Like every Thursday:The just and the legal

Like every Thursday

Ricardo Blume

 
RICARDO BLUME
Newspaper articles
(This is the compilation of some articles published in the newspaper El Comercio of Lima Peru between 1981 and 1988)

The just and the legal
the first disappointments that I remember as a child are very different in nature and importance. From discovering that there was no Santa Claus to the awful revelation that people die.
One of the biggest deceptions that I suffered as an adult, and which I still do not recover despite the years passed, I had when a lawyer friend of mine told me that just  it is not the same thing that the legal thing.
I could not believe it. I had a trial (first and last of my life, I play wood) and when he informed me that there was a point where I was right but could not defend myself, I could not but say, but that's not fair!
It was then that my friend, a brilliant lawyer, took the trouble to explain to me that one thing was fair and the other legal. It was a blow. The breaking of an illusion.
Over the years and disappointments I have been able to verify a thousand times that my friend told the truth. However, the wound that it produced has not healed and it is reluctant to heal. These days (regardless of whether or not the legality of a measure adopted by the judiciary is approved (we are witnessing a clear confrontation between what is just and what is legal), what is fair is what is fixed for justice and reason. prescribed by law and according to it, justice is the virtue that is inclined to give each one what belongs to him, equity, what must be done according to law and reason, justice is something that is above We are an aspiration that we tend to.
The laws, on the other hand, are made by men. Tending to achieve justice, naturally.

 But if the just is right, the legal (by the mess of laws created by men) is full of shortcuts and twists and turns where justice can slip.
As everyone can suppose, I am a layman when it comes to legality. That is what the lawyers, jurists, and even pettifoggers are for; all this is synonymous with lawyer.

As laymen  therefore, ( ignorant, illiterate, unlearned and incompetent) I allow myself to say that while I understand that legality must be the sustenance and the path to justice, the just should never be sacrificed for the legal.
I believe in the probity and rectitude of people more than in the attachment to legalism and formality. An honest and just judge is for me a more perfect and efficient institution than a whole courthouse full of legal officers and bureaucrats of justice.
I write many days before this note is published. I do not know if the matter that motivates this reflection will end or will have ended.
If justice or legality will have triumphed. But this is what worries me:
Is it legal for an offender sentenced to fifteen years in prison for a crime against humanity, such as illicit drug trafficking, to be released in such a short time?
Possibly. But it does not seem fair to me. It is not fair in itself. Nor is it fair in relation to other cases. The law must be the same for everyone, white’s people or high landers civilians and uniformed.
This is not the delicate issue that is presumed to be someone who is guilty but who cannot legally be proved. It is a proven and sentenced crime.
That the legal intricacies allow that sentence to be concealed is what worries. And what would prove, flagrantly, that one thing is just and the other legal. But that should not be the case. Jus means right. And right means straight. Something that does not admit zigzags, what goes directly.
When legality is opposed to justice, in a clamorous case like this, an injustice occurs within the law.
I believe that there is nothing that harms public morals more than allowing a fact of this nature. I understand that getting the right thing to coincide with the legal is not always possible. But towards that we must tend.
Let divergence be the exception, not the rule.
At least, an ignorant, unlettered, unlearned and incompetent in legal issues like me, is reluctant to accept that the just and legal can become opposite things.
Just as I refuse to believe that a kind of genocide of youth, like a narco-trafficker, can continue to belong with a military institution with impunity.
The author. March 13, 1986

with affection

Ruben

History: Modern China and the legacy of the Opium Wars1-e

Historical stories1-e

What is history? A simple fable that we have all accepted (Napoleon

Modern China and the legacy of the Opium Wars

RN

By Monique Ross and Annabelle Quince for Rear Vision

Updated 3 Sep 2018

The Opium Wars were a pivotal — and humiliating — juncture in China's history.

The two armed conflicts, waged over sovereignty, trade and opium almost 180 years ago, pit the richest empire on the planet against Britain.

The result for China was catastrophic.

It lost its standing as the most powerful force in Asia, and its economic wealth. It was opened to Western influence, and all but carved up by foreign powers.

"That page of Chinese history was one of humiliation and sorrow," China's president Xi Jinping said in 2017.

Experts say the legacy of the wars continues to influence China's foreign policies, and its desire to reunite all former Chinese territories, including Taiwan.

So to really understand modern China, you have to start with the Opium Wars.

A tea-fuelled trade imbalance

At the time of the wars, which unfolded between 1839 and 1860, China was ruled by the Qing Dynasty.

Rear Vision explores the Opium Wars: what started them, how they unfolded, and why they still matter today.

Yang-Wen Zheng, a professor of Chinese history at the University of Manchester, says the empire had amassed large amounts of territory and wealth.

"Qing China was rather powerful because it had a large population, it had sucked in a lot of silver from international trade, hence [it was] very wealthy," she says.

China mainly traded porcelain, silk and spices like tea — the daily drug of choice for the English.

But it wasn't really interested in what Britain had to offer in return, mostly furs and textiles.

