Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Like an abused child grown up to be a child-abusing adult, Red China is consumed by an obsession for revenge. Every sin that hyper-nationalists within the People’s Republic imagine was perpetrated upon China during its 19th and early 20th Century period of weakness is being resurrected. These old evils are being revived by China to be used against the wider world.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has propagandized generations to obsess over a so-called “Century of Shame.” From before the 1842 Anglo-Chinese Opium War through the Communist takeover in 1949, China was conspicuously weaker than the West. This coincided with the most aggressive epoch of European Imperialism, when Europeanized great powers conquered nearly the entire world.
Much of China’s weakness was self-inflicted. China cut itself off from the outside world from the early 1600s through the early 1800s. Europeans posed no significant threat when they closed themselves off. China then lived in a fantasy of isolation where nothing outside mattered.
The European West, including the United States, which came calling in the early 1800s was being transformed by the Industrial Revolution. These Europeans had increasingly greater strength relative to China. By the late 1800s, cartridge firearms, smokeless powder, the machine gun, and mobile artillery made the West unstoppable.
China’s weakness was perpetuated by a contempt for the “foreign devils.” China had always been the central civilization in East Asia, around which all others orbited. Barbarian invasions came and went, but China never suffered a Dark Age because their superior culture always absorbed the savages into themselves.
The West’s superior industry, technology and, in many ways culture, was unprecedented. The Chinese response was to disdain the “round-eyed barbarians” as being beneath contempt. They did not adapt themselves to the industrial age. Consequently, China came very close to being divided up by the Europeans into separate colonies around the year 1900.
Only US President Theodore Roosevelt’s Open Door Policy saved China from partition and direct rule by Europeans, Japanese, and Americans. China remained whole, but it had been compelled to agree to a series of unequal treaties that effectively made the Chinese people into second-class citizens within their own homeland.
The first of these unequal treaties was imposed because of the Chinese defeat in the First Sino-British Opium War of 1839-1842. The Manchu Dynasty would only accept silver in return for foreigners buying Chinese goods. This drained Britain’s silver reserves to such an extent that a plan by the British East India Company to import Afghani opium was enacted.
The desperation of drug-addicts undermined Imperial silver policy as it degraded countless Chinese lives. Peking dispatched Commissioner Lin Tsehsu. He gathered all known Opium stocks in Canton and pointedly burned it in clear view of the European enclave. His policies led the British to declare war.
The consequences of China’s defeat included the abandonment of the silver requirement, China’s allowance for the importation of Opium, the British gaining rights to act within China beyond Chinese law, and ultimately to an extendable 99-year lease for the islands of Hong Kong.
Soon every other great power extorted similar concessions from the Manchu Dynasty. They overshadowed the entire history of the 1912-1949 Republic of China. Only Japan’s efforts to conquer China (1931-1945) eclipsed them. The Communist victory in China’s Civil War ended them.
Like every totalitarian dictatorship, the CCP demonizes enemies to focus attention away from their enslavement of their own people. Anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Japanese propaganda dominates Chinese media. Without exception, every problem faced by the Chinese people is blamed on outsiders.
Today, decades of Western investment has transformed China into a powerhouse. The CCP now imposes unequal treaties and 99-year leases on any nation foolish enough to partner with their Belt and Road initiative. China now bullies every one of its neighbors, threatening war unless concessions are granted.
Evidence is mounting that the fentanyl epidemic and much of our broader drug addiction crisis is being orchestrated by the CCP. Xi Jinping and his Politburo are gleefully doing to the West and the rest of the world what they believe was once done to China.
None of this recognizes that no one alive then lives today. Two World Wars, a Cold War, the advent of atomic weaponry, and widespread fundamental social change has transformed the Westernized world since the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Today’s CCP imitates their self-made caricature of the West of those long ago times.
This is why today’s fentanyl epidemic is like no previous criminal enterprise. It is a foreign attack, part of a broader series of attacks intended to weaken the West, while being just minor enough to avoid provoking a full-scale war.
The old Cold War rules no longer apply. Our open borders aid this attack. Like before 9/11, most Americans have no idea that there are those already at war with us. Unless we awaken to the existential threat posed by the CCP, of which fentanyl is only one small part, we will be easy prey to their revenge.
