Do You Remember the Opium Wars? China Does.

Complaints about fentanyl complicity must sound as the ultimate hypocrisy

America’s Crisis, China’s Echo of History

Americans see the fentanyl crisis as a national emergency. Chinese-made precursor chemicals fuel a synthetic opioid epidemic that has killed tens of thousands, and Washington wants Beijing to do more—monitor its manufacturers, police its exporters, and cooperate with U.S. law enforcement.

But in Beijing, that outrage lands very differently. When America laments the flow of narcotics into its borders, Chinese officials hear an uncanny echo from the 19th century. They remember a time when China begged the West to stop the opium trade, only to be answered with gunboats, treaties, and national humiliation.

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A Trade Imbalance Built on Tea and Silver

To understand today’s tension, you have to return to the beginning—to a simple commodity: tea.

By the late 1700s, Britain had become a tea-drinking empire. Millions of pounds were shipped from China each year, and the British treasury grew addicted to the tax revenue that tea consumption produced.

But China wanted nothing British in return. Refusing industrial goods and dismissing Western manufactures as inferior, Qing officials insisted on one form of payment only: silver. The result was a lopsided trade that drained bullion from Britain and filled Chinese coffers.

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Britain Finds the Product China Never Wanted

Desperate to reverse the imbalance, British merchants looked for something China would buy. They found it in opium, grown in British-controlled India. What began as quiet smuggling became a sophisticated pipeline: opium flowed into China, silver flowed out, and that silver purchased tea legally at Canton.

The commodity that allowed Britons to sip their morning tea was the same one hollowing out China’s economy and addicting millions of its citizens.

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China Pushes Back — and Britain Sends Gunboats

By the 1830s, addiction was rampant, silver reserves were collapsing, and the Qing court finally acted. The Daoguang Emperor appointed Commissioner Lin Zexu to enforce the ban. Lin seized and destroyed over a million kilograms of opium and pleaded with Britain to halt the trade.

Instead, Britain answered with warships.

The Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) opened China’s ports by force, ceded Hong Kong, imposed indemnities, and ultimately legalized the drug China had tried desperately to suppress. These defeats marked the beginning of China’s Century of Humiliation, a narrative that still shapes Chinese nationalism and foreign policy.

What makes this wound cut so deep is what China was before the gunboats arrived. This wasn’t an aggressive empire that had provoked the West. China was an isolationist civilization, content to trade on its own terms and otherwise be left alone. It wasn’t at war with anyone. It didn’t want foreign goods, foreign religion, or foreign entanglements. And for that—for the crime of saying “no, thank you”—it was broken open, humiliated, and poisoned.

China’s isolationism was also its fatal weakness. By withdrawing from technological exchange, China fell behind in the one area that mattered most: weapons. The same civilization that had invented gunpowder centuries earlier now faced British steam-powered warships and modern artillery with outdated defenses. Their policy of self-sufficiency, born of confidence and cultural pride, left them defenseless against powers that had no such scruples. It’s a lesson Beijing has not forgotten—which is why modern China pursues technological supremacy with such intensity.

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The Chinese View: Living Memory, Not Ancient History

Americans may be forgiven for not knowing this history. Most never learned it. The Opium Wars get perhaps a paragraph in U.S. textbooks, framed as “trade disputes” or a prelude to China’s modernization. The drug-dealing-as-state-policy angle—that the world’s preeminent power deliberately addicted millions of Chinese to fix a trade deficit, then sent gunboats when China objected—doesn’t fit comfortably into Western narratives about free trade and civilization.

But in China, every schoolchild learns this story. The Century of Humiliation (1839–1949) is foundational to Chinese national identity the way the Revolution is to American identity. It explains everything: the chip on the shoulder, the sensitivity to Western lectures, the obsession with never being weak again. When Chinese officials bristle at American moralizing, they’re not performing outrage. They’re drawing on a wound that has been deliberately kept fresh for generations.

This isn’t to say Beijing cynically manipulates history. The grievance is real. But it does mean that when Americans demand China “do something” about fentanyl, they’re speaking to an audience with a very specific memory of the last time Western powers had opinions about drugs crossing Chinese borders.

And to be clear: the situations are not equivalent. Britain ran opium as state policy—the Crown sanctioned it, profited from it, and went to war to protect it. China’s role in the fentanyl crisis is different: lax regulation, loose enforcement, companies operating in gray markets, and a government that has been slow to prioritize someone else’s drug problem. That’s negligence and indifference, not a deliberate campaign to addict Americans. The distinction matters—but it doesn’t change how the accusation lands in Beijing.

There’s another uncomfortable truth Americans must confront: the opioid crisis was largely self-inflicted before Chinese fentanyl ever entered the picture. Purdue Pharma and the medical establishment spent decades overprescribing OxyContin, creating millions of addicts through legal channels. Mexican cartels built the distribution networks. Chinese precursors made the product cheaper and deadlier, but they didn’t create the demand. America set the table; China just made the meal more lethal.