"That caused a huge trade imbalance and trade deficit," Professor Zheng says.

The imbalance grew until the later 18th century, when Britain found something the Chinese people did want: opium.

The illegal drug being used by China's elite suddenly became accessible to the masses.

"What the British did is they fuelled the consumption by supplying more, by making it possible for the middle classes to join in," Professor Zheng says.

"You could say that opium smoking in the 1780s, 1790s, was like a spark. By the 1830s it was a fire, it was a wild fire."

From the early 1820s onwards, the balance of trade started to shift into Britain's favour.

The Qing tried to stop the opium trade, worried about the social impact of the drug — and also about the outflow of silver.

"Silver is pouring out of China, that's when the state gets very alarmed about what is happening," explains Robert Bickers, a professor of history at the University of Bristol.

Smuggling crackdown sparks a war

In 1839, China appointed an official to crack down on the smuggling trade in southern Guangzhou.

"He first orders all the drug supplies held by foreigners in Guangzhou to be handed over to him," Professor Bickers says.

"And until the drug is handed over to him, he holds all the British traders hostage.

"And from that perfectly legitimate act on his part unfolds a series of moves which lead to the dispatch of the British ships and soldiers to fight what we call the first Opium War."

Even though the Qing Empire had a larger army, it was defeated in 1842.

The British argued that the war was not about the right to trade opium, but rather the right to free trade across China.

The defeat of the Chinese led to the Treaty of Nanjing, the first of a series of treaties imposed on the Qing Dynasty.

"[It] opened five further ports to British trade and residents, and ceded the island of Hong Kong in perpetuity to the British as an island enclave," Professor Bickers says.

Once Britain had opened the door, France and America also came knocking.

"What the treaty did is it opened China for grabs," Professor Zheng says.

China in Focus

The rise of China has everyone talking. In a special series, RN examines Australia's relationship to China, and its rising prominence in global affairs.

With that came foreigners with new ideas — and that turned out to be a big problem for the Qing.

In the 1840s, there was a massive rebellion in the south-west, led by a man who styled himself as the younger brother of Jesus Christ.

"These were indigenous Chinese Protestant Christians who went into battle chanting the 10 Commandments, who had their own translation of the Bible," Professor Bickers says.

"[They] rolled up from the south-west, conquered central China, set up a capital in Nanjing, and almost dislodged the Qing Dynasty."

The rebellion lasted for 14 years.

"It's probably the bloodiest civil war in recorded human history," Professor Bickers says.

"Tens of millions of people died as a result of displacement, famine, conflict, and most people overseas had never heard of it

"It has a direct link to the arrival of foreign ideas and foreigners on the China coast."

A second conflict erupts

All the while, despite remaining illegal, the opium trade in China flourished; none of the treaties even mentioned the drug.

"I would say from the 1850s, opium consumption was destroying the fabric of society," Professor Zheng says.

"Now almost all the classes, top to middle, lower middle classes even, are consuming and some are becoming addicts."

In 1856, the second Opium War began.

"[If unfolded] because of the continued frustrations of some British officials and British traders at their failure to ... penetrate the China market," Professor Bickers says.

"They felt that they were not respected by Qing officials. They felt that the real market was always a bit further away from them."

When Chinese authorities seized a ship suspected of smuggling, the British consul took the opportunity to effectively begin a war.

It was bloodier and far more damaging for the Qing than the first, and eventually saw British and French forces march on China's capital in late 1860.

The Summer Palace was looted and burned down.

"The Chinese have quite deliberately left ruins there, a wasteland, to educate their young people: this is what happens if you don't love the motherland," says John Wong, an emeritus professor of History at the University of Sydney.

"They used that as a patriotic education campaign."

Dividing up China

After China's defeat, new treaties were signed, opening more ports to foreign trade.

And the pain for China didn't end there.

"All the powers wanted to have a share. This was historically called the scramble for concessions," Professor Wong says.

"Britain would say 'because of Hong Kong, the Pearl River Basin is my sphere of influence'. Further to the west, the French say, 'well, we've got Vietnam, and therefore the Red River Basin of south China is our sphere of influence'.

"The British say 'Shanghai is a very important commercial centre of ours, so we claim the whole of the Yangtze River Basin to be our sphere of influence'.

"Germany got Shandong province and tried to extend it along the Yellow River. Russia claimed Manchuria and what is now Chinese Turkestan."

The existing Chinese governments continued to operate in those regions, but under the watch of the foreign powers.

An enduring legacy

The defeat of the Qing Empire in the Opium Wars was a key factor in their downfall, and the rise of the Communist Party.

Professor Zheng says a "sense of injury" remains, and influences China's actions to this day.

"The Chinese regime have used this period of humiliation [and] defeat in the hands of foreigners ... as some kind of legitimacy," she says.

"I think this sense of injury is prompting China to do a lot of things today on the world stage, because it's still angry with the West — because the West never apologised for what it did to China.

"It's an ammunition for the Chinese Government."

Rear Vision puts contemporary events in their historical context, answering the question: "How did it come to this?"

