Not Zero-Sum: Perspective of an Ordinary Chinese American
From the Opium Wars to the era of Trump/Putin/Xi, an ordinary Chinese American's hope for solidarity (Chapter One)
(Source: Fulton County Jail; YouTube “Chinese Backstreet Boys — That Way” screenshot; Wikimedia Commons)
Chapter One: First Impression - The Opium Wars
When I was eight years old, my parents moved to the United States. They were leaving me behind intentionally, my parents explained, so that I could “build a solid foundation in Chinese culture first.” For the next three years, I lived with my grandparents near the heart of a city named Nanjing, where their two-bedroom home sat on the top floor of a four-story building. In the early 1990s, it was one of the taller residential buildings but would soon be overtaken, hinted by the vast construction compound that formed the panorama view from our balcony.
On most weekdays, I got up at seven, ate breakfast, then set off for school on foot along a modest alley common in inner city neighborhoods. Like most places in China, it was never a solitary walk. Streams of pedestrians, swarms of bicycles, and a few out-of-place cars (too wide), vied for right-of-way on the unmarked road. Street vendors staked their claims on the sidewalk or the space where the sidewalk would have been. Small crowds kept forming around them, entreated by the tantalizing scents wafting through the air. Amidst the chorus of chatter, the ringing of bells, and the occasional splashes of water, it was easy to lose oneself. Indeed, individuality and privacy seemed like distant concepts. Yet, there was something intimate in the chaotic scene before you — the heat rising from the food carts, the comforting warmth of others’ presence, the atmosphere as a whole — and the memory of it may just pop up years later, long after you have moved on, an unlikely source of nostalgia. But you probably won’t feel it in that moment, especially if you are preoccupied with navigating traffic and insist on reaching your final destination unscathed.
Enclosed by seven-foot walls on all sides, Third Alley Elementary School was prototypical in its design. The sole entrance revealed a large rectangular open space of concrete and mud, adjoined by a standard three-story building. Each floor consisted of a single row of classrooms, uniform in every facet except their locations and occupants. Each classroom lodged approximately 30 students, who stuck together as a unit from first grade to sixth grade (elementary school lasted six years in China), for better or for worse. The students sat in pairs of opposite sexes toward the back of the room, a validated arrangement that led to more orderly behavior. The front, mostly empty except for a long blackboard and a single table, belonged to the teacher.
Mandated by a blend of teachers’ austerity, parents’ expectations, and the cumulative weight of tradition, I spent the better part of the day attached to my seat, collecting homework for the night shift. A part of me still believes that I have never worked harder than during those years, from third grade to fifth grade. The only respite came in-between classes, when my classmates and I filed out of our classroom and poured into the open space, tossing sandbags, bouncing shuttlecocks, engaging in that rare round of snowball fight after a fresh winter storm…
It was around fourth or fifth grade that I first came across the Opium Wars. I don’t remember much of the details. There may have been a short video, which would have been a rare commodity in those days. But I’m almost positive that it was the first mentioning of the West at school: a collision of worlds during the 19th century, China’s humiliation in two consecutive wars, and the motion of events that ultimately led to the collapse of the imperial dynasty, an enduring system that had spanned 3,500 years of history.
I can imagine a Chinese Party official advocating for the topic’s inclusion in the curriculum — the fact that China suffered despite owning moral high ground. The lessons served both as a cautionary tale from the past — the imperial rule’s “backwardness” contrasted with a modern republic on the rise — and as an effective guardian into the future against too much Western influences. Meanwhile, in the American classrooms, we skipped over the same conflicts altogether, if they even made it into the textbooks in the first place. It’s not surprising then that most Americans remain unaware of the events that form “the very foundation of modern Chinese nationalism.”
World history diverges.
In the late 18th century, the West was undergoing a burst of transformations. The emphasis on science, exploration, and self-improvement led to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution, in turn, led to better designed and eventually more powerful ships, ships that carried profit-seeking merchants to distant shores.
In China, these merchants found an immense civilization abundant in resources. As Westerners’ appetite for tea, silk, and ceramics grew, more and more merchants made the voyage from Western Europe, around the southern cape of Africa, a pit stop in India, and finally arriving at Canton (present day Guangzhou), China — an expedition that took over half a year to complete. American traders had an even longer journey, first having to cross the Atlantic Ocean, before embarking on the remainder of the trip. But while Western traders were eager to do business with China, their enthusiasm was not always reciprocated.
