Is Julia Lovell spinning a web to deceive about the First Opium War (1839 to 1842)?
ACN Newswire posted a press release recently announcing the pending publication of The Opium War by Julia Lovell (available September 2011).
Lovell’s reason for writing this book was to “see whether things really were as black and white as the Chinese textbooks seem to say it was.”
“Seem!” Doesn’t Lovell know what the Chinese textbooks say?
If you check to see who runs ACN Newswire, you will discover it is an associate company of Japan Corporation News K.K., which may mean nothing or everything when it comes to a nonfiction book that aims to make the Chinese look as guilty as the British regarding the Opium Wars.
Julia Lovell says, “It wasn’t a clear-cut story of innocent Chinese on the one hand, and the British invaders on the other.”
British author Julia Lovell talks about writing her book.
“But even if you look at the time, what’s going on during the time of the war itself, the Chinese are supplying the British, they are navigating for the British, they are spying for the British, for a fee of course, so there is an extraordinary pragmatism,” Lovell says in the ACN Newswire press release. “They don’t necessarily feel the loyalty to the idea of the Chinese imperial centre or the emperor or anything else, they will go with where the smart money is. And the British couldn’t have won the war without this assistance.”
There are two key phrases of Lovell’s proving her theory is more complicated than she makes it sound. The first phrase says, “for a fee of course” and the second, “They didn’t necessarily feel loyalty to the idea of the Chinese imperial center or the emperor or anything else…”
In fact, little is “clear-cut” about the Opium Wars. Since the Qing Dynasty was not ruled by the Han Chinese (which represents 90% of the population), but was ruled by a brutal Manchu minority, many Han Chinese probably felt little or no loyalty to the Qing emperor.
Continued on August 16, 2011 in Spinning a Web – Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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