My goal is always the same: to invoke the past as a shield for the future, to show the invisible world of yesterday and through it, perhaps on it, erect a moral world where men are not victims and children never starve and never run in fear.

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate (in “A Personal Response”)

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban, Israeli politician

The world has much to learn from China’s 70-year war on poverty, but even as doctors must diagnose a disease before curing it, so we must unearth the roots of poverty if we are to vanquish it. Trying to end endemic global poverty without addressing its causes is little better than treating malignant skin cancer with a Band-Aid.

Scholars struggle to coin a term for poor countries that is both neutral and politically correct—developing countries, less developed countries, third world countries, emerging nations. I prefer “emerging nations” because “emerging” betrays the fact that they have been “submerged”.

The deliberate submergence of nations persists to this day, though the mechanisms that perpetuate poverty are more insidious than the in-your-face colonialism of a century ago because they masquerade as modern political and business practices given a veneer of respectability by academia and media.

Blood Diamonds, Blood Opium

The 2006 movie Blood Diamond shocked the world, but we also have blood copper, blood coffee, blood bananas and chocolate, blood copper, tin and oil. Even in this enlightened twenty-first century, massive profits are made at the expense of the poor—who are then blamed for their predicament, absolving the perpetrators of guilt. But fake news is nothing new.

The U.S. is outraged—and rightfully so—by Mexican drug lords’ smuggling drugs into America, but their profits pale in comparison to the billions made by the West’s century of opium sales to China to pay for China’s tea, silk and porcelain. The nationalized drug trafficking in nineteenth century enriched the West while at the same time destroying China economically and morally.

Three hundred years ago, China and India accounted for two thirds of the global GDP. Even Harvard Business Review noted that China’s economy was “more open and market driven than the economies of Europe.” But by the 1940s, both were destitute and, not surprisingly, the Western opium-based economies basked in unprecedented wealth.

When America’s first multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, died in 1848, the empire he’d leveraged from nine years of opium smuggling in China was worth USD 20 million–USD 140 billion in today’s money.

Boston Built on Opium

In “How Profits from Opium Shaped 19th Century Boston,” Martha Bebinger wrote, “In a city steeped in history, very few residents understand the powerful legacy of opium money… Boston’s elite – the Delanos (grandfather of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Cabots, Cushings, Welds and Forbes built their fortunes, and built Boston, on China opium smuggling.”Footnote 1

Perkins, a wealthy Boston merchant, sold over 150,000 lb of Turkish opium from just one shipment, and according to John Rogers Haddad, a professor of American Studies at Penn State University, made millionaires of many others. “China had a really strong economy in the early part of the 19th century and the Americans were able to tap into that by exchanging tea for opium,” Haddad said. “Opium was really a way that America was able to transfer China’s economic power to America’s industrial revolution.”Footnote 2

Bebinger wrote:

Tax revenue from the trade funded Massachusetts police and fire departments, roads, bridges, courthouses and schools. Opium profits funded many leading Boston institutions. The Perkins brothers helped found Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital and the Boston Athenaum. The names of other opium barons are engraved on university buildings, high schools and public libraries. “There was an unwitting dependency in Boston on profits from the opium trade,” says Towson University associate history professor Elizabeth Kelly Gray. “But today, that history is largely buried. Most institutions contacted for this story did not know their benefactors got rich selling an illegal drug in China.”Footnote 3

The Chinese emperor tried, repeatedly, to stop the opium trade, and Lin Zexu wrote to the Queen of England asking why they forced on China what was illegal in their own nation. “Such conduct is repugnant to human feeling and at variance with the Way of Heaven.”

“The Way of Heaven,” Lin explained, was:

…fairness to all; it does not suffer us to harm others in order to benefit ourselves. Men are alike in this all the world over: that they cherish life and hate what endangers life. Your country lies 20,000 leagues away; but for all that the Way of Heaven holds good for you as for us, and your instincts are not different from ours; for nowhere are there men so blind as not to distinguish what brings profit and what does harm….

But on April 6, 1843, the Times summarized Prime Minister Robert Peel’s position:

Morality and religion, and the happiness of mankind, and friendly relations with China, and new markets for British manufactures were all very fine things in their way; but that the opium trade was worth to the Indian government £1,200,000….

