Climbing the ranks of the Communist Party while working in a coastal province, Xi Jinping \u2014 the man now leading China\u2019s push to overtake the United States \u2014 kept a poem on his desk that helps explain why he has fought back fiercely against President Trump in their trade war.<\/p>\n
The poem, a patriotic ode to the sanctity of national interest, was written by Lin Zexu, an imperial commissioner from Fujian, the same coastal province, who oversaw China\u2019s foreign commerce in the early 19th century. He is celebrated today in Chinese textbooks and speeches by Mr. Xi as a national hero for standing up to Britain, the superpower of the day, in a confrontation over trade.<\/p>\n
That confrontation, triggered by Lin\u2019s efforts to halt opium smuggling, ended in disaster for China \u2014 a crushing military defeat that gave Britain control of Hong Kong and, in China\u2019s telling, started a \u201ccentury of humiliation,\u201d a shameful stain whose removal President Xi has set as one of his most important goals since becoming China\u2019s leader in 2012.<\/p>\n
Past shame looms large as Mr. Xi prepares for a meeting on Thursday in South Korea<\/a> with President Trump, highlighting a gulf between the two leaders that stretches wider than their turbulent tiffs over tariffs, rare earth minerals and soybeans.<\/p>\n President Trump \u201csees China as the winner of the international modern order, but Xi Jinping sees China as its victim,\u201d said Julia Lovell, the author of The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of Modern China, adding that these contrasting views can lead to \u201cprofound instability\u201d in these talks.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know how much of a student of history Trump is, but it is very important that he understand the emotional importance of this history in China,\u201d said Ms. Lovell, a China scholar at the University of London\u2019s Birbeck College. \u201cThis history is shaping China\u2019s actions and strategies in the here and now.\u201d<\/p>\n For Mr. Xi, Lin\u2019s legacy carries a dual message: China must never bow to foreign pressure, but it also must never again negotiate from a position of weakness. Lin\u2019s defiant stand failed because Qing China lagged far behind the West in military and economic power. Mr. Xi\u2019s strategy of pushing back against Mr. Trump suggests he believes China has finally accumulated the strength to succeed where Lin could not.<\/p>\n Celebrating China\u2019s resurgent power last month with a massive military parade in Beijing, he said from the rostrum of Tiananmen Gate that his country had \u201cput an end to China\u2019s national humiliation of suffering successive defeats at the hands of foreign aggressors in modern times.\u201d<\/p>\n Beijing has also bristled at what it sees as efforts by American leaders, including Mr. Trump, to cast China in the role of 19th-century Western opium traders with accusations that it is aggravating America\u2019s drug problem by exporting chemicals used in the manufacture of fentanyl. Mr. Trump said last week that this would be his \u201cfirst question\u201d for Mr. Xi when they meet. China accuses Washington of using the drug problem to \u201cblackmail\u201d China.<\/p>\n The 19th-century showdown between China and the West began, much as today\u2019s did, with mounting Western anger over a huge Chinese trade surplus. The country exported large quantities of tea, rhubarb, porcelain, silk and other goods but imported little in return.<\/p>\n Britain turned to opium to narrow the gap, with Western merchants selling growing quantities of the drug to China despite an official ban on the narcotic declared in 1729.<\/p>\n Commissioner Lin arrived in the southern port of Guangzhou, then known as Canton, in 1839, with orders from the emperor in Beijing to stop the opium trade and restore Qing dynasty finances, which had been upended by the outflow of silver to pay for drugs.<\/p>\n Lin\u2019s determination to resist British power made him a heroic figure of resistance to Western bullying for generations of modern Chinese leaders since the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911.<\/p>\n He is best known in China for confiscating and then destroying foreign opium worth hundreds of millions of dollars at current prices in trenches dug on the bank of the Pearl River at Humen near Guangzhou. Foreigners who witnessed the destruction, Lin informed the emperor, \u201cfeel heartily ashamed.\u201d<\/p>\n China\u2019s public security minister, Wang Xiaohong, who has been at the center of arguments with Washington over fentanyl, this week visited Humen and a museum there celebrating Lin\u2019s anti-drug actions in the 19th century. The minister, vowing to carry out \u201ca victorious people\u2019s war on drugs in the new era,\u201d said all Chinese need to \u201cuphold and carry forward the spirit of Lin Zexu.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Xi has embraced the Qing official\u2019s example with particular vigor, presiding during his 17 years in Fujian over the renovation of sites connected to Lin, including the house where he was born and his family\u2019s memorial hall.<\/p>\n The hall is now a sprawling exhibition complex highlighting Western perfidy, Lin\u2019s righteous defiance and what a carved stone in a leafy courtyard describes as \u201cChina\u2019s incessant struggle against foreign aggression.\u201d In keeping with Mr. Xi\u2019s view that China needs to be open to the West but on its own terms, the exhibits also praise Lin for promoting Western science and technology as a way to strengthen China.<\/p>\n Lin\u2019s birthplace in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian, has become the Bethlehem of modern Chinese nationalism, the small room in which he is said to have been born the centerpiece of a state-sponsored heritage trail feting his unyielding patriotic spirit.<\/p>\n \u201cI am so proud of my ancestor,\u201d said Lin Yanyi, a seventh-generation descendant who works for the Lin Zexu Foundation, which manages the birthplace. She said he had never spurned \u201cgood things from the West\u201d but always put China\u2019s interests first. <\/p>\n Mao Linli, a Fuzhou historian and adviser to the foundation, said that the lesson from Lin\u2019s showdown with Britain is clear: Never bend to foreign pressure or concede the moral high ground.<\/p>\n He said that were he alive today, Lin, who served in Guangzhou from 1839 to 1841, would never accept American demands. \u201cHe always stood on the side of right,\u201d Mr. Mao said. \u201cAmerica started this fight, not China. America should stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n