Dude, where’s my rickshaw?

The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of China. By Julia Lovell. Picador; 480 pages; £25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

HISTORY, it turns out, is not just written by the winners. In documenting the historical crapshoot of the last 200 years, there have been few losers more assiduous than the Chinese. So, apart from adapting first Karl Marx and now Adam Smith, what have they been writing? Rather a lot, it seems. A topic of choice is the Opium Wars, those 19th-century skirmishes on the far-eastern fringe of the British empire. They are largely unknown by British schoolchildren, but successive Chinese governments have made sure the same cannot be said for their overachieving students in the Middle Kingdom.

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Julia Lovell's excellent new book explores why this period of history is so emotionally important for the Chinese. Drawing on original sources in Chinese and English, she recounts the events of the period in fascinating detail. More importantly, she explains how China has turned the Opium Wars into a founding myth of its struggle for modernity.

Ms Lovell weaves this story into the historical brocade of the early 19th century, when European demand for Chinese silk, tea and porcelain was insatiable. To save their silver, the British began to pay for these luxuries with opium from India, and many Chinese were soon addicted. The Chinese emperor tried to stop the trade, and hoped to slam the door completely on the outside world. Between 1839 and 1842, the British manufactured a nasty little war in which they smashed the Chinese military, and justified it all in the name of free trade. The Western powers, hungry for more markets, then prised China open.

Westerners have good reason to be ashamed of their treatment of China in the 19th century. Yet Ms Lovell contends that they administered only the final blows to an empire that was already on the brink. That is hardly how it has been portrayed in China, however, where manipulating memory is an important tool of government propaganda. In the 1920s Chinese nationalists began spinning the arrival of Western gunboats as the cause of all the country's problems—the start of China's “century of humiliation”. Chairman Mao also blamed Western aggression at the time of the Opium Wars for China's decline. And so emerged the narrative of China as victim that can still be heard today, even as the country casts off its loser status.

Despite China's growing strength, Ms Lovell sees worrying similarities between China's weaknesses today and those of the Chinese empire of 1838, describing both as “an impressive but improbable high-wire act, unified by ambition, bluff, pomp and pragmatism”. She finds parallels too in how the West sees China. Foreign policy hawks in 1840 repeated loudly that violence against China “was honourable and inevitable until, in the popular imagination, it became so.” Demonisation of China today, especially in America, can sometimes seem almost as shrill.

Westerners interested in why China behaves the way it does should read “The Opium War”. So should Chinese readers, who could gain a more balanced view of their own history than they receive in school. In 2006, for example, China's government shut down a leading liberal weekly over an article that challenged national orthodoxy on the Opium Wars. The Communist Party's propaganda bureau accused the author of attempting “to vindicate criminal acts by the imperialist powers in invading China”. An internet post by a nationalist suggested the author should be “drowned in rotten eggs and spit”.

Ms Lovell reassures her readers that not all Chinese buy into tired government propaganda. But the Opium Wars are always there, lurking in the Chinese subconscious, perpetuating the tension between pride and victimhood. Tellingly, Ms Lovell quotes George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”