By the late 18th century, people at all levels of British society, from the very wealthy to the destitute, were addicted to tea, imported from China mostly by the Portuguese. The British wanted to know more about China, this distant, indirect trading partner to whose product they were addicted. The Chinese seemed to be calling the shots in trade deals, demanding payment in silver, running a large trade imbalance and forbidding traders from leaving highly restricted areas of China or learning Chinese. The British, recovering from the loss of the U.S. but energized by their military prowess in the Seven Years War, decided they needed to know more about the Chinese so they could negotiate at least as equals. In 1793 King George III sent a colonial administrator, George Macartney, on Britain's first diplomatic mission to the ruler of China, the Qianlong Emperor. To Macartney's suprise, he was expected to kowtow (literally: "bang the head") before the emperor, an act in which "supplicants," as representatives of trading nations were termed, had to kneel and bow down until their foreheads touched the floor, as obvious expression of subservience. This was considered appropriate even for another ruler's representative because the emperor was the "Son of Heaven," the representative of the divine on earth, and all other monarchs and leaders on Earth were subordinate to him. Macartney refused to kowtow because he believed that George III, though by then a "constitutional monarch" who shared power with Parliament, was certainly at least an equal ruler to any other. The mission was a failure, and 50 years later the British invaded China in the Opium Wars, forcing China to accept imports of opium and widespread addiction to it. The history is basically of two warring drug gangs.
The obsession with trade balances and the question of who is supplicating whom is reminiscent of today, as President Trump imposes a 34% tariff on Chinese imports and the Chinese reply in kind. The disruption will be severe, affecting Chinese produced electronics, pharmaceuticals, auto parts and many other addictive elements of modern culture.
