Alec Ash is a writer based in China. He is the author of Wish Lanterns (Picador, 2016), about the lives of young Chinese, a BBC Book of the Week. His articles have appeared in The Economist, Dissent, The Sunday Times, and elsewhere. He is a contributing author to the book of reportage Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (University of California Press, 2012) and co-editor of the anthology While We’re Here (Earnshaw Books, 2015). Ash was Managing Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel. He is currently working on a new book from Dali, Yunnan.
The Opium War, understood as the start of an unprecedented crisis inflicted on China by foreigners, is a key source of political legitimacy for China’s contemporary ruling party. The official Communist historiographical narrative of the Opium War relates that it brought on a national emergency which different generations of Chinese reformers—from...