Over its lengthy history, China had developed a suspicion of outsiders, driven by several occasions when it had been conquered by outsiders. In fact, Manchus, the ruling ethnic group of the Qing era, were themselves conquerors from the Northeast, before they adopted the Chinese culture as their own. Faced with the growing presence of Western “barbarians,” Qianlong Emperor limited trade to the single port of Canton and confined foreign traders’ movements to designated spaces outside of the city walls — all but ending their hopes to explore China beyond its rigid customs and advance commercial relations.
Nor did China share the West’s attitude toward the concept of trade. In the West, free trade, often a cover then for imperialistic aggressions and colonialism, served as a pillar for economic growth. Meanwhile, China, shaped by Confucian thoughts, purportedly shunned commerce in favor of scholarly, peasantry, and artistic pursuits. Chinese emperors viewed trades with other nations as a form of tribute acknowledging China’s greatness — a slight the West willingly overlooked, so long the vast Chinese empire remained an exotic mystery.
Moreover, the Middle Kingdom — China’s self-proclaimed name as the center of the world — was inconveniently self-sufficient. The lack of demand for Western goods impeded traders’ desires for full cargos and maximum returns on their marathon journeys, leading to an initial trade imbalance.
The final obstacle, trade imbalance, was solved by opium. As a commodity, opium was illegal in China, banned by edicts of multiple emperors. However, despite the bans, opium trades thrived, aided by corrupt local officials and a society that was slipping into decadence after centuries of productivity.
In smoke-filled dens, previously able-bodied men languished all across the Middle Kingdom. They clutched to their pipes like crutches; light faded from their eyes with each exhale, drifting into a world of emptiness. As nights merged with days, financial burden accumulated until a rude awakening. Meanwhile, chills, nausea, and cramps lurked around the corner, quietly laying traps between the land of euphoria and withdrawal.
Addictions invited surging shipments, forming a vicious cycle that eventually permeated every social class. As the list of customers swelled into the millions, it included the Daoguang Emperor, who inherited the throne in 1821. The seventh emperor of the Qing Dynasty fell under the spell of opium despite having passed an edict to ban it.
While the British were the biggest player in the opium trade, the first iteration of American businessmen also made their fortunes trafficking to China. A few of the notables include Warren Delano (FDR’s maternal grandfather), John Jacob Astor, who became the first American millionaire (you may remember his descendant John Jacob Astor IV from Titanic), and John Murray Forbes, whose close friendship with the Chinese businessman Howqua — then richest man on Earth — supplied much of the capital that powered America’s railroad expansion in the East, decades before Chinese immigrant laborers would lay the tracks in the West.
The profits from the opium trade also cultivated the development of the city of Boston, funding prominent infrastructures such as Mass General Hospital (MGH) and Bunker Hill Monument. If you take the red line T from Cambridge toward downtown Boston, MGH, a distinctively massive building, poises over the subway tracks as the train makes its way across the Charles River. Getting off at the Boston Common Park stop, the red brick path marks the beginning of the Freedom Trail, a three mile walk through US history. It passes the bustling Quincy Market, where Chinese goods bought with opium money would have been unloaded in the 19th century, passes the pristine Old North Church, where the tale of American Independence is recounted, and culminates at the Bunker Hill Monument, a serene and peaceful park, where the intricate connections of our international history remain hidden.
As the opium trade spurred economic growth in the West, China underwent a different transformation. Mired in an insidious, ever-expanding fog, it had entered the haze a healthy young man but soon saw its skin fold, muscles recede, mind grow dim. The Qing government finally became alarmed — jolted out of its own stupor — when it realized that opium addictions had spread to the military, jeopardizing national defense.
Spirited debates followed at the high court on dwindling options. One faction supported the pragmatic approach of legalizing opium and taxing its users, while a second faction considered opium a moral evil that was destroying China, and it supported cracking down on the merchants who were distributing illegally. The emperor nodded in the direction of the moral faction, prompting the appointment of Lin Zexu, an official known for his unwavering principles — an increasingly rare quality. Fittingly, the selection of an upright official would set in motion the series of events that ultimately led to the downfall of a corrupt empire.