Lin Zexu finally confiscated Britain’s opium, and even paid for it, though it was illegal. As he burned it, he noted that the English would certainly feel shame at their actions and the opium trade would end. England’s response was not shame but war—with fake news to justify it.

Opium Trade a Human Right?

America’s first reference to China’s human rights was in the 1840s when ex-President Adams tried to drum up American support for Britain’s 1st Opium War. He whipped Americans into a frenzy of righteous indignation with his revelation that China’s refusal to engage in trade was a “violation of the rights of men and nations.” He never noted that China refused to import only one item—opium.

Although China lost the 1st Opium War, the drug remained illegal. Had England required legalizing opium in the Nanking Treaty, it would have been tantamount to admitting the war was over opium, which Western powers deny even to this day. But as opium profits mushroomed, the West chafed at China’s restrictions, so Britain fought a 2nd Opium War to legalize the trade.

This time around, England’s entire parliament objected to a second war, which Lord Derby argued was “the shedding of the blood of unwarlike and innocent people without warrant of law and without the warrant of moral justification.”

Lord Palmerston simply accused them of disloyalty, dissolved Parliament and sent them home, and set the Fake News machine in gear by telling the British people that China had dishonored their Queen with “acts of violence, insults to the flag and infraction of treaty rights.” Again, he did not mention opium, but after this war China was forced to “legalize” the deadly drug.

By 1900, all of Asia was reeling from the West’s drug trade. Opium accounted for 60% of Britain’s Asian income in 1916 and it was estimated that up to a quarter of Chinese adults were opium addicts. But opium addiction also spread to the West.

Coming Home to Roost: Opium Addiction in the West

Eighty years earlier, Lin Zexu had prophetically warned the West, “For so long as your subjects make opium, who knows but they will not sooner or later take to smoking it?” By the twentieth century, opium addiction was global, and international conventions were held in 1912 and 1925 to debate the causes. Britain was selling 500 tons of opium annually to India and 700 tons yearly to China. Opium accounted for 60% of Britain’s Asian income, including 48% of their Singapore revenue and 100% of their North Borneo revenue. But the Western experts concluded the global opium epidemic was caused solely by China’s opium because the West’s opium was legal, whereas China’s opium, grown and sold only in China, was illegal.

China had begun growing its own opium only in the hope that increased production would saturate the market, destroy the high profits and the West would abandon the trade. When that failed, China burned its opium fields and renewed its anti-opium campaigns, though they had “legal” power to stop the West’s drug trafficking in their own country.

India, like China, had also begged Britain to stop the opium trade. Britain responded that her opium monopoly was a humanitarian service to India, as it had been to China, and that to end the opium trade would be a “mockery; to many millions it would be sheer inhumanity”. Britain kept its opium monopoly right up into the 1940s, when the profits were no longer vast enough to justify the embarrassment of a civilized nation engaged in drug trafficking.

Catastrophe or Statistics?

Major-General Clive had once called India a “rich and flourishing kingdom”, but during England’s 190-year rule of India, farmers were forced to grow opium instead of crops. With nothing to eat but opium, some 60 million starved to death during Britain’s rule. But these numbers are simply too large to move ordinary people.

During the Nuremberg War trials, a former SS officer said that Eichmann, who organized the extermination of the Jews, was asked what would happen after the war if people asked about the missing millions. Eichmann replied, “One hundred dead are a catastrophe; one million dead are a statistic.”Footnote 4

The West made billions from the opium trade and millions of Asians suffered, but the numbers are so vast that they go right over our heads and hearts. In the 1700s, China and India accounted for two thirds of the global GDP. By the 1940s, they were destitute—and we blame them for their failure. If we do speak of the opium wars, we maintain the fiction that they were over free trade, not opium.

