There is a pattern to how great powers treat the countries they wish to exploit. They do not, as a rule, say they are exploiting anyone. They talk about free trade, open ports, civilised commerce, and the mutual benefits of international exchange. The language is always high-minded. The ships in the harbour are always the argument.
In the early nineteenth century, Britain had a problem. It was buying enormous quantities of Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, and the Chinese would only accept payment in silver. The trade deficit was draining the treasury. The East India Company, which controlled the Bengal poppy fields in India, had a solution: flood China with opium. Not as medicine. As a product engineered to create and sustain addiction. By 1797, the Company was selling 4,000 chests of opium a year — around 308 tonnes — to private merchants who ran it into China through floating warehouses anchored off the Pearl River delta. American merchants joined in too, running cheaper Turkish opium into the same market. By 1833, the trade had reached 30,000 chests per year. By 1838, it was 40,000. The Chinese economy, which had run a silver surplus for two centuries, was now haemorrhaging silver outward to pay for the drug.
The Qing court was not ignorant of what was happening. The Daoguang Emperor issued anti-opium edicts in 1729, 1799, 1814, and 1831. These were in fact the first anti-drug laws in history. None of them worked, because the trade was too profitable for too many people — including Chinese smugglers and colluding officials — and because the foreign merchants had no interest in stopping. In 1839, the Emperor appointed the Viceroy Lin Zexu to solve the problem definitively. Lin arrived in Canton, confiscated 1,420 tonnes of opium from British warehouses, and had it publicly destroyed on Humen Beach over twenty-three days. He also wrote an open letter to Queen Victoria, appealing to her moral responsibility to halt the trade. The letter never reached her. It was later published in The Times as a direct appeal to the British public. The public was unmoved.
What happened next is one of the cleaner examples in history of a government going to war to protect a drug trade. The British government dispatched a naval expedition not because China had attacked Britain, but because the Chinese authorities had destroyed British property — the property in question being opium that the Chinese government had explicitly prohibited for over a century. The Royal Navy’s steam-powered gunboats, against which Qing war junks had no answer, sailed up Chinese rivers and did as they pleased. The First Opium War ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking: China ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain in perpetuity, opened five ports — Canton, Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, and Xiamen — to British trade, and paid an indemnity of twenty-one million silver dollars. Five million of those dollars were compensation to Britain for the opium that Lin Zexu had destroyed. China paid Britain for the drugs it had burned.
The Second Opium War, fought from 1856 to 1860 by Britain and France together, ended with China contractually obliged to legalise the opium trade. British and French forces sacked the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, burning it to the ground over three days. The 1858 Treaty of Tientsin opened ten more ports, granted foreign missionaries the right to travel and proselytise anywhere in the country, and gave British subjects extraterritoriality — immunity from Chinese law on Chinese soil. This is what China calls the beginning of the Century of Humiliation, the hundred-year period from roughly 1839 to 1949 in which foreign powers carved the country into spheres of influence and stripped it of sovereignty over its own territory. By 1858, annual opium imports had reached 70,000 chests — 4,480 tonnes — equivalent, by one estimate, to an entire year’s global opium production a century and a half later.
The book I recently published — The Butterfly Effect — traces these kinds of long chains: how decisions made for short-term reasons accumulate into catastrophes nobody planned and nobody can fully claim. The Opium Wars were not an accident. They were policy. The East India Company needed the revenue, the British treasury needed the silver balance corrected, and the merchants needed their trade protected. The addicted population of China — estimated at somewhere between ten and twelve million people by the mid-nineteenth century — was a side effect that London found manageable. The Qing dynasty that limped on for another seventy years, its authority gutted, its territory carved up, its military repeatedly humiliated, was the price China paid for the industrialised world’s hunger for silver balance sheets.
Fast forward to now. China is no longer a client state. It is the world’s second-largest economy, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and a military power that no Western government seriously contemplates confronting directly. That reversal — from carved-up semi-colony to peer competitor in less than a century — is one of the more remarkable geopolitical transformations in modern history, and Beijing reminds the world of its origins regularly. The Century of Humiliation is not just a historical label in China; it is a living political argument, deployed to explain military build-up, territorial assertiveness, and deep suspicion of Western motives.
It is also, if you squint at the present moment in a certain light, context for something else.
China is today the primary source of the chemical precursors used to manufacture fentanyl — the synthetic opioid that now accounts for the majority of drug overdose deaths in the United States. The supply chain runs from Chinese chemical companies, through Mexican cartel brokers who assemble the finished drug, and onto American streets. In 2023, approximately 70% of all US drug overdose deaths involved illegally manufactured fentanyl. Total drug overdose deaths that year exceeded 100,000. In 2024, as enforcement tightened and the two governments eventually reached an agreement on precursor controls, the figure dropped to around 79,000 — still higher than the American death toll in the entire Vietnam War, compressed into twelve months. Fentanyl is roughly a hundred times more potent than morphine. A few milligrams is a lethal dose. It is not a drug that people accidentally start using; it is mostly a drug that ends up in the supply chain for other drugs and kills people who did not know it was there.
The obvious objection is that this is not what it looks like. Chinese pharmaceutical companies are not acting on state orders to poison Americans. The precursor chemicals have legitimate industrial uses. The Chinese government, under pressure from Washington, agreed in November 2025 to control all thirteen primary fentanyl precursors and seven additional subsidiary chemicals, and accepted the reduction in retaliatory tariffs Trump had imposed as a quid pro quo. Beijing’s official position has always been that it takes drug enforcement seriously. And there is no document, no smoking gun, establishing that the Chinese state is deliberately running an opium-war-in-reverse.
All of that is true. It is also true that for most of the period when fentanyl deaths in America were accelerating — from around 20,000 in 2016 to over 70,000 by 2021 — China was the unchecked source of the precursor chemicals, the US was pressing Beijing to act, and Beijing was largely declining to do so. The argument that enforcement is difficult, that the chemicals are dual-use, that the cartels are clever — these are not lies. They are the same kind of structural excuses that made the opium trade so durable. It is always difficult to stop a profitable supply chain. It is always someone else’s responsibility that the end consumer is dying.
I am not arguing that modern Americans deserve what has happened to them because British politicians and East India Company shareholders decided, almost 200 years ago, to solve a trade deficit with narcotics. Inherited guilt is a useless category. The people dying of fentanyl overdoses in Ohio and West Virginia and Kentucky are not the heirs of the men who burned the Old Summer Palace; they are the collateral damage of a domestic political economy that turned opioid prescriptions into a business model and left behind millions of people with addictions and no way to feed them. The crisis has deep American roots.
But the shape of it — the reversal of fortunes, the direction of the drug flow, the asymmetry between the power that once dictated the terms and the power that now sets the price — is not invisible. Historical justice is rarely tidy, rarely proportionate, and almost never falls on the right people. What happened between China and the Western powers in the nineteenth century was deliberate, systematic, and defended at the time with the language of free trade and civilisational progress. What is happening now is diffuse, commercially motivated, and officially denied. The arrow of suffering has simply changed direction.
That is what historical justice, such as it is, looks like. Not a reckoning. Not a plan. Just the world arranging itself, over a long enough time, into something that rhymes.