Professor Bicker agrees, but points out there are also other factors at play.

"China's actions today do speak to that legacy, but they are also motivated by its own savvy understanding of geostrategic shifts and geopolitical shifts in the global economy," he says.

"It would be foolish to say that every Chinese leader, administrator, walks around thinking all the time, 'oh, I must extract revenge for the Battle of the Taku Forts in 1860'.

"But at the heart of the way the state articulates itself, especially in the way that younger Chinese people respond to events, China's formerly degraded position is constantly a reference point.

"China can say 'no, China will never be weak again, the Qing was weak, and the Qing threw away China's sovereignty. We won't, we have strength, we will assert ourselves'.

"So it is absolutely bound up into the way Chinese people see the world.

"History is important in China."

With affection,

Ruben

History: Opium trade 1-d

Historical stories1-d

What is history? A simple fable that we have all accepted. Napoleon

 

Opium trade

Opium as a medicinal ingredient was documented in Chinese texts as early as the Tang dynasty, but the recreational usage of the narcotic was limited. As with India, opium (then limited by distance to a dried powder, often drunk with tea or water) was introduced to China and Southeast Asia by Arab merchants. The Ming dynasty banned tobacco as a decadent good in 1640, and opium was seen as a similarly minor issue. The first restrictions on opium were passed by the Qing in 1729 when Madak (a substance made from powdered opium blended with tobacco) was banned. At the time, Madak production used up most of the opium being imported into China, as pure opium was difficult to preserve. Consumption of Javanese opium rose in the 18th century, and after the Napoleonic Wars resulted in the British occupying Java, British merchants became the primary traders in opium. The British realized they could reduce their trade deficit with Chinese manufactories by counter-trading in narcotic opium, and as such efforts were made to produce more opium in the Indian colonies. Limited British sales of Indian opium began in 1781, with exports to China increasing as the East India Company solidified its control over India.^[
The British opium was produced in Bengal and the Ganges River Plain. Rather than develop the Indian opium industry themselves, the British were able to inherit an existing opium industry from the declining Mughal Empire, which had for centuries profited by selling unrefined opium inside the empire. However, unlike the Mughals the British saw opium as a potentially valuable export.^[32] The East India Company itself neither produced nor shipped opium, but did set the horticultural laws allowing for opium cultivation and actively facilitated the transport of the drug.^[25] From Calcutta, the company's Board of Customs, Salt, and Opium concerned itself with quality control by managing the way opium was packaged and shipped. No poppies could be cultivated without the company's permission, and the company banned private businesses from refining opium. All opium in India was sold to the company at a fixed rate, and the company hosted a series of public opium auctions every year from November to March. The difference of the company-set price of raw opium and the sale price of refined opium at auction (minus expenses) was pure profit made by the East India Company.^[21] In addition to securing poppies cultivated on lands under its direct control, the company's board issued licences to the independent princely states of Malwa, where significant quantities of poppies were grown.
By the late 18th century, company and Malwan farmlands (which were traditionally dependent on cotton growing) had been hard hit by the introduction of factory-produced cotton cloth, which used cotton grown in Egypt or the American South. Opium was considered a lucrative replacement, and was soon being auctioned in ever larger amounts in Calcutta.^[21] Private merchants who possessed a company charter (to comply with the British royal charter for Asiatic trade) bid on and acquired goods at the Calcutta auction before sailing to Southern China. British ships brought their cargoes to islands off the coast, especially Lintin Island, where Chinese traders with fast and well-armed small boats took the goods inland for distribution, paying for the opium with silver.^[21] The Qing administration initially tolerated opium importation because it created an indirect tax on Chinese subjects, for increasing the silver supply available to foreign merchants through the sale of opium encouraged Europeans to spend more money on Chinese goods. This policy allowed the British to double tea exports from China to England, thereby profiting the Qing monopoly on tea exports held by the imperial treasury and its agents in Canton.
However, opium usage continued to grow in China, adversely affecting societal stability. From Canton, the habit spread outwards to the North and West, effecting members from every class of Chinese society.This spread led to the Qing government issuing an edict against the drug in 1780, followed by an outright ban in 1796, and an order from the governor of Canton to stop the trade in 1799.^[34] To circumnavigate the increasingly stringent regulations in Canton, foreign merchants bought older ships and converted them into floating warehouses. These ships were anchored off of the Chinese coast at the mouth of the Pearl River in case the Chinese authorities moved against the opium trade, as the ships of the Chinese navy had difficulty operating in open water.^[35] Inbound opium ships would unload a portion of their cargo onto these floating warehouses, where the narcotic was eventually purchased by Chinese opium dealers. By implementing this system of smuggling, foreign merchants could avoid inspection by Chinese officials and prevent retaliation against the trade in legal goods, in which many smugglers also participated.

Despite restrictions, silk and porcelain continued to drive trade through their popularity in Europe, and an insatiable demand for Chinese tea existed in Britain. From the mid-17th century onward around 28 million kilograms of silver were received by China, principally from European powers, in exchange for Chinese Products.

With affection,

Ruben