In “China as ‘Victim’? The Opium War That Wasn’t”, Harry G. Gelber, visiting scholar, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, writes:

The 1840–42 Anglo-Chinese war (the so-called “Opium War”) is almost universally believed to have been triggered by British imperial rapacity and determination to sell more and more opium into China. That belief is mistaken. The British went to war because of Chinese military threats to defenseless British civilians, including women and children; because China refused to negotiate on terms of diplomatic equality and because China refused to open more ports than Canton to trade, not just with Britain but with everybody. The belief about British ‘guilt’ came later, as part of China’s long catalogue of alleged Western ‘exploitation and aggression.’

Blood Trade: Today’s “Opium”

While the era of nationalized drug trafficking at gunpoint is behind us, today we traffic in blood diamonds, oil, chocolate, bananas, sugar—anything that turns a profit—and we are as adept today as a century ago at blaming the victims for their poverty, and from our wealth we dole out medical aid to those we deny a living wage.

Consider Africa today. The Dark Continent is so large that it could hold China, the U.S. and Europe and still have room left over. And this vast land is the richest continent in natural resources, yet also the most destitute continent. These nations are now “liberated”, but they are still run by puppet governments or military dictatorships backed by the former colonial powers to maintain trade advantages. It is no surprise that most wars in Africa are not between countries but within countries—corrupt governments fighting rebels, who are labeled freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on what nation has armed them.

In 1980, Africa accounted for only 0.4% of global manufacturing. In 2002, the figure had dropped to 0.3%. By 2004, it had inched up to 1.5%—still miniscule but at least an improvement—and largely because China had started to help build Africa in the same way as it had helped its own people—not through aid, which engenders dependency, but through building fundamental infrastructure that created opportunity, and fostered self-sufficiency. For as China learned too well: aid enfeebles, enablement empowers.

My youngest son Matthew and his wife do volunteer medical work in Africa, and even in the remotest places, they see Chinese building highways, railways, dams and power stations. No wonder my African friends who are graduate students at Xiamen University like Braughham’s book, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of Africa in China.

Fair Trade, Not Aid

TED Talks has three talks addressing aid in Africa that I have watched many times. “Aid for Africa? No Thanks” by Andrew Mwenda; “Free Trade, Not Aid” by Dambisa Moyo, and “Aid Versus Trade” by Ngozi-Okonjo-Iweala—these should be required viewing for anyone with even the slightest interest in practical, sustainable poverty alleviation and the dangers of simplistic aid.

Latin American and Asian countries have shared the same fate as Africa. Malaysia’s British colonial overlords cited Ricardo’s 1817 “law of comparative advantage” as justification for building Malaysia’s economy on mining and agricultural exports and restricting any Malaysian manufacturing that would compete with British imports. But Prime Minister Mahathir came into power in 1981 and by 1988, manufacturing exports surpassed those of primary commodities for the first time and Malaysia became the world’s top exporter of semiconductor chips. This economic success in turn helped the nation improve education, healthcare and living standards—but Malaysia was an exception. Many Asian, Latin American and African countries are still shackled to economies dependent solely upon exporting their natural resources.

Scholars like Kenichi Ohmae warn poor nations to avoid this “resource trap” but he does not address the fact that these nations have no choice. Attempts at reform are met with swift and brutal retaliation. Since the 1940s, the U.S. alone has engaged in almost 100 attempts at “regime change”—ostensibly to preserve human rights and democracy but in reality simply to keep in power those leaders who best protect “American interests” (sugar in Cuba, copper in Chile, coffee in Columbia, bananas in Guatemala, cheap fruit and veggies in Peru).

As an American, I too believe we should protect American interests—but that should not include waging war or installing a murderous dictator in Chile to ensure cheap coffee or in Africa to secure exports of cheap diamond, cobalt and uranium.

A century ago, the so-called World Order allowed the opium trade and blamed the victims for their poverty. Today, neither China nor India fear such foreign intervention, but smaller poor nations have as little hope today as they had 100 years ago—even if they could duplicate China’s measures for ending poverty. They’ve no choice but to rely on “aid” that serves largely to keep them in their place.

Some 33% of U.S. foreign aid is for military assistance and 11% is for political intervention. Although 42% is earmarked for long-term development, over half of this is for healthFootnote 5—but of what use is improved health to people who are denied a living wage?

