A correspondent and I had the following discussion, which ends up with a comment about traditional Chineseeconomics and the Great Divergence, both of which pertain to the Opium Wars:

Correspondent:

1. Until you are an Elon Musk or Bill Gates you are treated like an enemy of the government.  At what point does the government become your friend?  IRS is hounding American small and midsized companies all over the world.  

2. Thailand has off limits businesses for Thais and foreigners.  One is brewing beer.  You can sell your own beer outside of Thailand and on your own premises

I do wonder if governments hold down those who could compete.  

Yours truly: It’s true, once you’re big enough to pay to play with the politicians, you are probably going to be left somewhat alone. I think Apple pays something like a 2% tax rate in Ireland. The European Union being notoriously crooked, particularly the southern half, no doubt there are some behind the door shenanigans going on all over the place. Bribing foreign public officials used to be widely legal. Vive la France! But even then, I bet the bribes Apple has to pay to take advantage of favorable loopholes doesn’t amount to very much percentagewise.

As mentioned previously, when representative Weiner was finally dethroned for sending chickspictures of his schlong, I remember construction magnate Donald Trump saying on television, in so many words, that he was happy he would no longer have to pay off dicks like Weiner to get his construction projects up and going. We saw how much Obama’s Senate seat went for in Illinois (I think the bidding was something like $1 million when Blagojevich got caught) after he graduated to president. It’s always been this way though; in the past it was even worse. Abraham Lincoln of course stated publicly that there was no other way to getanything done in government unless bribery and influence peddling wereinvolved.

Governments always held people down. And China was a big malefactor in this regard throughout thecenturies, which is why the industrial revolution took place in Europe. However, the only reason it could take place in Europe was because there was no Roman Empire anymore and the place was fractured into different competing states. As such business people and intellectuals could flee from country to country when their one nation’s laws became too oppressive and their rulers too grasping. This is largely what the intellectual and financial/business history of Europe boils down to during the Middle Ages: a series of exoduses of people and their fiscal and cultural capital from one state to the next. For Chinese entrepreneurs and thinkers, options were much more limited, as there was usually nowhere else to go with a comparable level of civilization. 

Off Topic, but worth a gander: one of these is a lovely photo of one of the precursors to China's Great Wall. The Great Wall ruins of the ancient Chu state here are seen in Yexian county, Pingdingshan, Central China's Henan province. They look rather similar to Hadrian's Wall. I'll let you figure out which is which.

From China Daily: Bringing China's treasures home

The lost treasures of Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace, the very words have the ring of myth. And yet, the treasures existed. The destruction and looting of the park by British and French troops in 1860, during the Second Opium War, was described at the time by the author Victor Hugo as: "Two robbers breaking into a museum, devastating, looting and burning, leaving laughing hand-in-hand with their bags full of treasures."

Well, first of all, robbers don't devastate. Vandals do. Ditto for looting and burning. Since when do robbers burn? Since when do they laugh while they leave? They sneak out. They're robbers. Not vandals. So much for the venerable wordsmith, who can't distinguish between stealing and plundering.

Secondly, novelists are quite often clueless when it comes to history or politics. There are few classes of more reliably illogical information workers after all, with their professional eagerness to reduce the complexities of interesting real-world situations to the cliched banalities of the best-selling moral combats they churn out for a living and sell to housewives (fiction's primary consumers, last time I looked. For what it's worth, I fit HL Mencken's definition of a historian: a failed novelist. ha...).

After the ransacking by French and British troops in 1860, the royal garden was looted a second time in 1900 when the Eight-Power Allied Forces invaded Beijing, then again a decade later during the warlord period and again during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, all of which inevitably worsened the situation and made tracing the treasures extremely difficult.

I don't have time right now to offer my own analysis, but I'll leave you with the left-leaning, and probably Marxist, Jack Beeching's account. For this will give you an idea of the complexity of the situation on the ground and why I'm so opposed to the moral combat approach to history.

Page 305 from Beeching's The Chinese Opium Wars:
On 17 September Lord Elgin had noted in his journal:'I rode out very early this morning, to see my general before he started, and to give him a hint about the looting, which has been very bad here. He disapproves of it is much as I do...' but, on 18 September 1860, in the enthusiasm of victory, the town of Chang-chia-wan was given over to the troops to be plundered, 'as a punishment for any treachery'.

There was treachery and by this time Elgin was starting to engage in a British version of Sherman's march to Georgia during the US Civil War. Which is to say, punitive destruction of local infrastructure, without killing people. Though with the British effort, there was also looting and rape.

'No steps were taken to prevent looting,' noted Roberts Swinhoe, 'as the town was a capture in war, and hence lawful booty.' Some of the troops enjoyed smashing things up, others had more of an eye to the main chance. 'A rare old house, with its exquisite carving and hangings, and its rooms filled with curiosities too big to carry away, was completely ransacked,' Swinhoe went on. 'Our people were in this case the destroyers.'

The reason Swinhoe writes, "in this case," was because in many the other cases the destroyers were local Chinese or part of a huge swarm of Chinese camp followers that settled like vultures on towns the British attacked. Ditto for the Summer Palace. There's a long tradition of gangs of bandits doing this in China. Probably Europe too. But I'll get into that at another time.

More from Beeching: The mostpitiable sufferers in Chang-chia-wan were the Chinese women. One house broken into was full of females, ranging in age from 50 to 2. Sticky tins of opium lay on the floor, the air stank of the raw opium and mouths were smeared with it. The women folk, rather than be dishonored, had done their best to commit collective suicide. 'The more conscious of them,' said Swinhoe, 'beating their breasts, condemned the opium for its slow work, crying out, "let us die; we do not wish to live."' Whether they wished to live or not, a sympathetic chaplain fetched an army surgeon, and with the help of his stomach pump their lives were restored to all but one of them.
Shaken by this turn of events, Baron Gros wrote his foreign ministry in Paris, 'I was heartbroken by the acts of vandalism which I saw committed by our soldiers as well as by those of our allies, each delighted at the chance of heaping up on the other the blame for abominable deeds for which all deserve punishment.'
On 21 September the allied armies advanced from plundered Chang-chia-wan, outflanking T'ungchow. Authority once more imposed its will. When citizens in T'untchow attacked and killed two of a gang of Canton coolies who were trying to plunder a shop, and gave the others up to the British, the guilty coolies were publicly flogged. Three coolies attempting rape in the field were sentenced by Gen. Hope Grant - the two accomplices got 100 strokes of the cat a piece, laid on by the Provost-Sergeant, the worst villain was then hanged. But whatever recourse might be made to methods used latterly in India, the damage was done, both to discipline and morale, and Baron Gross has graciously put his finger on the nub of it.
British and French troops could always put the blame for bad actions upon each other.

So who does one blame? Manchus for treachery, English and French for being violent hypocrites, or the indigenous bandits?
Were the Europeans imperialists? Well so were the Manchus. Were the Europeans violent? Not half as violent as the Manchus. Etc, etc, etc...
Blame gets you nowhere. It's a hindrance to understanding. The opposite of understanding. A form of stupidity incarnate.