The adventures of a Chinese Brit growing up in post-war liberal Britain

Anna Chen, UK’s first Chinese punk. Catsuit made for her by Vivienne Westwood. 
Pic Bob Carlos Clarke

Anna Chen launches her Substack account

Originally published at Anna’s Substack 25 March 25

“Charming, witty and sophisticated. ” – SUNDAY TIMES

“… extraordinary … independence and spirit. A very distinct voice, very funny …” – Jean Seaton, Director, ORWELL PRIZE

“Assured, funny, angry, exhilarating … A triumph.” – Alan Moore

Sui generis

Okay. In brief, here’s a bit about me before I throw myself into the world of Substack for your amusement and delectation.

I am the UK’s first Chinese punk, the first Chinese Brit to take a show to the world-famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a published poet at 14, Orwell Prize shortlisted and longlisted, a TED speaker, a BBC writer and presenter of groundbreaking programmes back when there was an inch of space to do such things, a dissenting journalist (formerly Guardian, New Internationalist, Asia Times), critical thinker and political analyst.And, yes, contrary to the template, I am capable of original thought.

I was born and raised in Hackney, east London, the child of a Chinese father and an English mother. Growing up in the heart of two major civilisations at a historic crossroads, it was hardly surprising that I would end up as a cultural outrider.

Born into the belly of the imperial beast, it was difficult to miss how no Chinese were positively reflected in the culture. Realising young it was only supposed to be vampires, not humans, who cast no reflection, I kicked up.

My disquiet went far beyond the ghetto of identity politics, the safe zone into which minorities are usually shovelled. I grew to recognise this erasure as a manifestation of a larger class conflict that required women and labour, as well as empire minorities, to submit to a grinding world order. I may have found myself on the immediate frontline of sinophobia but it was one battlefield in a wider class war.

One of my objectives — to demystify and humanise the Chinese as a counterweight to the Yellow Peril stereotypes embedded in western culture – was never an effort to empower the bourgeoisie of one ethnic group to which I happened to belong. It was a matter of survival and solidarity with everyone else who fell on the wrong side of the divide.

It was also good training in discerning truth from illusion.

The pressure was always to be submissive and why should I submit? I was sensitive but I wasn’t a delicate lotus blossom. I didn’t giggle. I didn’t have a bell-like, tinkling laugh, more a throaty guffaw like Fenella Fielding had just been told a rude joke. I was never tiny and doll-like. My glutes were built for running 100 metre hurdles and I was likely to squish you if I landed on you.

I won my chess matches, I argued my case. A classic autodidact, I was into dinosaurs, astronomy and science. I read The Little Red Book by six. By twelve, I could tear a telephone directory in half. (Technique, baybee!) I’ve survived being mauled by a puma and swum with sharks (the fishy kind). I was never going to defer to pasty-faced Masters of the Universe.

So …

Undeterred by the absence of role models and fed up with deeply embedded stereotypes that were taken for granted, I defied the degrading western narratives and carved out new ground in my activities, my writing and my commentary on British politics and culture.

“Whatever current western propaganda demands that you believe, we are capable of altruism, fellow feeling, critical thinking and original thought. Of course we are. We’re human.”

Thirty years of writing inside the belly of the empire beast

There was a lot to learn from a lifetime of watching geopolitics unfold while living through the West’s cycle of capitalism. From post-war austerity, through its sparkling zenith of The Beatles and the arts to an ignominious end in crushing austerity redux (which we’re entering right now), I realised that we were in danger of completing the circle and ending up in another world war if we didn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Looking around me now, I’m shocked by how much that we took for granted we’ve lost. I’m a direct conduit back to a kinder time when the British working class were at peak confidence. Having the oldest working class in the world, the country had the greatest potential for social change for the benefit of the majority: AKA revolution. Karl Marx came to London and wrote about it. A century later, I lived it and saw the hope wax and wane.

In the expanding post-war economy we’d had it good compared to our cousins in the remnants of the British Empire. We were granted a National Health Service, housing, jobs and education which turned the majority into a society of high-functioning, apex proletarians with upward class mobility.

Don’t knock it; it gave us the space to raise the collective consciousness and for a while we soared.

However, it came with a dark perk: you, too, could join the ruling class should your moral compass fail. This perpetually dangling carrot kept profits high and seduced many of us away from the temptations of communism, a prospect that terrified our elites.

The 1960s were marvellous unless you were living in China or Northern Ireland or South Africa or the Gorbals or the USA’s deep south or any number of nations struggling to be reborn, but I digress.

We went on strike, we protested. We created marvellous cultural artefacts. The media had relative bandwidth, the press was benign up to a point. With access to the world’s art, literature, philosophy and politics, our souls and spirits were enriched, our empathy finely developed to embrace fellow humanity.

All these things we could do before the jaws of the State snapped shut. Because we understood too late that the State isn’t a charity. It isn’t our parents unless you count Wicked Stepmothers and brutish fathers. It does enough to keep itself in power and no more.

