Opium Wars

But as I did my coursework, I kind of became increasingly drawn to the more modern era.

And as I did a lot of reading in Qing and Republican era history in the course of my PhD work, I really came to see sort of this period from, say, the Opium Wars into the PRC period into the Mao era as kind of a long sort of dynastic tradition.

And, you know, when we look at sort of this survey of Chinese history, we see these kinds of dynastic transitions, you know, take like a century or more to really kind of like, really, you know, kind of reached their fruition and and so when i looked at that i was kind of drawn to to to the prc period and really interested i was interested a lot in communications and and the way that sort of networks of communication you know worked like across across cultures across nations across regions And I was kind of fascinated by the way that tourism was part of that.

And so reading a few travelogues of people who had visited China during that period sort of led me to start questioning what's the sort of backstory? These people are coming and visiting, but what are the people on the other side sort of thinking about this process and how are they preparing for that?

And we've gotta think of that 180 years, it included the Belle Époque in sort of mostly in Paris, but more than just in Paris, where people were drinking and drugging and having a lovely time, dancing and all those things of the Belle Époque, which I love the fashions from then.

And then remember the absinthe fe- fairies, and that is also in this last 180 years, the opium trade, the Opium Wars as well, the growth of pubs and bars, especially when they stuck them outside factories.

We had the Roaring '20s.

We had the Swinging '60s.

Number one, Madagascar, uh, you know, another one of these African countries definitely has some, uh, you know, I'm not going to claim that they are directly interrelated with, uh, you know, China specifically, but there's definitely certain things going on there that, you know, you might want to look into later, but, um, the treasury department's press release only specifies that準備 guarantee is a Chinese language, uh, application right so that one is more broad lots of southeast asian countries speak chinese understand it right it is effectively a lingua franca if you think about english and then chinese is probably pretty close there to number two But the DOJ specifically says Chinese-run scam compounds.

I'm not going to say that this is Opium Wars V2 or maybe it's V3, whatever it is, but I do think that you're seeing this large economy being built around this kind of economic extraction, social damage, and that's going to obviously be a point of conflict between the United States and China broadly.

And then the second piece here is that they specifically thank Tether for proactively assisting in their investigation.

So, you know, dollar stablecoin issuers have, you know, an interest, a vested interest, ensuring they have access to dollar rails, working directly with the U.S. government to make sure that, you know, they're safe.

Essentially, the Chinese were under siege from a variety of imperial powers.

Britain and France had certain rights that they'd got in the Opium Wars, the late 19th century.

But the really major pressure in the 1930s came from Japan, who had invaded Manchuria, the northeastern part of China in 1931.

They'd already had big presence.

Of course, folks know that immigrants from China came for the gold rush to California.

But I would say, even to understand their experience, we have to go back to the opium wars.

So Britain had a trade imbalance with China once.

Again, the U.S.'s trade imbalance with China, of course, is not the first because the British were voracious consumers of tea.