded--and
proceeded to slaughter the helpless Chinese from above. The casualty
list of the battle was: for the Chinese 600 dead, and for the British, 1
dead and 30 wounded, more than half of the latter having been injured by
the accidental explosion of a powder magazine. A few weeks later, there
followed another British exploit. The forts of Anung-Hoy and North
Wantong were to be taken. No less than twelve fully equipped cruisers
were available for this task. What is more, the Chinese, once again
forgetful of the most important thing, had omitted to fortify the island
of South Wantong. Thus the British calmly landed a battery of howitzers
to bombard the fort from one side, the cruisers shelling it from the
other. After that, the Chinese were driven from the forts in a matter of
minutes, and the landing met with no resistance. The ensuing display of
inhumanity--an English report says--will be for ever deeply deplored by
the British staff. The Chinese, trying to escape from the barricades,
had fallen into a moat which was soon literally filled to the brim with
helpless soldiers begging for mercy. Into this mass of prostrate human
bodies, the sepoys--acting against orders, it is claimed--fired again
and again. This is the way in which Canton was made receptive to
commodity exchange.
Nor did the other ports fare better. On July 4, 1841, three British
cruisers with 120 cannon appeared off the islands in the entrance to the
town of Ningpo. More cruisers arrived the following day. In the evening
the British admiral sent a message to the Chinese governor, demanding
the capitulation of the island. The governor explained that he had no
power to resist but could not surrender without orders from Peking. He
therefore asked for a delay. This was refused, and at half-past two in
the morning the British stormed the defenceless island. Within eight
minutes, the fort and the houses on the shore were reduced to
smouldering rubble. Having landed on the deserted coast littered with
broken spears, sabres, shields, rifles and a few dead bodies, the troops
advanced on the walls of the island town of Tinghai. With daybreak,
reinforced by the crews of other ships which had meanwhile arrived, they
proceeded to put scaling-ladders to the scarcely defended ramparts. A
few more minutes gave them mastery of the town. This splendid victory
was announced with becoming modesty in an Order of the Day: 'Fate has
decreed that the morning of July 5, 1841, should be the historic date on
which Her Majesty's flag was first raised over the most beautiful island
of the Celestial Empire, the first European flag to fly triumphantly
above this lovely countryside.'[370]
On August 25, 1841, the British approached the town of Amoy, whose forts
were armed with a hundred of the heaviest Chinese guns. These guns being
almost useless, and the commanders lacking in resource, the capture of
the harbour was child's play. Under cover of a heavy barrage, British
ships drew near the walls of Kulangau, landed their marines, and after
a short stand the Chinese troops were driven out. The twenty-six
battle-junks with 128 guns in the harbour were also captured, their
crews having fled. One battery, manned by Tartars, heroically held out
against the combined fire of three British ships, but a British landing
was effected in their rear and the post wiped out.
This was the finale of the notorious Opium War. By the peace treaty of
August 27, 1842, the island of Hongkong was ceded to Britain. In
addition, the towns of Canton, Amoy, Futchou, Ningpo and Shanghai were
to open their ports to foreign commerce. But within fifteen years, there
was a further war against China. This time, Britain had joined forces
with the French. In 1857, the allied navies captured Canton with a
heroism equal to that of the first war. By the peace of Tientsin (1858),
the opium traffic, European commerce and Christian missions were
admitted into the interior. Already in 1859, however, the British
resumed hostilities and attempted to destroy the Chinese fortifications
on the Peiho river, but were driven off after a fierce battle in which
464 people were wounded or killed.[371]
After that, Britain and France again joined forces. At the end of August
1860, 12,600 English and 7,500 French troops under General
Cousin-Montauban first captured the Taku forts without a single shot
having been fired. Then they proceeded towards Tientsin and on towards
Peking. A bloody battle was joined at Palikao, and Peking fell to the
European Powers. Entering the almost depopulated and completely
undefended city, the victors began by pillaging the Imperial Palace,
manfully helped by General Cousin himself, who was later to become field
marshal and Count of Palikao. Then the Palace went up in flames, fired
on Lord Elgin's order as an imposed penance.[372]
The European Powers now obtained concessions to set up embassies in
Peking, and to start trading with Tientsin and other towns. The Tchi-fu
Convention of 1876 guaranteed full facilities for importing opium into
China--at a time when the Anti-Opium League in England agitated against
the spreading of the drug habit in London, Manchester and other
industrial districts, when a parliamentary commission declared the
consumption of opium to be harmful in the extreme. By all treaties made
at that time between China and the Great Powers any European, whether
merchant or missionary, was guaranteed the right to acquire land, to
which end the legitimate arguments were ably supported by deliberate
fraud.
First and foremost the ambiguity of the treaty texts made a convenient
excuse for European capital to encroach beyond the Treaty Ports. It used
every loophole in the wording of the treaties to begin with, and
subsequently blackmailed the Chinese government into permitting the
missions to acquire land not alone in the Treaty Ports but in all the
provinces of the realm. Their claim was based upon the notorious
bare-faced distortion of the Chinese original in Abbé Delamarre's
official translation of the supplementary convention with France. French
diplomacy, and the Protestant missions in particular, unanimously
condemned the crafty swindle of the Catholic padre, but nevertheless
they were firm that the rights of French missions obtained by this fraud
should be explicitly extended to the Protestant missions as well.[373]
China's entry into commodity exchange, having begun with the Opium Wars,
was finally accomplished with a series of 'leases' and the China
campaign of 1900, when the commercial interests of European capital sank
to a brazen international dogfight over Chinese land. The description of
the Dowager Empress, who wrote to Queen Victoria after the capture of
the Taku forts, subtly underlines this contrast between the initial
theory and the ultimate practice of the 'agents of European
civilisation':
'To your Majesty, greeting!--In all the dealings of England with the
Empire of China, since first relations were established between us,
there has never been any idea of territorial aggrandisement on the part
of Great Britain, but only a keen desire to promote the interests of her
trade. Reflecting upon the fact that our country is now plunged into a
dreadful condition of warfare, we bear in mind that a large proportion
of China's trade, seventy or eighty per cent, is done with England;
moreover, your Customs duties are the lightest in the world, and few
restrictions are made at your sea-ports in the matter of foreign
importations; for these reasons our amiable relations with British
merchants at our Treaty Ports have continued unbroken for the last half
century, to our mutual benefit.--But a sudden change has now occurred
and general suspicion has been created against us. We would therefore
ask you now to consider that if, by any conceivable combination of
circumstances, the independence of our Empire should be lost, and the
Powers unite to carry out their long-plotted schemes to possess
themselves of our territory'--(in a simultaneous message to the Emperor
of Japan, the impulsive Tzu Hsi openly refers to 'The earth-hungry
Powers of the West, whose tigerish eyes of greed are fixed in our
direction'[374])--'the results to your country's interests would be
disastrous and fatal to your trade. At this moment our Empire is
striving to the utmost to raise an army and funds sufficient for its
protection; in the meanwhile we rely on your good services to act as
mediator, and now anxiously await your decision.'[375]
Both during the wars and in the interim periods, European civilisation
was busy looting and thieving on a grand scale in the Chinese Imperial
Palaces, in the public buildings and in the monuments of ancient
civilisation, not only in 1860, when the French pillaged the Emperor's
Palace with its legendary treasures, or in 1900, 'when all the nations
vied with each other to steal public and private property'. Every
European advance was marked not only with the progress of commodity
exchange, but by the smouldering ruins of the largest and most venerable
towns, by the decay of agriculture over large rural areas, and by
intolerably oppressive taxation for war contributions. There are more
than 40 Chinese Treaty Ports--and every one of them has been paid for
with streams of blood, with massacre and ruin.