Danny Jones

And when you drill down into that, you understand that the Chinese and the Communist Party promotes this idea of the century of humiliation.

So it all goes back to the opium wars when the Chinese empire was the most powerful empire on earth.

Very sophisticated technologically, artistically, culturally, all those ways.

And they were basically peaceful.

And the East India Trading Company and the British showed up and they wanted to trade with China at the beginning of the 18th century.

And the Chinese, the Europeans loved Chinese silk and tea in particular and porcelain, but the Chinese didn't really value anything that was coming from the West.

They felt that all their products were superior.

So what the British, what they discovered was that, well, maybe we could send opium that they grew in India to China and check that out.

And it turned out that the Chinese have almost like a genetic weakness like the Native Americans have for alcohol, they have for opium.

And very quickly, opium addiction became like a huge, huge problem in China.

And something like estimates as high as over 20% of the whole population was addicted to opium.

And the Chinese emperor in the mid-19th century said, hey, that's it.

I'm not allowing any more opium imports into my country.

And the British and the French said, no.

We need that money.

The whole British empire was based on opium sales.

I mean, they were like the Sinaloa cartel of their day, right?

And so they fought two wars, two opium wars where they sent troops into China

defeated them because they had better technology.

And they basically negotiated two treaties that allowed, forced the Chinese to open up their certain ports to opium imports.