By Nirmal P. Acharya
Around 1840, the Western trade deficit with China continued to rise.
At that time, the West was eager for Chinese silk, tea, porcelain, etc., but had nothing to offer the Chinese market.
So the West came up with the idea of dumping opium into China. Naturally, the Qing government resisted this. So Britain launched the Opium War against China. China was defeated and, as a result, became weak and poor and a semi-colony of the West.
History moves forward in stormy waters and arrives in 2023. Now the US and the West are back to running huge trade deficits with China.
According to official data from the US and the European Union, the US trade deficit in goods with China in 2022 was $1.19 trillion and the EU nearly 400 billion euros.
In order to solve this huge deficit problem, some politicians in the US and the West have habitually come up with all kinds of ideas. Of course, the old method of launching an opium war against China will certainly not work again, because China today has a military force sufficient to resist any invasion from outside. As a result, the US and the West devised a variety of complex strategies to seek to achieve the results of the Opium War without starting the Opium War.
The Indo-Pacific strategy, for example, is an upgraded version of the Opium War strategy. The US has publicly declared that the MCC is part of its Indo-Pacific strategy, which is to place Nepal in an unjust place. Nepal cannot swallow this bitter pill.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.
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