GDP and First Opium War

choi

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Of course, John Maynard Keynes developed the concept of GDP in 1940. BGDP figures before that year were estimated.

(1) It is true that China's GDP (calculated by PPP) was bigger than the West
and Russia combined--and twice as big as India (the next economic power in
the world) in 1820, according to Maddison. See
List of regions by past GDP (PPP)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)

Though GDP per capita (PPP) is about the same for China, India and US, which
is about half of that in UK (which, due to Industrial Revolution, is second
highest in the world, after the Netherlands), again according to Maddison.
List of regions by past GDP (PPP) per capita
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

However, by that time, India was going to fallen British rule, and China
would be defeated in the First Opium War.

(2) My opinion is Qing Dynasty was in decline. Foreigners accelerated the
inevitable.

Qing Dynasty conquered Taiwan in 1683. A century later, it had a hard time
putting down rebellion led by 林爽文 (1756-1788).
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/%E6%9E%97%E7%88%BD%E6%96%87

(3) Take US as an example. Americans invented lots of useful things long
before it became a power (or superpower). Eli Whitney (cotton gin, 1793);
Samuel F. B. Morse (telegraph and Morse code, 1844), Thomas Edison (many
inventions), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone, 1976).

Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the
Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. Harper
, 2008
talked about an Englishman Joseph Needham, who observed that China made no
contribution to science and engineering for the past half millennium.

(4) History has shown a nation of smaller total GDP can defeat another with
bigger one.

The thirteen colonies are a good example.

(a) Facts for Features. Census Bureau, July 4, 2010.
http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb10-ff12.html
("2.5 million   In July 1776, the estimated number of people living in the
newly independent nation.
Source: Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970")

(b) Aram Bakshian, Jr., Sparks of a Revolution; Recalling the fractious days
of 1776 when a handful of rebels demanded freedom. Wall Street Journal,
July 3, 2010 (book review on William Hogeland, Declaration: The Nine
Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1-July 4, 1776.
Simon & Schuster, 2010).
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704103904575336951606079786.html
("True enough, we fought a small-scale war in which a tiny fraction of our
population ventured their lives, fortunes and sacred honor for the sake of
independence from what they saw as King George III's tyranny. And, with
indispensable French naval support, the relative handful of rebels won
independence, even if almost as many colonists enlisted in pro-British
loyalist units as served in George Washington's Continental Army. Many lives
were lost in battle, of course, and much hardship was endured")

This demonstrates Taiwan can achieve the same, with population divided.

(c) And the American Revolution did not cost much, either.

Elizabeth Bumiller, The War: A Trillion Can Be Cheap. New York Times, July
25, 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/weekinreview/25bumiller.html?scp=3&sq=iraq%20war%20afghanistan%20revolution%20congressional&st=cse
(Congressional Research Service said American Revolution cost $2.4 billion,
compared with $4.10 trillion for World War II (both figures were inflation-
adjusted) and $1.15 trillion for Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far.

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choi

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(5)
(a) In my view, Qing Dynasty's faults started the war.

* First Opium War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
(Lin Zexu "asked that all opium be surrendered to the Chinese authorities *
* * forced the British hand by closing the channel to Canton, effectively
holding British traders hostage in Canton. The British Chief Superintendent
of Trade in China, Charles Elliot, got the British traders to agree to hand
over their opium stock with the promise of eventual compensation for their
loss from the British government. (This promise, and the inability of the
British government to pay it without causing a political storm, was an
important cause for the subsequent British offensive). Overall 20,000 chests
[8] (each holding about 55 kg) were handed over and destroyed beginning 3
June 1839")

* Treaty of Nanking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nanking
(signed on 29 August 1842; open five ports; The Qing government was obliged
to pay the British government six million silver dollars for the opium that
had been confiscated by Lin Zexu in 1839 (Article IV), 3 million dollars in
compensation for debts that the Hong [Cantonese for 行] merchants in Canton
owed British merchants (Article V), and a further 12 million dollars in
compensation for the cost of the war (VI))

My comment: Imagine Qing did not start the War--at least did not hold
Englishmen hostage to extract  opium and then burned it--China would have to
open the ports for foreign trade, which Japan did a decade later, having
learned lessons from Qing's capitulation.