In 1839, Lin descended upon Canton. After initial attempts at reconciliation — including an earnest letter that never reached Queen Victoria — Lin pivoted to a more hardline stance, arresting both unscrupulous Chinese bureaucrats and unruly foreign smugglers, while seizing over 2.6 million pounds of opium. For 23 days, the confiscated goods danced with flames in the oriental version of the Boston Tea Party, painting a poetic scene of smokes and fumes as the dissolved sins washed out to sea.
In Lin’s short-lived triumph, the British stumbled upon the solution for the remaining trade challenges with China. The destruction of opium would trigger a confrontation that exposed China’s enfeebled state to the rest of the world, opening the floodgate and marking “a sea change in [China’s] relations with the West — the end of one era, when foreigners came to China as supplicants, and the dawn of another, when they would come as conquerors.”
In the early 19th century, the West and China were moving in opposite directions. As the West powered forward during the Industrial Revolution, China was on the precipice of decline — an inflection point in history that would be coined the Great Divergence. The simplest evidence was the goods each acquired through trade. The West’s main import from China was tea, a commodity that sharpened minds and increased productivity, and opium, of course, was the exact opposite.
After centuries of economic dominance and amassing a greater GDP in 1820 than that combined of the eventual Eight-Nation Alliance (Britain, France, Russia, America, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan), China had grown complacent and then decadent as opium trades flourished and corruptions ran rampant. Once the civilization of the four great inventions (paper making, printing, gunpowder, and compass), China had also fallen dangerously behind on technology driven by its adverseness to trade and self-imposed isolation, remaining mostly oblivious to the progress that the rest of the world was making.
In America, the turn of the century saw a generation of ambitious young men who constantly sought self-improvements in order to leave their marks on the world. Imbued with “the belief that the only barriers to success were discipline and the extent of one’s talents,” the youngsters broke away from “the small towns and limited opportunities their fathers had known” and ventured into the vast, unexplored land of the new nation in search of their own luck. Lincoln, in particular, his meteoric rise from birth in a log cabin to one of the greatest presidents of the United States, exemplified what was possible.
In contrast, the efforts of Chinese young men were frustrated by a system that had become rotten to the core, with an opium addict installed as its lifetime leader. Moreover, during the Qing Dynasty, China was ruled by the minority Manchu ethnicity, whereas the working class consisted mostly of the majority Han ethnicity — a social dynamic that would lead to widespread internal struggles when faced with external pressure. While the burning of opium was finally a step in the right direction, it came a few decades too late. The foundation of a vigorous society had gradually disintegrated, exacerbated by the compulsive consumption of opium. In the meantime, the influence of opium money had expanded in the West, particularly in Great Britain.
As the British contemplated its response to Lin’s actions, heated debates on the vice of opium versus the virtue of free trade broke out in the Parliament. Curiously, the same government body had just recently abolished slavery. But perhaps there’s a quota on human conscience. Because in this case, self-interest won over morality by a slim margin, and Great Britain chose war.
The first and second Opium Wars took place between 1839–1842 and 1856–1860, respectively. The conflicts could be best described as battles between great white sharks and a giant, disoriented whale: China was unquestionably inferior in military technology, but it had a chance if it could throw its full weight against the Western predators.
However, as the powerful British navy skillfully sacked Chinese coastal cities one after another, the Qing administration was never able to coordinate a central defense. Instead, it left local governments to fend for themselves. The local governments were often more afraid of the Qing administration — its tendency for cruel and unusual punishments — than they were of the British. As a result, they fought futilely and fabricated tales of great victories even as their cities crumbled under Royal Navy bombardments.
Sans accurate intelligence, the Qing administration didn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation until it was too late. Conversely, the British gained surprisingly good intelligence despite being halfway around the world. The ethnic divide in China meant some Chinese were glad to see the Qing falter — at least initially. The venal Qing leaders also lacked the steely resolve to defend national interests. Instead, both local government and later central government officials sought to appease the British through payments and ceding of territories, even as elite Manchu warriors fought to the bitter end, their entire families — women and children — committing suicides to preserve honor.
The first Opium War ended with the signing of what would become known as the unequal treaty — because of its one-sidedness. China suffered reparation payments for the cost of war and destruction of opium. Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain, not to be returned until 1997. Additionally, five more coastal cities were pried open for trade. Even under Chinese sovereignty, British citizens would be governed by British rather than Chinese laws. Perhaps the most infamous was the inception of favored nation status, which conferred that any favors granted to other nations would also apply to the British.
As news of Britain’s success took sail from its shoreline, China receded, while the other imperial powers steadily emerged into view. They had observed the conflict from afar with keen interest, and they absorbed its outcome with a sense of opportunity. China had long been deemed desirable, now, it had also been found vulnerable. Smelling blood in the water, the US, France, and Russia circled in to sign their own versions of the unequal treaty.
Across the East China Sea, Japan followed the same events with great alarm. The defeat of the Qing served as a wakeup call that helped to convince Japan to eventually abandon Sakoku — its own policy of isolation that had endured for over two centuries. Moreover, Japan enacted severe punishment for opium consumption and sought to learn from the West, embarking on an aggressive campaign to industrialize its economy and modernize its military. Over time, it would become the worst imperialist offender in China.
Meanwhile, China’s wounds festered internally. The reparation payments forced higher, impossible taxes onto millions of Han peasants, adding to a long list of existing grievances. In 1850, simmering dissents erupted into the Taiping Rebellion, one of the more devastating civil wars in mankind history, carrying as many as 30 million souls to their graves. The 14-year rebellion, led by a Han who claimed to be Jesus Christ’s younger brother, is a tale of its own. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the rebellion overlapped with the second Opium War and had the unintended consequence of ensuring that once again, the Qing would not put together a coherent defense against the West.
If the first Opium War unmasked China’s declining state, the second Opium War laid bare the naked aggression coupled with the unapologetic greed that defined the era of European imperialism. The renewed conflict witnessed lopsided land battles between British & French coalition troops and the Qing army, pitting advanced guns and artillery against doomed cavalry charges. It recorded the looting and destruction of Summer Palace, the emperor’s summer residence of unimaginable opulence. It revealed Xianfeng, the Qing’s eighth Emperor, fleeing from his throne, leaving behind his ministers to acquiesce to even greater concessions. As the uneven battles drew to a close, the admiration that China once commanded had eroded into contempt.
The United States remained largely neutral during the Opium Wars, except for a few skirmishes where the American Navy sided with Britain and France. However, when the US demanded “most favored nation” status from China, riding the coattails of European bullies, it provided the opening for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to paint America, in the aftermath of WWII, as an imperial power that once tormented a weaker China.
While propaganda in China has since portrayed the Opium Wars as a grand scheme of Western imperial powers, historic records depict a different view in which the first Opium War “was all but unthinkable until it actually began.” For centuries leading up to the wars, much of Britain admired and were even in awe of China. Certainly, there was a bloodthirsty faction in Great Britain, but it would have been rather difficult for that faction to prevail if the Chinese emperor had been a little less imperious to the British and a little more willing to listen to his local governments along the coast, who understood the risks posed by the Royal Navy. Because of the widespread corruption and general ineptitude that plagued the Qing government, the only real defense China possessed rested in its past reputation and immediate mystery. When Lin Zexu, the main protagonist in most Chinese textbooks, acted upon the strength of his personal characters, it was a mismatch to the weakened state of the Qing Dynasty, and the resulting response from the British hastened the empire’s downfall.
When the conflict initially broke out, Great Britain had no greater designs beyond protecting its trade interests, and perhaps expanding to additional Chinese ports if things went well. It was only when the complete lack of resistance and awareness of the Qing government led to an outcome which frankly surprised all stakeholders in the first fateful war, that the British (and other imperial powers) began to form new ideas. As the mystic shrouds of China faded with the cold advance of Western guns and cannons, as the Qing’s arrogance turned to indignity and to appeasement, a harpoon that would sink deeper over time into the heart of the Chinese empire had been inserted.
While the West has since generally alluded to the Opium Wars (in the rare instances the topic comes up) as an intentional lesson taught to an arrogant, backward establishment demanding outdated customs such as kowtow, it’s also far from the truth. The fact is the main motivation for the British to go to war with China was money. Because of its costly expeditions around the world and enormous tea imports from China, Britain was perpetually in need of funding sources.
Faced with a choice between morality and financial interest, the British government threw its support behind the drug dealers. But while “a sense of inevitability has always been projected backwards onto this era in hindsight,” there were far more oppositions than what might be expected as the events actually unfolded. The first war, facing vehement public criticisms domestically and abroad, was approved by only a few votes in the Parliament. The second war, despite complete military triumph in the first war, required the dissolution of the existing government, replacing those who deplored opium trades and those who respected Chinese sovereignty with new pro-war members, before greed could take over.
Today, the Opium Wars represent merely a couple dots on the rising curve of Western power, and they are largely overlooked in Western history and diplomacy. After all, the West didn’t actually conquer China, few lives were lost in the engagements, and the battles occurred long before the era of cable TV or social media, leaving behind only a few paintings and some borrowed 19th century Chinese artifacts stored in British museums.
However, from China’s perspective, the Opium Wars and the century of humiliation that followed, marked a singular moment of humbling and reflection in an otherwise long and remarkable history. The unmistakable realization that it had fallen behind technologically, the inability to defend its own sovereignty, and the shame of having to submit to the wills of others despite owning moral high ground, remain etched in memory. The lessons were many, but the one that persists is “weakness is not an option.”
Growing up, America’s silence on the topic spoke louder to me than the actual events that took place. Like a bully from distant memory, what’s more relevant is often not the past but rather the present attitude. Yet as I dug into the history, I learned that America had been more of a follower during the conflicts, and it was one of the more principled actors in an era where the strong preying on the weak reflected the norm. The US may also have played an important role — out of fear of missing out on its fair share of the Middle Kingdom pie — in preventing China from being permanently carved up among colonial powers. It could certainly be argued that American missionaries did quite a bit of good in China too, building infrastructures such as hospitals and universities, and replacing backward traditions with modern thinking — in the same way that the Chinese government may claim of its activities in Tibet or Xinjiang in the present. The situation is further complicated by the CCP’s campaign to accentuate America’s involvement, as well as recent tensions between the US and China, such that it may not be as simple as acknowledging an injustice from one and half century ago (though maybe it is). Rather, the focus shifts to how do you reconcile a relationship with uneven starting points? What are the implications for Chinese and American worldviews?
While, unquestionably, the Opium Wars are not excuses for human rights abuses in China, they are sources of mistrust when Western nations raise moral high ground to justify anti-China policies. They are sources of irony when America blames China for its recent opioid crisis without a nod to the past. And they are sources of indignation when American politicians suggest that prosperity in China is only possible because of the mercy the West extended to China by granting its entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO).
As China grew stronger through generations of hard work, resilience, and IP thefts (more on this later), the Opium Wars offered a different perspective — not how China had suffered, but how powerful China once had been. The rise and fall of dynasties has long been ingrained in the Chinese’s understanding, accepted as a part of life as natural as sunrises and sunsets. However, China’s latest ascendancy propels it toward a potential clash with America — not only because of America’s professed belief in linear progress, but also because the same belief implicitly assumes perpetual American leadership.
Since Xi Jinping came into power in 2012, China has become even more assertive, ironically drawing inspirations from the Monroe Doctrine to expand its sphere of influence. Alarmed by China’s rising ambitions, America has coincidentally taken a page out of China’s playbook, looking back thousands of years into the cycles of history. The Thucydides Trap, spawned in the fate of Sparta and Athens, observed that in 75% of instances of when a rising power meets an established power, it has resulted in war.
While I appreciate the deep-dives into what conditions and circumstances led to the other 25%, I cannot resign myself to the best case scenario of a mere 1/4 chance the US and China will avoid war, not when the overwhelming majority of people on both sides prefer peace, not when we have so much in common, not when I and millions like me, stand as living proof that the US-China relation is not zero-sum.
Although diplomacy has traditionally been the task of the few — those who made it to the inner circle — globalization and technological advancements have leveled the playing field. In a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected, I am optimistic about the possibility for (linear) progress through a new form of diplomacy, one rooted in the shared experiences of ordinary people — from the dance steps of Oppa Gangnam Style, to the exchange of ideas on Reddit, to the international solidarity for Ukraine, to the chorus “we are one.”
Since the trip across the Pacific at age 11, I have hoped for a permanent friendship between the US and China. It was my form of patriotism, shaped by the gradual realization that each nation had something to offer to the other. While neither the US nor China has truly invested in such a relationship, I had first glimpsed its possibility in President Obama’s words during the 2008 election. Inspirations from others, coupled with the foundations that my parents had built through a lifetime of hard work as first-generation immigrants, gave me the capacity to eventually think about things greater than myself.
Beyond personal experiences, I’m also motivated by current events — the state of US-China relations, a former president* who seems bent on demolishing every value that I hold dear, and a world caught at the crossroads between raw power vs. shared values and cycles of history vs. progress.
I hope my perspective will contribute to us finding the right balance.
Aftermath
Foreign aggressions and internal unrest continued to ravage China in the decades following the Opium Wars, further weakening the Qing and stunting its attempts to reform. The nonstop encroachments — Russia pushing into the Northeast, France asserting dominance in Indochina, Germany staking claims in Jiaozhou Bay, Japan expanding into Korea and Taiwan, and the imperial zones carving up the city of Shanghai — intensified anti-foreign sentiments, culminating in an attack on foreign missionaries by a newly-formed Chinese militia group known as “Boxers” in 1900. When the Eight-Nation Alliance dispatched 45,000 coalition troops to crush the uprising, it imposed even more draconian punishments on China.
In the wake of China’s demise, the US was the only nation to show meaningful restraint. President Theodore Roosevelt supported the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, reinvesting a portion of the Boxer reparation payment toward higher education in China, establishing universities like Tsinghua University, the Chinese equivalent of MIT today. As a result of this act of goodwill, when the Qing Dynasty finally collapsed in 1912, the new government led by Sun Yat-sen held America as the model to follow for reforms.
This trend of cordiality continued during China’s transition from an imperial dynasty to a modern republic: the US and China fought on the same side in WWI, the US tried to shield China from Japanese provocations — the Open Door policy had established that a Japanese dominated China was not in the interest of the US. However, President Wilson’s perceived betrayal during the Versailles Treaty in 1919 led many Chinese to question if America was merely a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The blow softened when the US became the first country to formally recognize the Chinese Nationalist government in 1928. Meanwhile, a fledgling Chinese Communist party, inspired by the Soviet Revolution, was just coming into existence. Despite all the foreign aggravations China experienced in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, the US and China developed friendly relations as the world headed into World War II.
*Trump had not been re-elected when I wrote this chapter
Chapter Two: Almost Friends — WWII →
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Chapter One End Notes + 2025 Commentaries:
In additional to the Chinese and American classrooms, Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt had hands down the biggest influence on this chapter. During research, I caught myself not only echoing Platt’s observation that “the symbolic power of the Opium War is almost limitless,” but its eclectic introduction also shamed me to write better. The quotes related to the Opium Wars in the chapter mostly came from this book; I simply could not find better words.
The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom by John Pomfret was another helpful source. I love the title of the book, although its content can be a bit encyclopedic — instrumental for my research / writing, but harder on the less hardcore US-China readers. Pomfret has another book that I’m a big fan of, I will recommend it when we get to chapter three (Cultural Revolution).
The article “How Profits From Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston” by Martha Bebinger from WBUR (Boston’s NPR) guided the paragraph narrating the opium trade’s impact on the city of Boston.
The book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin helped shape the paragraph depicting the progress of men in America during the early 19th century. It’s a fantastic read on the political genius and transcendent character of President Lincoln.
Further reading on the Opium Wars - nonfiction: Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt, fiction: The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang, hybrid: China: The Novel by Edward Rutherfurd
2025 Commentaries:
I’m a slow writer. I had intended to finish writing before the 2024 American election, with the hope of influencing it, however small, toward shared values. It’s been a tough few months witnessing the elected and his enablers retreat from everything worth fighting for, all the while pretending to be strong leaders, when in fact, they are weak bullies.
Besides the argument that US-China relation is not zero-sum, this book also explores the growing divide between political leaders and ordinary people, with the premise that we can’t let the self-interests of a few individuals drag us back to the days of raw power — a path that will inevitably lead to war. While I don’t know if the ordinary people committed to peace represent the biggest group in every nation, I’m almost certain we are the biggest group across all nations. How can we come together and make our voices heard?
Glad I finished reading, this was actually mind-blowing