Opium Wars Opium Wars The Opium Wars were two wars in the mid-19th century involving China and the British Empire over the British trade of opium and China's sovereignty. The clashes included the First Opium War (1839–1842) and the Second Opium War (1856–1860). The wars and events between them weakened the Qing dynasty and forced China to trade with the other parts of the world. In 1820, China's economy was the largest in the world, according to British economist Angus Maddison. Within a decade after the end of the Second Opium War, China's share of global GDP had fallen by half. In
Responsibility to protect in China risk of becoming victims of atrocity. China remains poorly regarded for its handling of internal dissent, especially the brutal crackdowns in Tibet, Xinjiang and the Tiananmen Square massacre. Mass atrocity is not foreign to China. Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists killed some 10 million people from 1927 to 1949 in group-targeted violence, while Mao Zedong’s communists killed a further 7 million from 1934 onwards, not including the tens of millions who died following the famine of the Great Leap Forward or the violence of the Cultural Revolution, or the 300,000 Chinese slaughtered by Japanese during the Rape of Nanking. More recently, China