Suppose that after Britain forces the Chinese market to the opium trade, China, realizing it cannot stop the British from introducing opium, decides to prevent anyone from buying it. As a result, a sort of 19th century Chinese War on Drugs happens. Any Chinese citizen caught selling, buying, or consuming opium gets severely punished, potentially with execution. What happens, and how do the British react?
China punishes opium consumption among it's people
- Thread starter Armored Diplomacy
- Start date
*Triple checks that it isn't a DBWI*
Didn't that happen? It didn't end well.
I feel like I'm missing something here.
Didn't that happen? It didn't end well.
I feel like I'm missing something here.
In this case, it was the Chinese government seizing opium from British traders. Now imagine if instead of interfering directly with British traders, the Chinese government simply says "anyone who buys any opium from them dies", and then follows through and executes any Chinese subject caught with opium.
If this indeed didn't happen as part of imperial policy, I'm sure local rulers did do such a thing on a province to province basis. This probably ratchets up the price of Opium a bit also so the Brits might even be happier of this was done by the central government?
Nope, generally attacking the supplies is more politically acceptable. Except... in this case the suppliers are the backed by a Great Power.
I meant it was more politically acceptable in this specific case where the suppliers had Great Power backing.
RousseauX
Donor
19th century era Chinese government did not have the law enforcement nor government capacity to enforce nationwide bans on opium
hell the US government can't do it today and the war on drugs has being ongoing for 40 years; that's why trump is saying go after mexican suppliers and not harsher penalties for drug users. And the Qing had a fraction of the law enforcement/government capacity the US has today.
I bet if the Death Penalty applied, it could be done (a lot of the drug users are repeat offenders possibly due to addiction or something)... at a huge cost of civil rights and stuff since buying drug really shouldn't be a capital offense
RousseauX
Donor
Not on users, addicts will do drugs even when faced with the death penalty because drug users are often not rational
modern asian governments like china or Singapore or japan uses death penalty on traffickers to clamp down on the drug trade, but yeah that's gonna involve executing some British nationals in the case of 19th century china
this is really anarchonical when talking about pre-modern states
the thing is pre-modern states lacks the infrastructural power to systematic violate people's civil rights: you didn't have something like a policeman around every corner. The issue isn't whether the government is allowed to do warrant-less search or not: the issue is that they don't have enough personnel to do it more than occasionally even if they wanted to.
Actually I was talking about today since you mentioned USA, but let's not go into that
Their rationality or lack thereof won't matter anymore when they're dead, though. Not endorsing this, but it seems like it could have some results.
This should be titled" what if China won the opium War" to get the results you're looking for.
He's not looking for a specific result, he's looking at what the result of a certain course of action would be!
I was referring to the type of comments that he would be receiving. If China could stop the opium trade or at least slow it down it would slow the decline of China, but you'd have to get rid of the Qing to stop it.
It's quite obvious he's looking for the Qing to stop or at least minimize the problem
Except that in HIS case the drug dealers don't get a trial, the police act as judge, jury, and executioner which results in false positives and... well politics isn't supposed to go here. Someone brought up the USA case and I couldn't resist pointing out that 19th century draconian lack of civil rights plus today's economics could result in (mostly) effective enforcement. Look, why don't we all just stop with the USA thing (I didn't bring it up), and focus on the OP?