‘The China Opium Trade’
James Bradley is the author of the best-selling The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia (Little Brown, 2015). In these excerpts from his interview with John Pilger, he describes how modern America was built on the ‘China trade’.
James Bradley: For most of American history, it was illegal for someone like me to know a Chinese. The Chinese came to America to mine gold and build the railroads, and Americans decided we didn’t like competition. So in 1882 we had the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which kept the Chinese out of the United States for about 100 years. Just at the point we were putting up the Statue of Liberty saying we welcome everybody, we were erecting a wall saying: ‘We welcome everybody except those Chinese.’
John Pilger: And yet, for the American elite in the 19th century, China was a goldmine.
JB: A goldmine of drugs. Warren Delano, the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was the American opium king of China; he was the biggest American opium dealer, second only to the British. Much of the east coast [establishment] of the United States – Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton – was born of drug money. The American industrial revolution was funded by huge pools of money – where did this come from? It came from illegal drugs in the biggest market in the world: China.
JP: So the grandfather of the most liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a drug runner?
JB: Yes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt never made much money in his life. He had public-service jobs that were very lowly paid, but he inherited a fortune from Warren Delano, his father. Now if you scratch anyone with the name Forbes, you’ll find opium money… such as John Forbes Kerry…
JP: That’s the present Secretary of State.
JB: Yes. His great-grandfather [Francis Blackwell Forbes] was an opium dealer. How big was opium money? Opium money built the first industrial city in the United States. It built the first five railroads. But it wasn’t talked about. It was called the China trade.
1 comment:
It gave us the term "gunboat diplomacy" and because the Chinese government wouldn't allow the opium trade in, the British and Americans took it unto themselves to force the empire to open their markets to "our" vice. When you learn about the Opium War in school, the first several paragraphs won't mention that. And fat chance you'll have a full chapter in our homogenized pasteurized "history" books. I'll bet a thousand percent of anybody's hindquarters it's told differently in China.
Wouldn't it be extra special if the new China actually forced America to open our markets to their trade? At gunpoint.
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