Opioid selling Indian opium which was smuggled into China in defiance of Chinese government bans. This led to the First (1839–1842) and Second Opium Wars (1856–1860) between China and Britain. In the 19th century, two major scientific advances were made that had far-reaching effects. Around 1804, German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner isolated morphine from opium. He described its crystallization, structure, and pharmacological properties in a well-received paper in 1817. Morphine was the first alkaloid to be isolated from any medicinal plant, the beginning of modern scientific drug discovery. The second advance, nearly fifty years later, was the refinement of the hypodermic needle
Foreign aid to China Foreign aid to China Foreign aid to the People's Republic of China since 1949 has taken the form of both bilateral and multilateral official development assistance and official aid to individual recipients. In 1978, China and Japan normalized their diplomatic relations. Deng Xiaoping had been to Japan to sign a treaty and to look at its development. As a result, China decided to borrow 220 million dollars in soft loans from Japan when the amount of foreign currency preparation was 167 million dollars. China poured that money into social infrastructures. In 2001 it received US$1.4 billion in foreign aid, or