(b) The game changer in the First opium War is HEIC Nemesis.

HEIC stands for Honorable East India Company.

Nemesis is the name of the warship.

The two belligerents had a stalemate in the first two years of the war,
because:
* HEIC could only dispatch two thousand people (1,500 soldiers and 500
sailors; mostly Indians);
* British warships could not come close to China's shorelines, due to deep
draft 吃水
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_(hull)
(The draft of a ship's hull is the vertical distance between the waterline
and the bottom of the hull (keel))

, whereas Chinese warships, made up of sampans, moved swiftly along the
shores;
* Qing had few major cities on the seacoasts. More important, China had
relied on The Grand Canal since Sui Dynasty (581-618). Thus Qing was not
concerned about blockade or interdiction of merchant marine (for it had
little).

(6) Nemesis
(a) Lincoln P. Paine, Warships of the world to 1900, Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2000, at page 115-116
http://books.google.com/books?id=Xh7CSxFeK-IC&pg=PA115&dq=%22opium+war%22+nemesis+st.+ives&hl=en&ei=cK9YTJj_Ao3y9QSdg8TsBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22opium%20war%22%20nemesis%20st.%20ives&f=false
("While wooden ships of the same size drew thirteen feet, Nemesis drew only
six feet of water fully loaded, which gave her a decided advantage in
riverine operations")

* windward (n): "direction from which the wind is blowing"
All definitions are from www.m-w.com.
* St Ives Bay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Ives_Bay
("The Stones reef lies about one mile north-west of Godrevy Head and
presents a hazard to navigation - the lighthouse on Godrevy Island warns
mariners of the danger")

St. Ives, Cornwall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Ives,_Cornwall

* The verb "stove" is past and past participle of "stave."

stave: "[vt] to smash a hole in <stove in the boat * * * [vi] archaic : to
become stove in —used of a boat or ship"

* Maputo Bay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maputo_Bay
(formerly Delagoa Bay, Baía da Lagoa (in Portuguese); is an inlet of the
Indian Ocean on the coast of Mozambique)
* broach (vi): "to veer or yaw dangerously so as to lie broadside to the
waves"
* Bocca Tigris 虎門
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bocca_Tigris
(Bocca Tigris or the Bogue or Humen; include 威遠炮台 and 沙角炮台)

Why the name? Chinese and English?

Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and
phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and
discursive: Hobson-Jobson. Asian Educational Services (New Delhi), 1903 at
page 101.
http://books.google.com/books?id=20pdFRekGvMC&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=Bocca+Tigris+origin&source=bl&ots=9memco7RHD&sig=SKUcuzhdkIB9q-IJCGvIDH0sZE8&hl=en&ei=ArZYTNLCEZSlngeewMCeCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Bocca%20Tig
("BOCCA TIGRIS, n.p. The name applies to the estuary of the Canton River. It
appears to be an inaccurate reproduction of the Portugese Boca do Tigre,
and that to be a rendering of the Chinese name Hu-men, 'Tiger gate.'")

Note: The noun "boca" in both Portugese and Spanish means "mouth." Therefore,
Boca Raton, Florida
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boca_Raton,_Florida
("The literal translation of 'Boca Raton' is 'Mouse Mouth' ('mouse' in
Spanish is 'ratón'). One explanation for the origin is the Spanish word
boca (or mouth) was (and still is) used to describe an inlet and ratón (
literally 'mouse') was used by Spanish sailors to describe rocks that gnawed
at a ship's cable.")
   
* Admiralty (n): "the executive department or officers formerly having
general authority over British naval affairs"

(b) Bruce A. Elleman, Modern Chinese Warfare, 1795-1989. Routledge, 2001,
pages 25-26 (headline: Ships, armament, and artillery in the Opium War)
http://books.google.com/books?id=OjJ8kdqhON8C&pg=PA25&dq=Elleman+nemesis&hl=en&ei=E61YTNiVA4Kw9gTtzrDsBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Quote:

"By contrast, the Chinese war junks, muskets, and military organization,
which were not too far from 'state of the art' at the beginning of the Opium
War, looked woefully outdated by the end of the conflict. China's inability
to either develop its own new weaponry, or to adopt quickly those
improvements devised by the West, proved to be a major cause of its failure.