With the collapse of the Soviet communist bloc in 1991, our ruling elites no longer had to pretend to care. They started to claw back all our gains on turbo-charge.

As the elites of the declining empire cut us adrift like gangrenous limbs, preserving the core organs, I’m addressing a new generation I see cheated out of what was possible: dreams made concrete reality through cooperation rather than the fetish of “competition” — for which, read dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost.

Oh, but here comes an upstart: a Cinderella story of the world’s factory transformed into a fabulous Golden Goose. Our global lifeboat and growth engine bringing peace, stability and affordable stuff.

I bet the Wicked Stepmother and the Ugly Sisters are going to have something to say about that. “Load the cannon, fire the torpedoes and break out the bubbly. We have a class war to win!”

A detailed biography and blog archive can be found at Anna’s About page

Renew the spirit, free the mind, change the world. In the meantime, maintain.

In the tiny sliver of time that is my life, I managed to carve out a space in the culture from being the first Chinese Brit to take a show to the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival 30 years ago, the satirical trailblazer Suzy Wrong, Human Cannon, to making groundbreaking programmes for the BBC. But the Obama Pivot to Asia and Trump’s Captain Ahab schtick with the white whale of China means that’s all closed down. In order for the West’s Viking raiding party to turn the Golden Goose into a dead duck, it requires a dehumanised, cartoon China on whom to unleash their worst impulses. And that means no Chinese with whom to empathise. Blank canvases only.

The same goes for the working and middle classes everywhere. The Empire wants to do to the whole world what they did to the Native Americans, to India, Africa and China.

I’m here for kindred spirits who say, hell no!

I want to talk to those interested in critical thinking, who look around and says wtf!? To Brits, Americans and Europeans who wonder where their lives, livelihoods and hopes went in some of the richest economies on the planet. To people of Chinese heritage who wonder what the hell’s happened in the West. And to the Chinese emerging into their day in the sun, breaking out of their centuries-long cocoon as beautiful butterflies only to find the predators lining up — don’t be seduced into our bad habits.

Anyone interested in clarity, a different perspective rooted in 400 years of the Age of Enlightenment, is welcome.

I feel a special kinship with the young women being buried by a Gamergate generation bringing back the old oppressions dressed up in new clothes. Bright young women who decline to submit to the hierarchy of delusional ass-hattery and plonkerdom.

Let this be your spiritual home.

Anna’s Substack account is now live.

A Brief History of the Chinese Who Came to Britain: Anna Chen's Introduction to Hannah Lowe's new poetry collection, Old Friends

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Hannah Lowe's new collection of poetry, Old Friends
Published by Hercules Editions, May 2022

Introduction written by Anna Chen

A Brief History of the Chinese Who Came to Britain

How many Chinas are there?

In 2022, two Grand Narratives jockey for position as the dominant conventional wisdom which will define China and its global diaspora: the one which demonises its subject, and the other which humanises.

After enduring their “century of humiliation”, China achieves superpower status and finds itself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. For the past few years, geopolitical stability has tumbled down a Sliding Doors rabbit-hole, splitting the narrative of the peaceful emergence of a multipolar world. One version portrays an existential threat to a western way of life already rapidly approaching its best-by date. The other, which it aims to topple, depicts the dragon reborn, a technological marvel raising 800 million out of poverty, battling the Covid-19 which has already felled western powers, while building beautiful futuristic cities and a new Silk Road.

Into this great sweep of history, Hannah Lowe’s poetry collection, “Old Friends”, provides a timely close-up of some of the characters from the great Chinese migration who’d left the upheavals of a China fragmented by 19th century wars and colonisation and fetched up in Britain. From her father’s Jamaica and Ilford where she grew up to the seafarers and their descendents who settled around the ports of Britain, the Chinese diaspora, established long before many of the nations in which it currently exists, has had to deal with the shadowy identities projected onto it by the same dominant entities who are at it today.

In the beginning … the Chinese were a complete mystery to Europeans.

Early tales from the 13th century Venetian Silk Road explorer Marco Polo, told of the great Kublai Khan, whose Mongol grandfather Genghis conquered a swathe of the Euro-asian landmass, establishing the Mongols as the biggest empire ever. Kublai himself unified China, founding the Yuan empire in 1271 from his home turf around Inner Mongolia and his legendary “stately pleasure dome” of Xanadu in Shangdu.

The first impression breaking through the void was of a magical otherworldly realm of horse warriors, sightings of comets and the exotic treasures that made up the chinoiserie Europeans found irresistible — porcelain, gunpowder, silks, spices and tea — whose desirability would lead to the devastating Opium Wars centuries later.

The Chinese made first contact with Britain in 1685 when the young Jesuit priest Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-tsung, who was touring Catholic Europe, was warmly welcomed by King James II. Unfamiliar with English, Michael communicated in Latin. Until his arrival, few people even knew which way up to hold a Chinese book so having him catalogue them was a revelation to the gentleman bibliophiles who’d acquired their exotic collections from the Dutch East India Company. King James was so enamoured that he commissioned a portrait which still hangs in the Queen’s gallery today.

However, the first significant number of Chinese to arrive in Britain — seamen brought in by the British East Asia Company during the Napoleonic wars to replace white sailors who were enlisted to fight — enjoyed no such representation in heroic tales, historical works or classical images. These mysterious visitors stayed in the poorest areas around the ports of Cardiff, Liverpool and London’s Limehouse waiting for the next ship to take them home. Not for them the humanising engagement of two worlds who’d just discovered each other. Just a minor role as a reliable source of cheap labour. Gone was the respect shown by James II and, instead, hard commerce and exploitation replaced curiosity and affection.

Even this utilitarian view of the Chinese degenerated further when the British decided they no longer wished to pay the bill in silver bullion for the exotic goods they consumed, (eerily echoed by President Donald Trump’s destructive trade war that’s morphing under Biden into a replay of the Opium Wars carve-up by some of the same imperial powers today.) In 1839, the British army, acting as the military wing of the East Asia Trading Company which had applied Industrial Revolution methods to the mass production of opium in Bengal, forced the drug onto the Chinese at gunpoint, turning an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction and called it “trade”.

It was during the ascendency of the imperial narcocapitalists that stories and images emerged to describe not the celestial subjects of earlier wonderment but a debased Yellow Peril, which found its apogee in Sax Rohmer’s villainous Fu Manchu. Stripped of all humanity, they were reduced to a reflection of the monsters in the British id, subhumans deserving of the misery meted out by Empire. It’s an ugly narrative that never really disappeared but simmered away, turning the Chinese and their descendents into a permanent reservoir of scapegoats.

The advent of Chinese seamen expanded the communities of international sailors — including Lascars, Portuguese, French, Germans, Russians and Americans — that huddled around Cardiff, Liverpool and London’s Limehouse. Fewer than 200 Chinese seamen and their families lived in two streets in Limehouse – Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway, thought to include five shops and a couple of restaurants – but those few residents were reimagined by the yellow press as an invading Yellow Peril horde.

Anti-Chinese hysteria driven by inflammatory newspapers such as the Daily Express and Daily Mail led to riots in London and lynchings in Cardiff during the early 20th century. So contemptuous was the post-WWII government’s policy towards Chinese in Britain that the seamen – who had run the wartime merchant navy in appalling conditions for lower wages than their white counterparts and settled in Liverpool – were quietly expelled and sent back to China, even if they’d started families with local white women. Most of the mixed-race children and their mothers were deceived into believing that they had been abandoned by feckless fathers, and thus they remained ignorant, until relatively recently, of the cruelty meted out in secret.

Surviving wars, occupation, prejudice and massacre, it wouldn’t be until the 1950s and 60s that the Chinese diaspora would make its longest-lasting impact on Britain. By doing what it did so well with food, they transformed fading Italian snack bars into the first of the takeaways, putting a Chinese presence on every High Street.

After a brief Golden Age in the 21st century when British-Chinese relations hearkened back to those earliest days when Shen Futsong was embraced by a British monarch, Yellow Peril monstering is making a comeback as China’s economy draws level with the US.

Amidst the tumult of lurid media fantasies, Lowe’s miniatures of the daily life of some of these early immigrants remind us of the common humanity currently obscured by the new wave of state level sinophobia. It opens a door into a world which will be familiar to some and a revelation to others.

Anna Chen

* * * * *

Hannah Lowe on Twitter: @hannahlowepoet
Hercules Editions on Twitter
Anna Chen presented the groundbreaking series, Chinese In Britain, which was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2007.

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

St Ives in a bygone era: short film by Alban Roinard

A wonderfully clever short film made of St Ives in Cornwall, superimposing old black and white shots of the same views, made by Alban Roinard of St Eia Films and posted by St Ives Films.

St Ives is where I often do all my best poetry and music performances for the May Literature and September Arts Festivals with Charles Shaar Murray and friends, and I know it well. So it's fascinating to see my old haunts as they were a century or more ago.

Also a must-see for anyone familiar with the town and Porthmeor Beach, here's The Boilers of the Alba.

The Borgias - 0 Tudors - 6: review of the Showtime series starring Jeremy Irons

Suffering from withdrawal symptoms at the end of my DVD box set binge of The Tudors — superb pacy story-telling, complex characters you cared about, stunning costumes and jewellery — I looked for a replacement. One friend assured me that The Borgias with Jeremy Irons was as good as. How could it not be? The most infamous family in Christendom, politics, power, treachery and sex.

I'm afraid my friend was wrong. Very wrong.

It's like wading through wet cement and I'm having a problem staying with it in the 2nd season. I can see why it was dropped after three seasons. Jeremy Irons is more a peeved country squire than the satanic but charming Roderigo Borgia transforming himself into Pope Alexander. No matter how much he seethes and flashes his eyes, he does not have the gravity of Daddy Borgia.

Same with Cesare Borgia played by Francois Arnaud. These are not bad actors, just a sadly miscast reflection of the programme's middle-class audience.

The real problem is the script. Ye gods: pompous, ponderous, on the nose, overlong. Scenes that outstay their welcome, the writing puts the bore in Borgias. I mean, how can you make Nicolo Machiavelli a smirking clerk? None of the lethal intelligence of the age is even approximated at, only shallow posturing. Neil Jordan needed someone on the team to give him a counter-balancing wit and verve, the sort that made The Tudors sparkle.

Not just in the style, but the content. The Tudors is excellent in showing how complicated politics worked in Henry VIII's time and swings you with masterful ease around all the perspectives, so you always understand the motivation behind dodgy choices even if you don't agree with them. The Borgias just have one dreary linear one-damn-thing-after-another plot but with long gaps. It's mostly telling with little showing, and all on one note.

We are told the fact that certain things happened and that choices were made, such as the French King Charles's change of mind when he captures Lucrezia — but there's never a convincing demonstration of why he suddenly held back. And then Charles simply agrees with Roderigo that the French army should go on to Naples rather than stopping to sack Rome. We are told the surface facts but are never shown the emotional and subtle reasons why this should be. This was never a problem with The Tudors.

Some of the characterisation is rivalled only by cardboard. Performances veer off grand guignol and into amdram. I mean, the affected nasal whine of the Naples prince and King Charles of France's uglification may have neen historically true but here it's apparent that it's being acted.

The only character who seemed to have any complexity is Giovanni Sforza (Ronan Vibert), Lucrezia's first husband who comes a cropper after serially raping her and trying to extract himself from the political commitments that went with the marriage.

The film set is the star. The bonus feature showing you how the vast beautiful hall of St Peters was made is fascinating. If only the series was half as interesting.

Showtime obviously felt the same as me and hunted for a replacement series to fill the Tudors gap and settled on what should have been a no-brainer. Unfortunately, this is no I, Claudius, Game of Thrones or ... dare I say it one mo' time, The Tudors.

The Opium War by Julia Lovell book review: Smoke and mirrors

The Opium War by Julia Lovell

Book review by Anna Chen

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
George Orwell

With renewed calls for the West to assert its imperial might in the interest of "capitalism and democracy ... if necessary by military force " (historian and BBC Reith Lecturer Niall Ferguson), it's useful to examine one episode in Britain's history when we attempted to do so, with catastrophic results for the conquered nation.

Britain’s craving for chinoiserie in the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in a trade imbalance which threatened to empty the treasury. In order to pay for the tea, silks, spices and porcelain we liked so much, the East India Company mass-produced enormous quantities of cheap Bengal-grown opium and, along with other British merchants, sold it on to China, turning an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction.

The profits from the opium trade made fortunes, earned revenues for the British government, paid for the administration of the Empire in India and even financed a large slice of the cost of the Royal Navy. In 1839, when the Chinese tried to enforce their own laws and halt drug imports, the narco-capitalists persuaded Foreign Secretary Palmerston and Lord Melbourne’s government to go to war in order to protect their profits. The first military conflict — thanks to superior technology, more a series of massacres — lasting a bloody three years, resulted in the Treaty of Nanking and the transfer of territory including Hong Kong to British rule. In waging the second war (1856-60) the British finally achieved their goal of seeing opium legalised in China.

That the Chinese government might use this notoriously brutal example of British imperialism to bolster their power is little surprise. That western authors now seek to diminish British culpability and shift responsibility onto the nation that suffered the predations of drugs and war is disturbing, though probably inevitable in the current febrile atmosphere of the China-bashing seen by many western intellectuals as a substitute for informed criticism.

The latest in a string of histories reviving positive images of Empire, Julia Lovell's The Opium War is on a mission to reassess history, presumably seeking to replicate her literary agent stablemate Jung Chang's success with Mao: The Untold Story.

Lovell's argument hangs by the revisionist thread that, far from creating a market for opium, the British were only satisfying what was already there. "What had happened," she asks, "in those four decades [to 1840], to transform opium-smoking from an acceptable displacement activity for an idle emperor-in-training to a perilous scourge?" Not British traders — who were only exploiting an existing weakness, it seems — but the Chinese themselves who were gagging for it and therefore the authors of their own doom. The point that opium was an expensive luxury until the British were able to mass-produce it cheaply in India and transform the market, is buried in a welter of smoke and mirrors.

Lovell sets out to correct the Chinese government's overplayed narrative of victimhood but overbalances into a 400-page vilification of the Chinese: theirs is a response to a Western threat "supposedly" determined to contain it ("supposedly" is wide open to argument); the 150th anniversary of the first Opium War "offered a public relations gift to the government"; it is a "founding myth", a mere "border provocation". Opium is a "scapegoat" for the emperor's problems, those who opposed it "ambitious moralizers" and "ambitious literati".

The Chinese are capable of only the basest motives in their efforts to wipe out the drug that is crippling the nation, their emotional and behavioural range running the Sax Rohmer gamut of dehumanising tropes: stupid, arrogant, cowardly, lazy and pragmatic. "Perhaps they objected for Confucian, humanitarian reasons; or then again, out of indolence, maybe." Their avowed repulsion and fear of what opium can do is dismissed, individual suffering skated over and characters never humanised. I'm not sure I detected any irony in her use of that old colonialist favourite, "wily", and the drooling pages of lurid descriptions in the Yellow Peril chapter might have made room for the moving contemporary accounts of the destruction of the Summer Palace, for example, or the massacres of the Chinese which shocked even hardened British soldiers.

In contrast, although some of the inescapable truths about the British drug-dealers and perpetrators of war are acknowledged, their actions are ascribed to human feelings; they are "generous"; their inner lives are explored; their flaws are treated with understanding for they are men on a quest to better themselves against a monstrous Empire that will not give them what they want.

When the moral high ground runs out, equivalence is strained: it was "mutual incomprehension that pushed both sides towards war". "Contemporary China's line on opium transforms it into a moral poison forced on helpless Chinese innocents by wicked aliens. The reality was more troublingly collusive." Both were as bad as each other. When everyone is guilty, no one can be innocent.

The book's selectivity is irritating, ultimately undermining the story. The British who grew industrial levels of opium and sent the price plummeting, are "diligent", their supply benignly "reliable". James Matheson is described kindly as a "tough Scot" and "living under the influence of the holy spirit", but whose banishment to the wilds of Canada of 500 residents of the Isle of Lewis — which he bought and decorated with Stornoway Castle on his drug money — is overlooked in this hefty tome. Of Charles Elliot, Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China, one of the architects of the first Opium War and later first administrator of Hong Kong, she writes sympathetically that he " ... instinctively disliked the opium trade and everything bound up with it: both its moral dubiousness and its ungentlemanly profit-hungry merchants". Sentimentally, "his weakness was to see a little of everyone's side: he understood the economic imperative of the opium trade, even while he hated the vulgarity of its perpetrators; he understood that his duty was to protect the British flag in Canton, even while he detested what some of Britannia's children were doing in the China seas."

Commissioner General Lin Zexu, who destroyed 20,000 cases (each holding 140 pounds) of British opium in 1839, is presented as a bureaucrat (Niall Ferguson couldn't even bring himself to name him in his account), albeit an incorruptible one, caught between a rock and a hard place. Lovell complains that "History has been kind to Lin Zexu", although it's not difficult to see why such an incorruptible force who tried to right an injustice might be a much-needed inspiration today. Her extensive research does, however, unearth the little gem that, once Elliot had finally handed over the opium stash, Lin made a gift to him of prized roebuck meat before which he "was careful to kowtow nine times".

There are some asinine reductions: "The Ming Dynasty was brought down in 1644 by insurrections led by a postman who happened also to be a failed candidate." (Note the snobbery — how would a humble carpenter fare in her scheme of things?) The Taiping Rebellion with all its fascinating complexity and humane objectives (the abolition of landlordism, the redistribution of wealth for all, and the prohibition of prostitution, bound feet and the smoking of opium) is reduced to a nervous breakdown of a "provincial schoolmaster" — a movement crushed, incidentally, with the aid of the British acting in concert with the Manchu imperial army during the Opium Wars, a fact missing here, at a cost of 20 million lives over 14 years.

It's not as if the Chinese need any lessons in the part played by the rotten Qing Empire in the nation's downfall. The "disorganisation and cowardice of its own officials and armies" is already well known. There was indeed much "self-blame", "self-pity" and outright "self-loathing" during and after the conflict which is still going on, as documented ad infinitum in China, with local militias fighting where Qing armies feared to tread, such as at Sanyuanli in 1841 (also derided by the author). It was the corruption of the old empire which led to its fall in 1911 and the establishment of a republic under Sun Yatsen, and which added grist to the communist mill in trying to stamp out the remnants of the old system described so luridly by Lovell.

Reading her account is a bit like hearing a rapist declaring his innocence because his victim wore a short skirt as she walked up a dark alley. Not only were there an estimated 120 million addicts in China at the trade's peak, but national treasures were looted or destroyed, and massacres and rape perpetrated by the invading troops intent on forcing the drug on the nation. So bad was this savagery that large swathes of British public opinion clamoured against the opium-driven conflict, led by the voices of such as Richard Cobden, William Gladstone and the Chartists. But Chinese outrage is ridiculed, with no room for the possibility that they might authentically feel empathy and concern or be justified in their anger. While paying lip service to some acceptance that a crime had been committed, Lovell offsets the gravity of the injury with a running national character assassination and a downplaying of facts already known and documented.

It's difficult to relax into the rollicking story that's fighting to get out as you are constantly poked in the ear with the author's "they made us do it" mantra. Lovell is much stronger when she tells the story straight and without pro-imperialist spin, but it is largely marred by an unfortunate sneering tone which plays to a gallery of prejudice and jingoism, a Great Wall that will keep out any reader whose bigotry is not being fed. This is a shame because she has done a formidable job by laying out the story in so much riveting detail.

However, far from presenting a brave new take on the history, this is an old dish reheated, a rebranding of Empire (do we still call it the Indian "Mutiny"?). Lovell replays the excuses made in Britain at the time by the narco-capitalists and Lord Palmerston, who tried to win over a public opinion revolted by the idea of a narcotics war by playing the insult to the flag by the Chinese and the "liberating values of Free Trade" cards. To this she adds a steady poisonous drip of various distancing devices and systematic "othering" of the Chinese.

The narrative spin dehumanises the Chinese, divesting them of moral capacity while painting violent drug dealers as acting out of a higher calling, themselves passive victims of force majeur. Hence, while Elliott considers opium smuggling to be "a trade which every friend of humanity must deplore", he wants the Qing to "legalise it, because it would force the Chinese to take full responsibility for its moral dubiousness", the opium trade being the fault of the addicts and not the suppliers. Elliot has a "conscience" while Lin is merely a bureaucrat who is described from the outside in, a bundle of facts with no heart. Elliot possesses an interior landscape. His "weakness was to see a little of everyone's side". He "understood his duty was to defend the British flag in Canton" even though he "detested" what his compatriots were doing. Yet, like Lewis Carroll's Walrus, he weeps into his handkerchief over the plight of the poor oysters while scoffing the biggest ones himself when he lands the British government with the inflated £2 million bill for the confiscated opium and thereby hands them the final excuse for war.

The rest of the book similarly struggles with balance in a scattergun outpouring of distaste for nearly everything and everyone Chinese. Lovell's account of the breakdown of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 is ludicrously one-sided — she makes it appear that it was all China's fault, with no mention of the Danish Text stitch-up of the talks by the wealthy nations — and she has nothing to say about China's massive efforts to cut carbon emissions and combat pollution. She condemns Chinese anti-Japanese hysteria but never mentions former Prime Minister Koizumi's provocative visits to shrines of war criminals and rewritten history books. Sun Yatsen is a "chancer" who was snubbed by the head of state and that's why he brought down the Qing. Bored students obsess about their careers. Interviewees interrupt their "self-loathing" denunciations of the West with requests for job-tips and enquiries about how to get on in the land of the rising shun. Chinese don't need to indulge in self-loathing while Lovell's on the case because she can loathe for England. By the end, you are willing the poor woman to retrain in another field altogether just so she can find some peace of mind.

Perhaps it's the illustrations which tell the story best. A photograph of Akmal Shaikh, the Briton executed in China in 2009 for smuggling heroin, is juxtaposed favourably with one of an emotional protester following the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, killing three journalists — an outrage claimed by the US as an accident even though the allies had the map co-ordinates and knew where the embassy was. Those of us opposed to the death penalty argued that a prison sentence was a more humane and apt option for Shaikh, especially if he was ill as claimed. But if one picture is worth a thousand words, then the juxtaposition of these two photographs speaks volumes. The British smuggler of 4 kg of heroin into China is portrayed with sympathy while the other is not. It is a deeply flattering, almost saintly, portrait revealing the humanity of the drug-dealer, set against the ape-like rictus of the Chinese protester in the grip of a feral rage. One is humanised, the other dehumanised. One life has value, the three dead and 20 injured Chinese do not even warrant a mention anywhere. This twisted morality evoking a visceral response — empathy for us and revulsion for "them" — as employed in the use of the photographs, permeates the book.

Lovell seeks to make a case against the communist government, but her thrust replaces one orthodoxy with another. In describing the fundamental rottenness of an ossified and decadent empire (China's, not ours) she inadvertently stirs a degree of sympathy with those men and women who tried to build a better society in response to the horrors visited upon a country on its knees but who have tragically failed to avoid writing their own catalogue of misery despite doubling life-expectancy and raising 600 million out of absolute poverty. As a demolition job on the upstart rival on the global stage, this book is sure to do well among those less scholarly than the professor who will seize on this exercise in exculpation with glee.

Anna Chen wrote and narrates The Steampunk Opium Wars.

Niall Ferguson dismisses the Opium Wars

At last, someone else has done a thorough analysis here at Hidden Harmonies.

Working for the Clampdown: Niall Ferguson's testosterone theory of history

'Dominate, dominate, dominate.' No, not an S&M dalek, but Niall Ferguson on the telly. I lost count of how many times this word, or variations thereof, came up in the first five minutes of Episode One of Ferguson's Channel 4 series, Civilisation: Is the West History?

Coming on like an Oxbridge Jeremy Clarkson, Ferguson promises an explanation as to why the West is in decline and about to be overtaken by Asia, as represented by China in the first programme. However, instead of presenting a cool economic and political analysis of history since 1420 when China was the most advanced nation in the world and England was a 'septic isle', this heavyweight intellectual rammed home a barrage of triumphalist tub-thumping which quite startled me. His nostalgia for Empire, as once observed by an astute Eric Hobsbawm, was cranked up to eleven as he attempted to nail his viewers to the headboard.

Fear of the Yellow Peril evidently stalks academia, and Ferguson stoked himself up to confront the threat of the Other.

Much of his thesis seems predicated on the supremacy of the penis because, on Planet Ferguson, the human cock is central to his might-is-right narrative. It's all eunuchs (them) and size (us) and grrr ... He may think that the overblown use of macho terms is punching (see what I did it there, 'pushing' being far too effete?) buttons in his audience which will identify him with the power he craves, but there's a danger of thus drawing attention to what he lacks.

Achieving patronising machismo in one tiny phrase, 'Killer Apps', the first of his six apps, 'Competition', is the theme of this opening programme, so I laid back and thought of England while Fergy strutted his stuff.

I recognised some of his reading material. Ferguson is able to draw on 1421 and 1434 by Gavin Menzies for his enthralling account of China's massive 15th-century Ming Dynasty fleet: a veritable ocean-going city, while much of his list of China's achievements in science, agriculture and warfare can be found in Robert Temple's masterful The Genius of China (Joseph Needham). This, plus the superficial nature of his enquiry, gives the unfortunate impression that little information has been gleaned from original research but has instead been sourced from best-sellers and airport potboilers.

Following an amazing period of voyage and discovery, when vast 400-foot ships sailed as far as Africa, and possibly further to the Americas and Greenland, the new Emperor issued an order in 1424 that China clam up.

I eagerly awaited an explanation as to why China closed down in the 15th century. Was it fiscal troubles? Squabbling in court? Wars in Annam (Vietnam) proving to be too expensive? And the master's answer? 'We may never know.' But Niall, honey, you're paid to at least come up with a likely answer.

At this point he must have been experiencing performance anxiety, but nonetheless on he ploughed. His next trick: a brief dismissal of the opium wars as a reaction to something done by China to the British, as if the Brits were mere passive unwilling participants, thereby absolving them of any responsibility ... "We got the coffee houses," he says, "while China got the opium dens." Admire the cunning linguistic gymnastics, distancing Britain from its role as drug pusher-in-chief.

The opium wars were airily dismissed as 'retaliation' for an 'over-zealous official' who had the temerity to 'burn' the Britishers' opium. The 'over-zealous official' happens to be Governor-General Lin Zexu, something of a hero to many Chinese for his bid to stem the tide of opium, about 1,400 tons of it per year, but Niall couldn't bring himself to even give him a name. (And the opium wasn't burnt for obvious reasons: it was dissolved in water, salt and lime and dumped into the sea.) But what's a little drug addiction when there's cash to be made?

'Size isn't everything,' Fergy growls manfully. Hence his admiration for tiny Portugal's Vasco da Gama, who wrested the spice trade from the Arabs and other Easterners in what he tortuously calls the 'first spice race'. Ba-doom! Never mind that da Gama set up trading posts in the East with 'ruthlessness and downright nastiness', you can smell the envy. 'G'wan my son. Who's the daddy?' as Fergy might have thought but thankfully never said. At least not in this programme.

Portugal was followed by Spain, Holland, France and then England which, in 1635, sent its first ship to Chinese waters. 'With each new trading post, Western capitalism uploaded its killer app of competition.' Western lust for money made the interlopers 'hungry enough to kill for it.' Good grief, where's the competition in the bloody brutality this entailed? Is this his definition of competition?

Venice, Frankfurt, Lubek and London wanted their own 'autonomy'. Small was beautiful, according to Fergy, because it meant competition between states. But it was still within a great schtonking Western capitalist system. So not exactly competing systems, then.

Chaos can produce energy, and Karl Marx approved of the productive energies released by the early competitive stages of capitalism. However, Marx saw that the system contained the seeds of its own destruction, and predicted that capitalism would be its own gravedigger. For many of us being chewed up by this great juggernaut, this is true: even if it does mutate and survive, it will be for the benefit of a shrinking number at the top, not humankind as a whole. Capitalism took us out of feudalism and makes a better springboard to a more humane system than it does a place to stop and ossify.

Fergy fetishises capitalist competition out of context, out of time. 'By being divided, the West was able to rule the world', he says, as if this is a good thing on its own. He wants this 'killer app' applied as a principle where we are all atomised and competing against each other for dwindling resources. Haven't we moved on from this barbarism?

Casual racism aside, and noting that slavery was at no point even mentioned, Fergy's crowing about the success of capitalism — despite 2008's catastrophic and ongoing recession — may be considered by some to be short-sighted, out-of-touch and perhaps even a tad corrupt. As others have pointed out, we are only now beginning to feel the effects of a recession with its roots in the untrammelled 'competition' of the banks since they were deregulated by Reagan and his fellow Milton Friedman acolytes.

Seaumas Milne writes:

... there is a determined attempt in Britain to restore the economic model so comprehensively discredited in the crash of 2008. ... the banks' survival might depend on the greatest public handouts and guarantees in history.

In Wisconsin, collective bargaining rights have just been removed, while we face devastating cuts to our services in the UK. Right now, it is the working class and proletarianised middle classes who are paying for the bankers' crisis, capitalising the ruling business class. Where is the competition here?

Ferguson glorifies the nasty, brutish and short values of Hobbes in a world of every man for himself, dog-eat-dog, devil take the hindmost. You know what happened to civilisation? Masters of the Universe like Ferguson ate it.

Perhaps the key to Niall and his strange obsessions is to be found in the latest issue of Newsweek. In a piece about the gender imbalance in China, titled 'Men Without Women: The ominous rise of Asia’s bachelor generation', he writes:

That has scary implications. Remember, most of Hemingway’s stories in Men Without Women are about violence. They feature gangsters, bullfighters, and wounded soldiers. The most famous story is called simply “The Killers". It may be that the coming generation of Asian men without women will find harmless outlets for their inevitable frustrations, like team sports or videogames. But I doubt it. Either this bachelor generation will be a source of domestic instability, whether Brazilian-style crime or Arab-style revolution—or, as happened in Europe, they and their testosterone will be exported. There’s already enough shrill nationalism in Asia as it is. Don’t be surprised if, in the next generation, it takes the form of macho militarism and even imperialism. Lock up your daughters.

Once upon a time, such paranoia would have earnt you a spell of therapy or a nice basket-weaving holiday. Nowadays it gets you a TV series. Funny old world. No wonder civilisation's going down the pan.

Looks like de Niall is a river in Egypt.

In the Evening Standard, Civilisation: The West and the Rest is imperial history without the nasty bits by Alex Von Tunzelmann

Glorious British Imperialism in action or bullying by gunboat diplomacy? 'China's Age of Fragility' by Robert Bickers in History Today.

Ken Livingstone challenges Niall Ferguson on the Tory cuts.

Guardian review 25th March 2011

Review of Nial Ferguson's Channel 4 series, China: Triumph and Turmoil, 12 March 2012

Niall Ferguson threatens to sue London Review of Books writer over unfavourable review in the LA Times.

Julia Lovell on The Opium War

Abbey Road Studios up for sale: Beatles history down the pan

For years whenever I've driven or taken the bus into town down Abbey Road in north London, I've been amused by the tourists playing with the traffic on the famous crossing outside the EMI studios, re-enacting the cover shot from The Beatles' Abbey Road album (1969).

The graffiti builds up on the white walls under the railings with love-lorn messages they probably think are there for posterity, only for it to be whitewashed every few weeks and the whole process starting over.

Pop groups, rock bands and classical orchestras have recorded here for decades, making use of one of the biggest and best equipped recording studios in Europe, dating back to 1931.

And now, beaten by the technology that means we can produce our own albums on Garageband in our bedrooms plus a massive debt of £3.3bn, EMI are putting it up for sale. However, the question does remain of how big orchestras are going to record. Yet another example of a society's culture imploding under the limitations of capitalism, the superstructure collapsing into the economic base like a cake left out in the rain.

EMI is just the latest and best-loved studio going the same way as the iconic Routemaster bus and the red telephone boxes. Bollards to this. (Has anyone noticed those disgusting dinky 2-dimensional yellow flaps replacing our beautiful solid white bollards in certain London councils?)

When the block is turned into the inevitable luxury flats, I trust the fans will carry on graffitiing. I may very well join them.

Abbey Road Studios up for sale: Beatles history down the pan

For years whenever I've driven or taken the bus into town down Abbey Road in north London, I've been amused by the tourists playing with the traffic on the famous crossing outside the EMI studios, re-enacting the cover shot from The Beatles' Abbey Road album (1969).

The graffiti builds up on the white walls under the railings with love-lorn messages they probably think are there for posterity, only for it to be whitewashed every few weeks and the whole process starting over.

Pop groups, rock bands and classical orchestras have recorded here for decades, making use of one of the biggest and best equipped recording studios in Europe, dating back to 1931.

And now, beaten by the technology that means we can produce our own albums on Garageband in our bedrooms plus a massive debt of £3.3bn, EMI are putting it up for sale. However, the question does remain of how big orchestras are going to record. Yet another example of a society's culture imploding under the limitations of capitalism, the superstructure collapsing into the economic base like a cake left out in the rain.

EMI is just the latest and best-loved studio going the same way as the iconic Routemaster bus and the red telephone boxes. Bollards to this. (Has anyone noticed those disgusting dinky 2-dimensional yellow flaps replacing our beautiful solid white bollards in certain London councils?)

When the block is turned into the inevitable luxury flats, I trust the fans will carry on graffitiing. I may very well join them.