How the Opium War Still Shapes Xi Jinping’s Trade Clash With Trump

Climbing the ranks of the Communist Party while working in a coastal province, Xi Jinping — the man now leading China’s push to overtake the United States — kept a poem on his desk that helps explain why he has fought back fiercely against President Trump in their trade war.

The poem, a patriotic ode to the sanctity of national interest, was written by Lin Zexu, an imperial commissioner from Fujian, the same coastal province, who oversaw China’s foreign commerce in the early 19th century. He is celebrated today in Chinese textbooks and speeches by Mr. Xi as a national hero for standing up to Britain, the superpower of the day, in a confrontation over trade.

That confrontation, triggered by Lin’s efforts to halt opium smuggling, ended in disaster for China — a crushing military defeat that gave Britain control of Hong Kong and, in China’s telling, started a “century of humiliation,” a shameful stain whose removal President Xi has set as one of his most important goals since becoming China’s leader in 2012.

Past shame looms large as Mr. Xi prepares for a meeting on Thursday in South Korea with President Trump, highlighting a gulf between the two leaders that stretches wider than their turbulent tiffs over tariffs, rare earth minerals and soybeans.

President Trump “sees China as the winner of the international modern order, but Xi Jinping sees China as its victim,” said Julia Lovell, the author of The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of Modern China, adding that these contrasting views can lead to “profound instability” in these talks.

“I don’t know how much of a student of history Trump is, but it is very important that he understand the emotional importance of this history in China,” said Ms. Lovell, a China scholar at the University of London’s Birbeck College. “This history is shaping China’s actions and strategies in the here and now.”

Celebrating China’s resurgent power last month with a massive military parade in Beijing, he said from the rostrum of Tiananmen Gate that his country had “put an end to China’s national humiliation of suffering successive defeats at the hands of foreign aggressors in modern times.”

Beijing has also bristled at what it sees as efforts by American leaders, including Mr. Trump, to cast China in the role of 19th-century Western opium traders with accusations that it is aggravating America’s drug problem by exporting chemicals used in the manufacture of fentanyl. Mr. Trump said last week that this would be his “first question” for Mr. Xi when they meet. China accuses Washington of using the drug problem to “blackmail” China.

The 19th-century showdown between China and the West began, much as today’s did, with mounting Western anger over a huge Chinese trade surplus. The country exported large quantities of tea, rhubarb, porcelain, silk and other goods but imported little in return.

Britain turned to opium to narrow the gap, with Western merchants selling growing quantities of the drug to China despite an official ban on the narcotic declared in 1729.

Commissioner Lin arrived in the southern port of Guangzhou, then known as Canton, in 1839, with orders from the emperor in Beijing to stop the opium trade and restore Qing dynasty finances, which had been upended by the outflow of silver to pay for drugs.

Lin’s determination to resist British power made him a heroic figure of resistance to Western bullying for generations of modern Chinese leaders since the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911.

He is best known in China for confiscating and then destroying foreign opium worth hundreds of millions of dollars at current prices in trenches dug on the bank of the Pearl River at Humen near Guangzhou. Foreigners who witnessed the destruction, Lin informed the emperor, “feel heartily ashamed.”

China’s public security minister, Wang Xiaohong, who has been at the center of arguments with Washington over fentanyl, this week visited Humen and a museum there celebrating Lin’s anti-drug actions in the 19th century. The minister, vowing to carry out “a victorious people’s war on drugs in the new era,” said all Chinese need to “uphold and carry forward the spirit of Lin Zexu.”

Mr. Xi has embraced the Qing official’s example with particular vigor, presiding during his 17 years in Fujian over the renovation of sites connected to Lin, including the house where he was born and his family’s memorial hall.

The hall is now a sprawling exhibition complex highlighting Western perfidy, Lin’s righteous defiance and what a carved stone in a leafy courtyard describes as “China’s incessant struggle against foreign aggression.” In keeping with Mr. Xi’s view that China needs to be open to the West but on its own terms, the exhibits also praise Lin for promoting Western science and technology as a way to strengthen China.

Lin’s birthplace in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian, has become the Bethlehem of modern Chinese nationalism, the small room in which he is said to have been born the centerpiece of a state-sponsored heritage trail feting his unyielding patriotic spirit.

Mao Linli, a Fuzhou historian and adviser to the foundation, said that the lesson from Lin’s showdown with Britain is clear: Never bend to foreign pressure or concede the moral high ground.

He said that were he alive today, Lin, who served in Guangzhou from 1839 to 1841, would never accept American demands. “He always stood on the side of right,” Mr. Mao said. “America started this fight, not China. America should stop it.”

Presaging China’s current efforts to get Mr. Trump to relent on tariffs by tightly restricting exports of rare earth minerals crucial to modern manufacturing, Lin sought to exert pressure on Britain and other nations involved in the illegal opium trade by threatening to halt Chinese exports he thought were indispensable to the West.

The thinking in China, according to “The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes,” a classic book on the conflict based on Lin’s diaries and letters, was “that Britons would die of constipation without rhubarb and tea from China” and would quickly fold.

In a letter he drafted to Queen Victoria in 1839, Lin urged the British monarch to halt the opium trade, noting that the drug was also illegal in Britain. He warned that China could cut off exports of “things which your foreign countries could not exist a single day without.”

Smugglers handed over more than 1,000 tons of opium but demanded compensation and balked at what they viewed as intrusive Chinese restrictions on legitimate commerce. They lobbied London to send gunboats.

Lin destroyed the confiscated drugs by mixing them with salt and lime near Guangzhou at Humen. He refused to pay compensation for the destroyed drugs.

Far less dependent on Chinese rhubarb and far stronger militarily than Lin believed, Britain sent gunboats to the coast of China to attack Guangzhou and other Chinese port cities.

Yet China’s official recounting of this chapter of the Opium War focuses on praising Lin for his integrity and not on whether he overplayed China’s weak hand in negotiations with Britain, as some historians have suggested.

At a Lin Zexu-themed restaurant in the center of Fuzhou, Wang Yike, the 9-year-old son of the owner, serenaded lunchtime diners last week with patriotic verses celebrating the destruction of British opium in 1839 as an act that “lifted the righteousness of our nation.”

The boy, wearing the red scarf of China’s Young Pioneers, a communist youth group, chanted one of the commissioner’s best-known lines — from the poem Mr. Xi kept on his desk: “If it benefits the nation, I will live and die for it.”