I found Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland to be an enjoyable film, but a bit underwhelming. There was nothing wondrous about "Underland", as it's known in the film, and no spectacular visuals you might expect from a dream world.
...but one thing that upset me was the ahistorical idea that Alice's little multinational would be "the first to trade with China". The first what to trade with China? Not the first European to trade with China, the Portuguese arrived in Macau in 1535. The British East India Company established a post in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1711.
In 1865, when Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), it was five years past since Britain's victory in the Second Opium War and one year after the end of the Taiping Rebellion and in the middle of the Dungan revolt, a rebellion of the Hui, Uighers, and other Muslim minority groups in China (the Taiping Rebellion was actually lead by a Christian convert, Hóng Xiùquán 洪秀全, who proclaimed himself the brother of Christ).
The Opium Wars were largely result of the efforts of the British East India Company trying to correct its trade imbalance through getting the Chinese addicted to opium from India. Like today, this MNC had a huge deficit with China, there was a high demand for Chinese goods, silks, porcelain, and tea. The "Canton System" limited Foreign Direct Investment to Canton (Guangzhou) and foreign companies established thirteen factories, essentially a Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ). Chinese government policy only accepted silver bullion as payment, a serious macroeconomic problem in the long run. It's interesting to note that the first modern FTZ in China was created in Shenzhen, in between Hong Kong & Guangzhou, in 1980 as one of Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 first and most successful economic reforms.
After 1757 the East India Company directly controlled Bengal and an ever-increasing amount of the sub-continent. By 1773, the company's costs of administering its own country and its deficit with China nearly drove it bankrupt. Parliament passed the East India Company Act 1773, bailing-out and partially nationalizing the company. Parliament also expanded its powers of monopoly and passed the Tea Act, allowing it to import directly to the American Colonies and indirectly sparking the American Revolution, as I have written about here. It still had to contend with its huge silver payments to China in order to sustain the increasing demand for Chinese goods. The sale and smoking of opium in China was banned since 1729 and reaffirmed in 1799. The company started to sell opium from India to be smuggled and sold into China. By 1773, opium exports from India was at 75 tons, up from 15 tons in 1730. The Opium trade with China became very strong and the East India Company had a British government-supported monopoly on the product, in 1820 900 tons of Bengali Opium was illegally imported to China.
In 1833, Earl Grey's Parliament (yes, the tea-loving Earl Grey) Abolished Slavery, it restricted child labor, re-conquered the Faukland Islands, and it abolished the East India Company's monopoly, reasserted the government's control of the board, and forbade employment discrimination of race, religion, and heritage in the company, although the territories of the East India Company as well as Sri Lanka (Ceylon) were explicitly exempt from abolishing slavery. Britain also sent a representative to China to see if it couldn't lobby the government to liberalize the restrictive Canton System which even forbade Westerners from learning Chinese. The government mandarins would not see the envoy or read his letter, contact was also forbidden.
There's a statue of Lin Ze Xu 林則徐, the world's first Drug Czar, that's near the Manhattan bridge and I passed it often when I used to take the Chinatown Bus from Philadelphia. In 1839, before the first Opium War, he wrote this open letter to Queen Victoria:
We find that your country is twenty-four or twenty-eight thousand miles from China. Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience?
When Lin Ze Xu demanded that the British forfeit their opium, the British refused and the Chinese imposed an embargo. The British Superintendent of Trade relented and promised to compensate for all confiscated opium. The British treasury didn't want to pay for that and some people back in London and Calcutta were pretty furious that British property was being confiscated, so they went to war instead and sent the British Indian Army. And that's how the British got Hong Kong... which is referenced in the movie as "a new stronghold in Hong Kong" or some rubbish like that.
And then there was another Opium War in 1856 and a big mutiny leading to war in India in 1857 triggered by the introduction of a new rifle which resulted in the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj. All of this happened BEFORE Alice in Wonderland was published, and therefore presumably before the film takes place.
I did a search to see if anyone else who has written about this ahistorical subplot and found these words by Frederica Mathewes-Green in Christianity Today:
At the movie's end, Alice re-emerges at the garden party, refuses the young man's hand, and then speaks to his father—one of her dad's partners of old, it turns out, and now owner of the company. She talks of the thrill of international trading, and stresses particularly the opportunity to be the first to initiate trade with China. The lord is impressed, and invites her to be his apprentice. In the final sequence we see Alice standing nobly on the deck of a ship, heading out to the open sea.This is wrong on so many counts it's hard to know where to start. It's a dud, dramatically, to go from multicolored Wonderland to the world of business planning. It's hard to picture capitalism as the ideal calling for the girl who fell down a rabbit hole. And were those 19th century international corporations really so admirable? In the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Depp's character fights against exactly the same type of business that Alice champions here.
And did it have to be China? Won't some history-savvy viewers wonder how many years Alice can profit from that nation, before its citizens rise up against foreigners in the Boxer Rebellion? "Let's be first to trade in China" is a bit like "Let's be first to invest in the Hindenburg."
Eileen Jones at The Exile writes:
The frame story of the film is pretty bad—best to ignore it as much as possible. It’s standard girl-power boilerplate projected back onto the Victorian Era, courtesy of screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who’s already cursed us with Disney crap like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. In her vision, Alice is a frowny teen who refuses to wear a corset or marry a total git, and opts for a career instead. Problem is, her chosen career is colonial-era exploitation—at the end she’s going to go expand trade routes to China and parts East, standing tall at the prow of an English ship, and we know how that kind of thing turned out.
And Todd McCarthy writes in Variety:
A jaw-dropping coda pivots on a "visionary" character's forthcoming voyage to open up trade with China, provoking musings about Disney's rationale for this sort of corporate encomium to a vast young market, as well as thoughts of a never-to-be-made sequel set among 19th-century Chinese as inscrutable and combative as the population of Underland.
ABC announced it was buying the rights to syndicate Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The actual original book should be in the public domain right now, could NBC release a series based on the source material? Will it contain this subplot? 19th-century international trade and capitalism are fascinating topics but also fairly dangerous to cover. I don't think objectivity is an obtainable goal, tell it from whatever perspective you want; accuracy, however, is.
I'm sure the screenwriter thought, "ooo, trade with China has become extremely important in the United States in the past two decades, let's try to connect the history with yesterday with current trends." This is done in every period film, it's a habit most screenwriters can't avoid. But now millions of people who don't know any better are being lead to believe that British trade with China happened sometime in the later-half of the 19th century, after the British obtained their "stronghold in Hong Kong". It's not the tail that wags the dog.
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