As Dr. Viktor Sidel said to the U.S. government in 1979 about China’s improved health:

Part of this change in health in China in the course of one generation has nothing whatever to do with medicine. It has to do with what people eat, the houses which they live, the way in which they’re clothed, and the ways in which they live together… Food distribution is a far more important determinant of health than is medical care.

Proffering medical and educational aid to people enslaved by institutionalized unjust trade is simply lifting them up by one hand while drowning them with the other hand.

There is hope, of course. Only this morning, I read about Bill Gates investing millions in healthcare for the poor. I admire Bill and Melinda Gates and applaud their efforts. But unless they use their wealth and influence to help address the very causes of poverty, they too are just slapping Band-aids on a malignant cancer.

There are signs, however, that some companies have a conscience—if it’s not too costly. Nestle, for example, has boosted its own profits while increasing farmers’ earnings by helping them to improve efficiency and protect the environment—successful measures that could have been taken from China’s own anti-poverty playbook.

Fair Trade: A Good Start

I am also thankful for the growing number of “fair trade” organizations. I buy fair trade products, even though they cost more than others, because I know the fig farmer in Turkey or cocoa farmer in South America was paid a fair price for their product. Of course, to be sure this is legitimate fair trade and not just more fake news, I look for the “fair trade” seal. As the website Fairtradecertified.org urges:

“Seek the seal, make a difference. The Fair Trade Certified™ seal represents thousands of products, improving millions of lives, protecting land and waterways in 45 countries and counting. Purchases have sent USD 610 million to farmers and workers since 1998.”

Yes, USD 610 million over 22 years is a pittance compared to the billions in annual trade—but it is a start. As Fair Trade Certified notes in an article about cocoa, “Brands worry that consumers would not be willing to pay more for a product, even if it’s supporting the well-being of workers and their communities.” The article then concludes by urging us, the readers:

“Tell your favorite brands that you want to know how they source their cocoa and other ingredients and tell them you care enough to buy fair trade. Brands are listening to you, and you can make a big difference for people like Kakou and Awa.”

You and I may not be able to change government or corporate practices but we can make a difference by our own individual choices.

Precision Poverty Alleviation Abroad Through BRI

As China has proven over the past 70 years, and especially since Xi Jinping’s adoption of precision poverty alleviation, enablement, not aid, is the solution to poverty. Aid is sometimes necessary, especially during disasters, but even better is to help foster self-reliance in nations and peoples—as China is now attempting with the Belt and Road Initiative in other nations.

I do know the Belt and Road Initiative has shortcomings, but with no historical precedent for lifting an entire nation from poverty, Beijing made mistakes even in its own country. There is even less precedent for one nation—a developing one at that—to engage in such a massive, truly global infrastructure project to build other nations as it has its own.

Only last week, the U.S. warned the world against the Belt and Road Initiative, saying it could do better than China has. I don’t doubt that, given its wealth. Yet so far, these wealthy nations have only criticized China’s actions while taking few of their own—with the exception of programs like the “Africa Military Command” to protect the governments that secure their profitable business ventures.

I hope that the West does indeed embark on its own infrastructure projects in Africa. But Africa is big enough and needy enough for both East and West to help.

Or we can continue to do nothing, for as Edmund Burke (1730–1797) wrote in a letter to Thomas Mercer,Footnote 6 “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”

But Burke’s longer version of the problem is as incisive today as it was 250 years ago:

Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Today’s instant, global communication links the world more closely than ever in history—but if we do not work together, we may survive but the poor nations “will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

Today’s instant communication has potential for uniting us, but online interactions and a glut of information can also serve to desensitize us. When Pope Francis visited the U.N.’s World Food Program in July, 2016, he warned that we are bombarded with so many images of pain and poverty that we accept poverty as natural, as “just one more news story,” rather than acknowledging that poverty results from “a selfish and wrong distribution of resources” and abuse and exploitation of the earth.

“The key to ending extreme poverty and hunger,” Pope Francis said, “is to recognize that behind every statistic, there is the face of a person who is suffering… Without faces and stories, human lives become statistics and we run the risk of bureaucratizing the sufferings of others….”Footnote 7

Wealthy of the world, unite. With today’s technology, and the experience of nations like China, for the first time in history we have the means and the methods to end poverty. We lack only the will.