Opium, and How India Created Hong Kong

[vinodkumarvc]

Li Ka Shing, one of the world's richest people, is a name known to fewer people than one would expect. Astute followers of Indian business would have seen him mentioned recently, during the Vodafone acquisition of Hutch. Newspapers referred to him by his nickname - "Superman".

I was reading through his mini-bio on wikipedia. Li seems to have had a

Comments

[chaitrasuresh]

Very very interesting! :) That brings out the cynic in me. Can there be no business without some cheating/fraud in the backdrop :)

[skthewimp]

totally strong stuff da!

i'm just wondering what could've been the alternative. maybe native indians themselves could've sold opium all over the world. get more money. how would the brits have reacted to that?

too complicated

[vinodkumarvc]

alternative is tough to figure. indians were no big sea-farers, unlike the europeans. other than Lord Rama and his army, i cant think of anyone from india who crossed the seas. :-)

europe would've had legal restrictions around opium at the time, i think. they may have been a bit more lenient when it came to the colonies.

[dilip]

> I say that India enabled the creation of Hong Kong

Very fallacious! If we didnt source opium, it would have been sourced from somewhere else.

Your reasoning is like saying that we are responsible for current revamp of Beijing just because we are exporting iron ore for Olympic games construction activities theres.

[vinodkumarvc]

demand, supply, distance.

note that the european traders were allowed to do "some of their own trading" only on pre-defined sea routes, and for pre-defined amounts. india-hk was a very short route, compared to australia-hk, say. also, i wouldnt think all countries were allowed to grow opium, even back then.

your beijing argument is not similar to mine. ur argument applies direct causality (a->b), while mine is indirect (a->b->c).

a more logically similar statement would have been - american miners mined ore out of indian mines, and sold them to several countries, at good profits. they then used a majority of those profits to create infra for china.