BY MAO DENG PHOOEY, NARCOSTATE CORRESPONDENT

FIRST THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT said that Britain should give the Falklands back to Argentina; now a telephone survey across the old Middle Kingdom has revealed that quite a large minority of Chinese people feel that Britain should be labelled a drug cartel for pouring drugs into China in the Nineteenth Century.

“Forty per cent of Chinese people think that Britain never properly answered for its role as a narco-state in the 19th Century,” says Yuri Malenkov, a Russian data expert who lives in exile in Hong Kong. “Most British aren’t even aware that their good fortune was founded in part by running drugs. And of course waging aggressive war on the Chinese along the way. You add drug running to the slavery it was involved in for centuries, and the optics aren’t good. Despite what the Imperial Apologists say. It’s all very awkward for the British now. When they were a world power, they could keep a lid on it; but their decline means that less and less of the world listens to London any more.”

Contacted for a comment, the Beijing Government said it understood its people’s sense of frustration and released this statement: “The Mexican and Columbian drug cartels, even the Irish Kinahan mob, they are rightly held in contempt and loathing, but the British appear to have gotten away with it. Does that send the right message to the world?”

The British began to run opium grown in India to China so that they might acquire enough silver – the only currency the Chinese Empire would accept – to buy Chinese tea, which was in high demand in Britain. The Opium Wars that went with the drug trade are seen in China as the beginning of a century of humiliation for China.

“The Chinese don’t forget this,” says Malenkov. “It always the problem with empire, like fame: on the way down you meet everyone you ever stepped on on the way up.”

When informed of Chinese feelings, a British Foreign and Commonwealth Office official remarked: “Oh, really, do they? It’s all such a long long time ago. Best to look forward. Like we always do.”