China_Opium_War

In the early 1900’s, the trafficking of opium had posed an enormous threat to the China, as it ruined human’s health, destroyed mankind and weakened the morale of soldiers. The consequences of opium trafficking and movement of imports from Western trade also impoverished the economy in China – which, also leads to the unfair “Anglo-Chinese Agreement” signed by the Chinese. As China was moving away from the Imperialism to Republic of China, those issues were supposed to disappear, in the governance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao Zedong, the chairman of the CCP, had claimed to be the most fervent of the Chinese interest and loudly condemned the Western countries for their opium traffic [294]. However, history shows that Mao is not a leader that is accountable for his words, and jeopardized the nation’s moral principle when his communist revolution ran into trouble. The following paragraphs will examine Mao’s ignorance; selfishness and escalation of commitment to his mistake that scars his reputation of a respectful revolutionist in China’s history. First of all, Mao was ignorant about the nation’s needs and inserted several bad policies. To start off with, the CCP has been promoting the Dazhai way of living for their revolution, where peasants would learn “how to create new men and women through ideological struggle, how to produce economic miracles through the mass line, how to change terrain through human efforts and how to overcome poverty through community endeavours.” [263] This all sounded too beautiful, in fact, it was really hard to accomplish without any blockage. In order to fuel the revolution, the CCP attracted the middle to lower class, by confiscating the grain, livestock, and properties of the landlord and rich peasants to redistribute them to the equality principle. This moved paid off as poor peasants were very supportive to the CCP and followed the Dazhai way, but what Mao neglected was the financial instability the land revolution created. During the early 1940s, China experienced major financial crisis that was caused by the Nationalist economic blockade and the Japanese military offensive. In war time, the economy was stagnant and Mao could barely support his army from the revenue of the peasants, so most of the source of funding comes from confiscation, fines, outside help and other extralegal methods. Also, the land redistribution, hostility toward merchants had depressed the local economy already [266] In all, Mao failed to appreciate the internal financial weakness of the party’s desperation during the three-year crisis and overestimate the accomplishment of a Dazhai Way.[265] Even with all these other incoming money, China was far from sufficient to remove their economy setback because Japanese had conquered other areas, such as Shaan-Gan-Ning border area, that China could get source from. However, Mao insisted on not abandoning the Shaan-Gan-Ning area, and persuaded soldiers to produce for their own needs. Other means have been promoted, such as taxation, printing money and expanding the “foreign trade“. As we all know in macroeconomic terms, the first two will undoubtedly dampen an economy further into recession and increase inflation, and only the ladder will satisfy both micro and macro problems. To elaborate, Mao tried to explore three domestic products in salt, herb and leather to foreign countries, but they proved to be unprofitable. When all things became unsuccessful and pessimistic, Mao launched the trade of a “special product”, which in essence is opium, to provide funds for the economy and his Red Army. Ironically, as mentioned above, Mao and the CCP were the ones that strongly opposed to western opium traffic; but yet, he selfishly neglected the states’ morale principle and compounded his mistake for the success of his own party. To a further extent, Mao was actually doubtful of dishonesty in dealing with opium in the early stages. He deceived everyone by restricting opium consumption or other related activity within his jurisdiction, while paralleling with the party’s anti-opium propaganda to provided a false sense of communist insistence on innocence. In fact, opium movement were very active in places not under Mao’s straight authority, such as Shaan-Gan-Ning territory’s neighbouring area of Jin-Sui area. However, it is hard to believe that Mao is not responsible of this evil deed, because all the activities within the CCP ruling had to be approved by him, and he must have overruled any objections, too. From those incidents, Mao was in part of the negligent to China’s moral principle and being hypocritical of his own image. Last but not least, to make the matter worse, the selfishness of Mao to provide money to the economy in the early 1940s has led another major issue in the society; series of corruption were going on. It was evident that “In 1941, the party urged all units to engage in profit-making businesses in order to pull through the period of economic difficulty.” [290]. Therefore, many states units were pressured and committed in smuggling its domestic products such as salt and leather, which could provide them with extra revenues. Needless to say, greed came into factored, and smugglers became involved with the opium, which was literally the big-profit generator during that time. Furthermore, some high official in the CCP became addicted (in consumption, should I add ') since the re-open of the opium movement, and affected their normal operation; and merchants also began to use opium to bribe high-ranking officials to fuel illegal activities. All that being said, Mao should be well-aware of these consequences in opening up the opium movement with the mistake China made in the Imperialism ages, and take responsibility of pressing the financial inferior Yenan region, which led into bribery smuggling. In conclusion, Mao Zedong is still a very successful revolutionist that brought China through numerous hard times and inserted different policies to improve China. However, he might not necessarily be flawless or as ideal of what the modern Chinese people might praise him. In fact, history demonstrated that he was actually at times being inconsiderate, hard-pressed, or could even be categorized as short-sighted. Mao failed to thoroughly speculate the internal weakness of the Shaan-Gan-Ning economy and the unrealistic development of the Dazhai way, and being aggressive in the funding for the economy. He escalated his commitment and brought back opium during the financial crisis, despite knowing all the drawbacks opium brings from his predecessors. Nonetheless, Mao was later to discard his Dazhai way of ideology in the 1950s, but it was all the questionable moves he made during the three year-crisis were one of the factors that left him harmed his prestige reputation.