The Long, Arduous Sino-UK Negotiations
"HONG KONG is not the Malvinas, and China is not Argentina!" —A cry from the depths of the soul of a humiliated, long-oppressed nation.
History's Summons Wakes a Nation's Sleeping Soul
May 20, 2012, was the day the fiery phoenix came into bloom.
As I walked along the streets of Hong Kong, sprays of flaming red royal poincianas (called "phoenix flowers" in Chinese) enveloped the tips of branches high overhead. Seen from afar, they seemed like clusters of flames. In a bustling world built of reinforced concrete, the quiet, powerful blooms grabbed the eye with a thriving vitality that felt almost like a visual attack. Tree after tree of flaming red phoenix flowers, of such beauty that it was as if I was walking through a poem! They were a sign of life's tenacity, and a symbol of Hong Kong's spirit.
Looking towards the towering buildings blocking out the sun and sky, at the interweaving streams of people, I couldn't help but let my imagination wander through the forest of my thoughts. Wen Yiduo's famous poem "Song of Seven Sons" flashed through my mind:
Hong Kong
I keep my night vigil
A leopard guarding the gates of empire
Mother! I am meek, but I am a stronghold
The sea-sent lion, vile and fierce, is set upon me Dining on my flesh, swallowing my excess
Mother! I weep, wailing for you in vain.
Mother! Let me hide in your embrace!
Mother! I want to return, mother!
This bloodcurdling lament awoke in me long-slumbering memories.
I revere Wen Yiduo—the Chinese nation needs more scholars like him, people with courage and a strong moral backbone. One can't help but regret the long years the Chinese people spend under feudal rule. They stripped us of our dignity, our character, our moral backbone, and replaced them with a slave like obsequiousness to kings and power.
A person with no moral backbone is like an animal with a snapped spine crawling upon the earth. A nation with no moral backbone is weak and easily bullied—prey for great powers, fodder for invaders.
While in Hong Kong, my thoughts often drifted towards history and the present day, wandering between what was real and what was only my imagination. My heart looked out through my eyes, gazing out upon history not long passed through a vibrant, dazzling Hong Kong streetscape.
Standing at the window of my hotel room, I look through the twilight of early evening towards the quiet beauty of Victoria Harbor, reposed like an ink painting; simple, peaceful, and elegant. But human history is not an ink painting. Everywhere the strong prey upon the weak; everywhere is cruel plunder and bloody slaughter.
The events of more than a hundred and seventy years ago are only an arm's length away from us.
That period of history is like a mirror hung before the eyes of our people, proof of our nation's past, warning the descendants of the Fiery Emperor and the Yellow Emperor[2]: never forget that the Chinese nation's recent history saw more than one-hundred and fifty-five years of humiliation.
August 29, 1842, was the most humiliating day in the modern history of the Chinese nation. On that day, the heavens were shrouded and the earth wept.
In the ancient Jing'an Temple on Shanghai's Nanjing Road, the sound of bells lingered, wide and vast, seemingly unchanged since time immemorial, and yet witness to so much change. These bells might almost be rousting awake the sleeping souls of our people, warning the Chinese nation of the dawn of an era of humiliation.
In Nanjing's Xiaguan district, twenty-six British warships drew up in a line, floating on the Yangtze, their dozens of cannons pointed directly at the city of Nanjing. Seen from afar, they looked like a cable choking off the flow of the mighty river, just as it was soon to choke off the Qing Dynasty's government. The British sent the Qing government their final diplomatic missive: If the Chinese government did not accept the British conditions, the British ships would immediately open fire on Nanjing!
In the throne room of the Forbidden City in Beijing sat the sixty year-old Daoguang Emperor, his brows knitted together in worry. The tension was unremitting.
As early as 1821, when the thirty-nine year old Daoguang ascended to the throne, at the close of the Qing Dynasty's "Prosperous Era of Kangxi and Qianlong" ,[3] signs of slippage were already in evidence, part of the so-called "Jiaqing-Daoguang Decline" .[4] The nation was beset with troubles inside and out, and an overburdened populace rose in frequent revolt against corrupt petty officials. Western powers, seeking a weak spot to force their way in, poisoned China's people with opium, whose consumption the Qing court repeatedly banned. From 1821 to 1834 the court issued eight proclamations forbidding its subjects from smoking opium, but the practice persisted despite the repeated prohibitions. In December of 1838, the Daoguang Emperor sent high official Lin Zexu to China's southeast Guangdong Province with an imperial mandate to halt the opium trade. Lin proclaimed, "As long as the opium remains, I will not return [to Beijing]. I vow to see this through to the end. I can foresee no insurmountable obstacles." In March of 1839—with the firm support of Deng Tingzhen, governor-general of Liangguang (present-day Guangdong and Guangxi provinces), and Guan Tianpei, commander-in-chief of the naval forces of Guangdong—Lin confiscated twenty-thousand crates containing approximately 1.2 million kilograms of opium from British merchants, and destroyed them publicly on the shores of the Bocca Tigris at the mouth of the South China Sea, in a fearsome blow against British opium peddling.