And then there’s the sheer audacity of the ask. The United States spends most of its diplomatic energy treating China as an existential adversary—a threat to democracy, a menace in the South China Sea, a surveillance state to be contained and decoupled from. We restrict their technology, sanction their companies, and warn allies to shun their influence. Then we turn around and ask them to help police our moral decadence. We want the country we’re trying to isolate to save us from ourselves. In Beijing, that request must land somewhere between absurd and insulting.

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Why Modern Criticism Sounds Like Historical Irony

This is why today’s U.S. accusations of fentanyl complicity resonate so painfully in China. When Washington demands moral accountability, Beijing hears a reversal of roles:

• Then: Western powers insisted on “free trade” in narcotics.

• Now: The West demands China stop the flow of narcotics.

To Chinese officials, the irony is unmistakable. To Americans, it is almost invisible.

And here’s something else Americans don’t grasp: to China, the West is the West. The distinction between Britain and the United States that looms so large in American minds barely registers in Beijing. From China’s perspective, the U.S. is essentially a British colony that grew up, inherited the empire’s playbook, and now runs the same system with different branding. Same language, same legal traditions, same naval dominance, same insistence on “opening markets” at gunpoint when convenient. When Americans say “that was Britain, not us,” Chinese listeners hear a distinction without a difference.

Historical memory does not excuse contemporary behavior, but it does explain China’s posture. Beijing’s defensiveness, its lectures about “demand-side responsibility,” and its accusation of Western hypocrisy all spring from a wound America barely remembers.

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The Question America Won’t Ask Itself

Before demanding China “do more,” Americans might ask why their own government can’t stop the drug epidemic. The United States has the most sophisticated surveillance technology on earth. The NSA can intercept communications globally. The DEA has vast resources. Border security budgets run into the billions.

But America is an open society. We have constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. Police can’t stop people on the street without cause or enter homes without warrants. We chose these limits—they’re features, not bugs. They reflect values we hold dear: privacy, due process, freedom from government intrusion.

China made different choices. The state can search, surveil, and detain with few legal constraints. That’s precisely why Americans call it authoritarian. Yet now we expect China to deploy those authoritarian tools on our behalf, to solve a problem we won’t solve ourselves using methods we’d never tolerate at home.

And let’s be honest about how we got here. The pharmaceutical industry captured Congress and the medical establishment. Purdue Pharma spent decades pushing OxyContin while regulators looked away. That wasn’t Chinese negligence—that was American corruption, legal and celebrated. We didn’t just allow the opioid crisis to happen; we subsidized it, advertised it, and wrote prescriptions for it.

So why, exactly, is this China’s problem to solve?

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The Path Forward Requires Acknowledging the Past

The fentanyl epidemic is real, devastating, and urgent. China bears responsibility for regulating its chemical industry and cooperating with global enforcement. But the United States will struggle to secure full Chinese cooperation as long as it approaches the issue without understanding the depth of China’s historical scar.

And this raises the question Americans should be asking: Could China really do more to stop fentanyl precursors from flowing out? Beijing runs one of the most sophisticated surveillance and control states in human history. It can track its own citizens’ movements, censor the internet in real time, and enforce lockdowns across cities of tens of millions. That said, China still has plenty of serious crime—surveillance states aren’t omniscient, and the chemical industry is vast and decentralized. The idea that Beijing could flip a switch and shut it all down overnight is naive.

But the idea that China is doing everything it reasonably could? That strains credulity too. Recent events prove the point: following the October 2025 Trump-Xi meeting, a tariff-linked deal prompted Beijing to impose export license requirements on 13 key precursors bound for the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. When the incentives aligned, China acted. But cooperation that only comes when extracted through trade leverage isn’t partnership—it’s transaction. And transactions can be reversed the moment the calculus changes.

Which leaves the harder question: Is China’s sluggish response a matter of limited capability, ordinary bureaucratic indifference to foreign problems—or something else? Is there a reluctance to expend political capital solving America’s drug crisis when America never lifted a finger to solve China’s?

Even if Beijing didn’t orchestrate this crisis—and it didn’t—there must be some part of the Chinese psyche that sees a grim satisfaction in the reversal. Not revenge exactly, since that would require intent. But something like poetic justice. The West addicted China to balance its trade and, some would argue, to weaken Chinese civilization itself. Now Americans are dying from chemicals shipped across the Pacific, and the world’s greatest power can’t seem to stop it. China didn’t plan this. But it would take an almost superhuman magnanimity to feel urgency about fixing it.

Karma, it turns out, has everyone’s address.

There’s another irony here, too. In the 19th century, Britain was addicted to Chinese tea and couldn’t pay for it. Today, the West is addicted to Chinese manufacturing—not just for its low cost, but increasingly for its quality and capacity. From iPhones to pharmaceuticals to the rare earth minerals that power the green energy transition, the dependency runs deep. The trade imbalance has reversed, but the addiction hasn’t gone away. It’s just changed substances.

Americans may forget how this story began. China absolutely does not.