The 'New Opium War': America's deadly fentanyl invasion could be China's revenge for 'century of humiliation'
China's 19th-century opium addiction crisis blamed on western powers — Communist Party fuels similar crisis in US today
By Kerry J. Byrne | Fox NewsThe 'New Opium War': America's deadly fentanyl invasion could be China's revenge for 'century of humiliation'
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The United States is losing the New Opium War with China.
Leaders in Washington, D.C. appear unwilling to acknowledge that a fight even exists.
A crisis of addiction in China in the 19th century, reportedly fed by European imperial powers, paved the way for foreign domination and sparked two conflicts called the Opium Wars.
It marked the depths of a social, cultural and political catastrophe widely known in China today as the "century of humiliation."
Revenge for this lingering insult to China’s national psyche, whether intended or tacit, helps explain America’s deadly opioid crisis today.
About 108,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), with two-thirds of those deaths caused by fentanyl.
The poison pouring across America’s porous southern border appears to be part of China’s robust multi-front asymmetric war against the United States led by a Communist Party intent on "world domination."
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China "finds fentanyl a profitable export to Mexico with the added benefit [that] it kills 100,000 Americans yearly," military historian Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, told Fox News Digital.
Fentanyl poisoning is the leading cause of death among adults ages 18 to 45, the CDC reports, killing more Americans in this age group than gun violence, auto accidents, COVID-19 or cancer.
China under the Qing Dynasty, its last imperial rulers, was flooded with opium by Great Britain and other European powers in the mid-1800s, according to commonly reported history.
It created widespread addiction, lawlessness, social strife, family crises, urban decay, the docile malaise of millions and streets filled with sad, emaciated addicts in cities such as Shanghai.
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First-hand accounts of China during its opium crisis sound similar to scenes of the ugly impact of opioid addiction found on the streets of many American cities today.
"By 1840 there were 10 million Chinese opium addicts, largely sustained by illegal British imports," according to the National Army Museum in the United Kingdom.
China was soundly defeated. Among other outcomes, it ceded the vast port city of Hong Kong to Britain at the end of the First Opium War. Hong Kong returned to China's dominion in 1997.
"The history of the Opium Wars has cast a long shadow over China’s relations with Western countries like Britain, and also the United States," British scholar Julia Lovell, author of "The Opium War," told Fox News Digital.
"For at least a century, public memory of the First Opium War in China has served as the founding episode of Chinese patriotism."
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The Opium Wars had a profound impact on geopolitics here in the 21st century.
The Communist Party rose to power in China after World War II by fomenting anger at foreign powers. The history of the opium crisis proved a powerful tool to tap into Chinese nationalist pride by highlighting the alleged evils of western influence.
The Opium Wars, in other words, helped communist revolutionaries take control of China after it was freed from its last foreign occupier, Imperial Japan, during World War II.
The United States, ironically in hindsight, liberated occupied China, including major cities Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai, from Japan during World War II. Tens of thousands of American troops died in the Pacific War that gained China its independence from yet another foreign oppressor.
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The sacrifices made by American GIs and their families to end China's "century of humiliation" is largely unmentioned by both the Chinese Communist Party and American academia today.
It ultimately led to the increasingly ominous standoff that now exists between the U.S. and China.
There is no direct evidence that China seeds the fentanyl catastrophe in America in retribution for the Opium Wars.
"I find that speculative and unlikely," said Lovell. "There would need to be a clear evidence trail for anyone to claim that."
But China is the source of this highly addictive, highly lethal synthetic opioid killing thousands of people each month in the United States.
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And this deadly attack on a western rival is consistent with a narrative that’s foundational to the Chinese Communist Party’s existence.
The fentanyl crisis is sourced in an industry that conveniently enjoys unusually lax oversight from Chinese leaders.
"China is the lead nation for the production of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl and the Chinese chemical industry is the most unregulated industry in all of China," Ray Donovan, the recently retired global Chief of Operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, told Fox News Digital.
"I think if China wants to do more to regulate it, they certainly can. If there was willingness to stop it, they could get ahead of the problem."
Chinese-made chemicals are also the source of the synthetic methamphetamines causing disorder and death in the United States, Donovan said.
The flood of deadly synthetic drugs may be even more sinister than just an effort to make money at the expense of American lives and social welfare.
The entire history of China’s opium crisis may be built on a lie — or, at the very least, a dramatic retelling of history for propaganda purposes.
Opium was legal in China and had been imported and even grown there for centuries, Australian scholar Harry G. Gelber wrote in a 2006 Harvard University research paper titled "China as ‘Victim’? The Opium War That Wasn’t."
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The war was fought instead over a variety of other economic disputes, while the treaty ending the First Opium War "did not mention opium," he wrote.
The Opium War was "a brilliantly snappy name that sneakily prejudges the issue in very simple form: While China had done Britain no harm, the British gratuitously invaded China," reported Gelber.
Opium "is a mere incident to the dispute, but no more the cause of the war than the throwing overboard of tea in Boston Harbor was the cause of the North American revolution," former President John Quincy Adams wrote in 1841 while serving in Congress after his presidency.
"China operates on the here and now and what is in its interests; it uses history only for propaganda purposes," said Hanson to Fox News Digital.
"It only references the Opium War as propaganda to justify post facto this self-interested drug export policy."
Kerry J. Byrne is a lifestyle reporter with Fox News Digital.
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