Roar, China, roar!
Why the Chinese story should inspire us all. A deep dive into how China defeated Western imperialism.
When the British and Dutch opium trade began in India during the 1700s, it inevitably expanded towards China, unleashing an addiction epidemic that threatened to collapse the Chinese society.
A Chinese provincial governor observed that opium, once regarded as a poison, was now treated in the same way as tea or rice. Accounts of benumbed mothers holding their “permanently stupefied” babies became widespread. While women turned to prostitution to fund their addiction, men turned to crime.
In describing the impending societal collapse, the Jiaqing Emperor said:
Opium has a harm. Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality…recently the purchasers, eaters, and consumers of opium have become numerous. Deceitful merchants buy and sell it to gain profit!
Finally in 1836, China banned the opium trade and closed its ports. Three years later, commissioner Lin Zexu openly burned 1.2 million kilograms of confiscated opium. All good right? No.
You see, this trade was was a source of massive profits for the British empire and other Western empires. In fact, the first American millionaire, John Jacob Astor, got his wealth from this trade.
The West demanded, on the principles of global capitalist free trade, that China open its ports. When they refused, the Brits allied with France and the United States and declared multiple wars on China, known as the Opium Wars, in which they seized Hong Kong and forced China to sign multiple humiliating treaties.
The British and the French also looted and destroyed the historic Qing palace in Beijing, for good measure.
In the aftermath of this humiliation of China, Western imperialists, including the United States, invited Japan for unofficial partition talks not too dissimilar from the Berlin Conference of 1884, in which the partition and colonization of Africa was planned.
Instead, they opted for a policy they called “Open Doors”, in which Chinese resources and minerals belonged to the highest bidders among Western capitalists, traders, corporations and investors.
Today, the Chinese people remember those days, and that century, as The Century of Humiliation.
Among the concessions China had to make to Western empires were enclaves in the cities belonging to Western investors and their families. Barbed wires and guards separated them from the Chinese people. The American enclaves enforced Race Laws segregating the Chinese inhabitants from services and streets in their own homeland!
When the black communist poet Langston Hughes visited Shanghai in 1934, he saw a society that reminded him of the Jim Crow South, but this time it was established in the heart of China.
American guards told Hughes that he had to be careful when going into the Chinese sections of Shanghai due to “crafty Orientals” who would swindle him. The reality he found to be very different:
“I found the Chinese in Shanghai to be a very jolly people, much like colored folks at home. To tell the truth, I was more afraid of going into the world famous Cathay Hotel [today the Peace Hotel] than I was of going into any public place in the Chinese quarters. Colored people are not welcomed at the Cathay. But beyond the gates of the International Settlement, color was no barrier. I could go anywhere.”
Hughes discovered that he wasn’t the only black American in Shanghai. This was the era of Shanghai jazz, and, he says, “Shanghai seemed to have a weakness for American Negro performers,” from Nora Holt at the Little Club, Midge Williams, Valaida Snow at St. George’s Nightclub, Earl Whaley, Buck Clayton, and Teddy Weatherford.
When Hughes returned to America, he wrote the following poem. It is still one of the most powerful poems I’ve read:
“Roar, China!
Roar, old lion of the East!
Snort fire, yellow dragon of the Orient,
Tired at last of being bothered.
Since when did you ever steal anything
From anybody,
Sleepy wise old beast
Known as the porcelain-maker,
Known as the poem-maker,
Known as maker of firecrackers?
A long time since you cared
About taking other people’s lands
Away from them.
THEY must’ve thought you didn’t care
About your own land either—
So THEY came with gunboats,
Set up Concessions,
Zones of influence,
International Settlements,
Missionary houses,
Banks,
And Jim Crow Y.M.C.A.’s.
THEY beat you with malacca canes
And dared you to raise your head—
Except to cut it off.
Even the yellow men came
To take what the white men
Hadn’t already taken.
The yellow men dropped bombs on Chapei.
The yellow men called you the same names
The white men did:
Dog! Dog! Dog!
Coolie dog!
Red! . . . Lousy red!
Red coolie dog!
And in the end you had no place
To make your porcelain,
Write your poems,
Or shoot your firecrackers on holidays.
In the end you had no peace
Or calm left at all.
PRESIDENT, KING, MIKADO
Thought you really were a dog.
THEY kicked you daily
Via radiophone, via cablegram,
Via gunboats in her harbor,
Via malacca canes.
THEY thought you were a tame lion.
A sleepy, easy, tame old lion!
Ha! Ha!
Haaa-aa-a! . . . Ha!
Laugh, little coolie boy on the docks of Shanghai, laugh!
You’re no tame lion.
Laugh, red generals in the hills of Sian-kiang, laugh!
You’re no tame lion.
Laugh, child slaves in the factories of the foreigners!
You’re no tame lion.
Laugh—and roar, China! Time to spit fire!
Open your mouth, old dragon of the East.
To swallow up the gunboats in the Yangtse!
Swallow up the foreign planes in your sky!
Eat bullets, old maker of firecrackers—
And spit out freedom in the face of your enemies!
Break the chains of the East,
Little coolie boy!
Break the chains of the East,
Red generals!
Break the chains of the East,
Child slaves in the factories!
Smash the iron gates of the Concessions!
Smash the pious doors of the missionary houses!
Smash the revolving doors of the Jim Crow Y.M.C.A.’s.
Crush the enemies of land and bread and freedom!
Stand up and roar, China!
You know what you want!
The only way to get it is
To take it!
Roar, China!”
China would, indeed, roar. A decade later, the Communist Party of China seized power and ended The Century of Humiliation. They expelled Western imperialists and would later go on to reclaim Hong Kong. Today, the CPC governs a country of astronomic wealth and prosperity.
The people who tried to drug down, rape, mutilate, partition and humiliate China are to this day still populating American and Western media outlets, central banks, intelligence communities and the military industrial complex.
They still hate China with the burning intensity of a thousand suns. But this time, they can’t do shit.