WW: Ch 19

     The chapter starts out with something that took me a second to fully understand: The fact that China had been in control of their own fate by keeping Europe, for the most part, out of their country. Having read how Europe seems to be the protagonist/antagonist (depending on your point of view) of this book, the fact that China was controlling the way they operated with foreigners really speaks for itself. Here you had the Europeans spread worldwide to the Americas and beyond to places such as Africa, yet they never got to proceed as they wanted with the Chinese. I find it really impressive that they held that frame of thought for so long. For example, the book talks about how in 1793, the Chinese Emperor at the time, Emperor Qianlong, rejected Britain's request that the Chinese open up their trade markets. However, that all came to end when the Chinese Empire fell early in the nineteen hundreds. 

     China, in a way, was responsible of its own downfall. Things that may seem like they were signs of improvement were not always what they seem. For example, the Chinese population went through a massive growth from 1685 1853; growing from around one hundred million, to four hundred thirty million. What made this a bad thing was that China had no Industrial Revolution. Due to the fact that they had their ports closed to any foreigners to keep them cut off from reaching China, they too were cut off from anything that was going on throughout the rest of the world. They had no idea what was going on around them, thus leaving them back in time. They had cut any sort of connection throughout the rest of the world, proving to be a double-edged sword. This led to no manufactured goods and people were suffering of starvation.

     These horrible living conditions, as a result of an ever growing population, led to people, peasants in particular, being treated horribly. Corruption made its presence known and people were going through hard times. This led to the Taiping uprising. It was a huge civil war that was to avail and led to millions of deaths. 

     This led to the Opium Wars, revolving around China's trading rights. A tariff was placed on imported opium and that led to the Chinese taking over warehouses of it and burning the opium, due to fear of addiction. This led to China finally opening up and allowing foreigners to set up trade markets and the spread of goods, as well as beliefs.