The Plantations
...lth there was if they got involved with trade in China. So they used their power and did whatever they could to get involved in this trade. The impact on China from the imports of opium led the country to lose wealth. In order to pay for the opium imports the Chinese people paid with silver. Traditionally Europeans were importing silver into China in order to buy goods such as tea and spices. Now silver was being exported out of the country to pay for opium .This left China with fewer amounts of sliver. The silver shortage caused taxes on peasants to increase. If opium was legalized then the Chinese government could put a tax on opium and increase profit. However, at this time the Chinese government could not tax the opium being traded because it was not legalized. At this time China saw their traditional political powers being demolished and their Chinese culture being humiliated. Finally in 1838 China began to fight back. In order for China to make a move a man named Lin Zexu was named commissioner and sent to Canton. Canton was one of the few ports that were available to foreigners to trade with China. Lin and his men entered Canton and they ordered the arrest of Lancelot Dent, who was the president of the British Chamber of Commerce. Dent refused the arrest but after forty-seven days of a blockade Dent was overtaken and Lin was given 20,283 chests of opium. The amount had a value of $9 million dollars and Lin took this opium and washed it out to sea. After this point Lin thought that he had given china a strong victory and a lot of strength. However, the British fought back bringing four steamers into the waters near Canton defeating the Chinese along those regions. The battle grew to the land and many Chinese soldiers were outnumbered however they fought fiercely. Most of the Chinese soldiers at this time didn’t want to surrender themselves and their families to the British. What some Chinese soldiers did was they killed their kids and wife and then killed themselves. The British came out on top from this war and the conquered the island of Hong Kong. They were also received the right to trade in five treaty ports and forced the Chinese to compensate for the opium destroyed by Lin. The results from this war had a negative effect to the Chinese society. The aftermath of this battle changed the way the Chinese had previously looked at the British people. The Chinese now see the British as barbaric and controlling individuals. Also the Chinese law has been demolished from existence. Since the British took over most of the territories from the Chinese, Europeans could now trade anywhere they wished and would have to report to their own courts for crimes instead of the Chinese court. Basically what the British did was allow Europeans to participate in trade in China without having to worry about Chinese laws and political rules. Chinese laws were crushed at this point in time however in the mid nineteenth century the Chinese people still lived their life the way they use to prior to the opium war. The Europeans and the North Americans were only trading on the outskirts of china and didn’t get involved in many cities. The main impact was on the political leaders and urban dwellers that were greatly affected by this foreign influence. Eventually these leaders had no choice but to except the strength of the Europeans and try to think about ways to learn from their tactics and take advantage of their technology. The Chinese people sill lived their traditional life in China after these events. At the end of the eighteenth century China’s population continued to grow. The population grew to over half a billion people and this created many problems. The large population started to diminish the country’s resources and created insufficient living space. Also many were feeling the effects of the political decay with the spread of poverty and peasant discontent throughout China. China’s society had continued to fall apart. Any chance of china starting to rebuild its status was crushed by foreign pressure. China’s defeat by the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) humiliated the Chinese people. An increase of foreign pressure of the Chinese started to cause some chaos. Foreign influence, especially from the Americans, wished to change the Qing regime to Western norms of political and economic exchange and tried to convince the Chinese to change to Christianity. The Chinese political leaders didn’t like this idea and the established an anti-European stance and used the technology from the Europeans in order to gain strength. Many Chinese people didn’t like the foreign influence so they started to fight back. The problems internally and externally in China gave way to the Boxer Uprising. These people consisted mainly of peasants who fought against foreigners living in their communities. With the weak state of the...