Number of words: 700

In time European states did indeed borrow freely from Chinese models of governance. As the historian Stephen R. Platt has noted, the East India Company’s adoption of a competitive examination system in 1806 was inspired largely by what its traders had learned of the Chinese system in Canton. This in turn became the foundation of the British government’s own civil service exams when they were established in the mid-nineteenth century.” The genealogies of the civil service examinations that preoccupy millions of young Indians today thus lead directly back to China. Indeed, as Wengrow and Graeber have pointed out, the very idea of the contemporary nation-state as a population of largely uniform language and culture, run by a bureaucratic officialdom… whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams is almost exactly the system that had existed for centuries in China.

It was in the late eighteenth century, when Europeans, and especially the British, were becoming increasingly dominant globally, that Western attitudes towards China began to change. It is no coincidence, I think, that Western perceptions became increasingly negative as China kept absorbing ever growing quantities of opium. It is as though the very fact that the supposedly ‘powerful’ Qing Empire was unable to effectively curtail the drug trade was enough to make it worthy of contempt. It is of a piece with this that the people who were most derisive of the Chinese were often the very merchants who were most successful in bribing local officials and breaking the country’s laws.

One such was Sir James Matheson, an opium trader who, over a career built on criminality in China, became the second-largest landowner in all of Britain, and bagged himself a baronetcy as well as a seat in Parliament.” In 1836, as a part of the (ultimately successful) lobbying effort to prod Britain into declaring war on China, Matheson wrote a book which begins thus: It has pleased Providence to assign to the Chinese-a people characterized by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit, and obstinacy the possession of a vast portion of the most desirable parts of the earth, and a population estimated as amounting to nearly a third of the human race

These attitudes echo those of contemporary drug lords, who are often contemptuous of the hapless governments whose laws they circumvent. They too often blame corrupt American and European officials for the constant rise in drug consumption in the West Unlike today’s drug lords, however, Matheson and his ilk came to be celebrated in their countries as paragons of imperial virtue.”

It is unarguable that the opium trade largely depended on the collusion of Chinese criminal networks, just as the drug trade in the West, and around the world, does today” Nor can there be any doubt that there was a great deal of official corruption in China even before the large-scale importation of opium accelerated. Still, according to Jonathan Spence, one of the greatest historians of China, the country’s standard of law and order was probably comparable to that prevalent in Europe or the US at the time.” But money can corrupt the soundest institutions and Western drug runners had no shortage of funds. In one instance, in 1839, British smugglers paid two low- ranking Chinese officials 26,000 dollars in cash and kind, a truly monumental sum in a region where ‘one Spanish silver dollar was equivalent to several days wages for an ordinary boatman.’

What is extraordinary about the views of merchants like Matheson, then, is that they blame China’s corruption not only for the very existence of the opium trade but also for their own wrongdoings (Look what you made me do!). In retrospect it is clear that the pattern of causality was complicated, and that the drug-traders’ exploitation of pre-existing vulnerabilities in the system contributed greatly to the steadily increasing corrosion of Chinese structures of governance in this period.

This too would establish a template for Western resource extraction around the world: mining and energy corporations that spend huge sums on bribing officials in poor countries frequently blame those very countries for their ‘cultures of corruption’.

Excerpted from Pages 285 to 287 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh