The Opium Wars Still Shape China’s View of the West

In 2018's city of London, I can see small sliver laugh gas bottles frequently on the street, almost every day in my commuting - as Economist suggested, "by then, smoking the drug had come to be viewed not so much as a bad habit encouraged by the British."

Selectively telling the truth and always weirdly emphasis on Chinese government makes me feel sick after reading. I guess that's the reason I stopped its subscription long time ago.

That doesn't seem like an accurate re-telling of the Irish famine.

The British government engaged in many kinds of relief effort. They bought food from America to import it, albeit screwed it up because Ireland didn't have sufficiently advanced mills to process the imported grain. They repealed import tariffs (the Corn Laws). Large public works programmes were created to employ the devastated farmers. This was all made more complicated by an Irish attitude that to ask for charity from the English was weakness and should never be done:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Charity

William Smith O'Brien—speaking on the subject of charity in a speech to the Repeal Association in February 1845—applauded the fact that the universal sentiment on the subject of charity was that they would accept no English charity.

Mitchel wrote in his The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), on the same subject, that no one from Ireland ever asked for charity during this period, and that it was England who sought charity on Ireland's behalf, and, having received it, was also responsible for administering it.

Despite this large sums were donated by the English through private charities anyway.

What you're referring to is a later stage of the famine whereby a new Whig government came into power, and it did indeed feel that the market should be left to sort things out. So it stopped intervening against food exports, believing that would make things worse instead of better (i.e. people who were successfully growing food despite the blight would have to sell it below cost and would go bankrupt). Even so, it still organised a public jobs programme so huge it became impossible to administer (over 500,000 people employed).

That state lasted all of six months before the government of the day realised it had failed and changed tack again, switching to a mix of direct relief through soup kitchens and the like.

So your claim that there was "deliberate inaction" is hardly true. There was lots of action at all times and the debate focuses on to what extent the action was incompetent or not.

Food exports from poor countries are a tricky subject even today. African countries export food to Europe and would export far more if it weren't for the CAP, even though Africa has famines, hunger and disease. Should they be prevented from doing so, or will trade enrich them and ultimately end their poverty?

"Came out of Yale" means one year running a magazine for the Yale associated school in China? As for the Western support, I can't begin to guess what you mean. My complete shot in the dark is some Western capitalists tried to make money in China, as they already have a history of being fine with the death of Chinese people to make money.

You’re correct in that the narrative of Mao and communist guerrillas fighting both the Japanese and Nationalist Army is a very common one in China. However, with the exception of the Hundred Regiments Offensive, the communist armies never engaged in the kind of the regular, brutal combat that occurred near China’s major cities against the Japanese. For political reasons, namely to portray the Nationalists as an ineffective and corrupt government, until the last decade there were few Chinese TV series or movies that depicted Nationalist armies effectively fighting the Japanese.

When you look at Nationalist efforts to secure the critical Burma Road into Burma and India, and the hundreds of thousands of casualties involved in fighting rearguard actions as civilians and governments fled inland, the casualty counts are not even close. Nationalist military fatalities are generally estimated by historians to outnumber Communist military fatalities by nearly an order of magnitude.

One of the reasons I wrote that WW2 set up the communists for a clean victory in the resumption of the civil war is that Japanese surrender left vast swaths of China under communist control, simply because there was not a nationalist presence in many of those areas. Hundreds of thousands of firearms, rounds of ammunition, and artillery pieces were surrendered by the Japanese to communist armies. As a result, the Communists were for the first time able to equip a large regular army, as opposed to fighting irregular war as guerrillas.

I highly recommend reading Forgotten Ally by Rana Mitter. This is maybe the best popular history of China in WW2.

P.s. I say this as the descendant of soldiers who fought on both sides of the civil war.

Hardly a big anecdote but I went to China once and asked the tour guide if Chinese people hated the British because of the opium wars. She just laughed, the idea seemed ridiculous to her. She said a lot of Chinese still resent or hate the Japanese because of the invasion during WW2.