"One of the best early examples of gunboat diplomacy was the iron ship
Nemesis, the first foreign ship to reach Guangzhou by the 'Macao Passage.' *
* * Because she was flat-bottomed, the normal draft of Nemesis was 6 feet.

"A second noteworthy improvement was teh technologicall advance in armaments
, including ship-mounted shell guns, mobile artillery, and small arms. These
advancements came into play most noticeably in an engagement on 7 January
1841, when the British forces easily subdued the Bogue fortresses, which the
Chiese thought were impregnable.


* Chuanbi 穿鼻 (近東莞虎門，係由海經珠江入廣東省城必經之地). Zh.wikipedia.
org
* Sanyuanli 三元裡 (traditional Chinese)/三元哩 (simplified), at 東莞.

(c) Robert Marks, The origins of the modern world: a global and ecological
narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century. Rowman &
Littlefield, 2007, at page 116.
("It [Nemesis] soon saw action in operations in the Pearl River, destroying
several Chinese war junks because of its ability to maneuver against the
current and wind and its shallow draft,
and it played a major role in 1842 in blockading the intersection of the
Yangzi River and Grand Canal, which carried much of the waterborne commerce
of the empire in central and north China and then in threatening to bombard
China's southern capital at Nanjing.")

【 在 choi 的大作中提到: 】
: Of course, John Maynard Keynes developed the concept of GDP in 1940. BGDP figures before that year were estimated.
: (1) It is true that China's GDP (calculated by PPP) was bigger than the West
: and Russia combined--and twice as big as India (the next economic power in
: (以下引言省略...)

--

choi

本文通过一路BBS站telnet客户端发布

1) In my original posting: US had 2.5 million people in 1976. I forgot to say
that at the time, population of United Kingdom was four times as big.

(2) In the second posting: I said HEIC sent around 2,000 in the expedition to
China in the First Opium War, I forgot to mention this.

Piers Brendon, Like Rome Before the Fall? Not Yet. New York Times, February
25, 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/opinion/25brendon.html?_r=1&ref=joseph_r_jr_biden
("Similarly [like Rome], the British Empire was a weak empire. It was
acquired thanks to certain temporary advantages, and run on a shoestring. It
governed the multitudes of India with 1,250 civil servants, and garrisoned
its African colonies with a thousand policemen and soldiers, not one above
the rank of colonel.")

【 在 choi 的大作中提到: 】
: (5)
: (a) In my view, Qing Dynasty's faults started the war.
: * First Opium War
: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
: (Lin Zexu "asked that all opium be surrendered to the Chinese authorities *
: (以下引言省略...)

--

choi

本文通过一路BBS站telnet客户端发布

(1) Regarding the last paragraph in the original:

"(c) And the American Revolution did not cost much, either.

Elizabeth Bumiller, The War: A Trillion Can Be Cheap. New York Times, July
25, 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/weekinreview/25bumiller.html?scp=3&sq=iraq%20war%20afghanistan%20revolution%20congressional&st=cse
(Congressional Research Service said American Revolution cost $2.4 billion,
compared with $4.10 trillion for World War II (both figures were inflation-
adjusted) and $1.15 trillion for Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far.)

(2) I tried hard before, and I tried again just now. The report
"The cost of major U.S. wars" by Congressional Research Service (CRS) in
late July 2010, was not released into public domain. After all, the Service
serves the Congress.

The $2.4 billion is 2010 dollars, not 1776. The NY Times report did not
include war cost to GDP ration for American Revolution, presumably because
the CRS report did not have that, either. I thought there were two reasons:
(a) there was no federal government in the War for American Revolution;
(b) the thirteen colonies paid the war cost. This explained why the 13
colonies clamored for and got the Eleventh Amendment (a citizen can not sue
a state in federal court). The war debt was said to be crippling to the
colonies; that is why they were afraid of being sued in the newly
established federal judiciary. But the newly founded federal government
offered to take over the war debt.




【 在 choi 的大作中提到: 】
: Of course, John Maynard Keynes developed the concept of GDP in 1940. BGDP figures before that year were estimated.
: (1) It is true that China's GDP (calculated by PPP) was bigger than the West
: and Russia combined--and twice as big as India (the next economic power in
: (以下引言省略...)

--