Climbing the ranks of the Communist Party hierarchy while working in a coastal province, Xi Jinping – the man now leading China’s drive to overtake the United States – had a poem on his desk that explains why he reacted strongly to President Trump’s trade war between the two countries.

The poem, a patriotic ode to the sanctity of the national interest, was written by Lin Zesu, an imperial commissioner from Fujian, the same coastal province, who oversaw China’s foreign trade in the early 19th century. Today he is honored in Chinese textbooks and in Xi’s speeches as a national hero for standing up to Britain, the superpower at the time, in a standoff over trade, the New York Times notes.

That conflict, sparked by Lin’s efforts to stop opium smuggling, ended in disaster for China—a crushing military defeat that gave Britain control of Hong Kong and, according to China, ushered in a “century of humiliation,” a disgrace that President Xi has made one of his most important goals since taking over as China’s leader in 2012.

Past embarrassment looms large as Xi prepares for a meeting Thursday in South Korea with President Trump, underscoring a gulf between the two leaders that is bigger than their turbulent disputes over tariffs, rare earth minerals and soybeans.

Trump “sees China as the victor of the modern international order, but Xi Jinping sees China as its victim,” said Julia Lovell, author of “The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China,” adding that these conflicting views can lead to “deep instability” in these talks.

“I don’t know how well Trump knows the story, but it’s very important that he understands the emotional significance of this story for China,” said Lovell, a researcher at Birbeck College, University of London. “This history shapes China’s actions and strategies in the present.”

The fentanyl controversy

Celebrating China’s resurgent power last month with a huge military parade in Beijing, Xi declared from the Tiananmen Gate podium that his country had “put an end to China’s national humiliation from successive defeats suffered by foreign invaders in modern times.”

Beijing has also been angered by what it sees as efforts by US leaders, including Trump, to cast China in the role of 19th-century Western opium traders, accusing it of exacerbating America’s drug problem by exporting chemicals used to make fentanyl.

Trump said last week that this would be the “first question” he would ask Xi when they meet. China accuses Washington of using the drug problem to “blackmail” it.

The Opium War

The 19th-century showdown between China and the West began, like today’s, with the West’s growing anger at China’s huge trade surplus. The country exported large quantities of tea, porcelain, silk and other goods, but imported little in return.

Britain turned to opium to close the gap, with Western traders selling increasing quantities of the drug to China, despite its official ban in 1729.

Commissioner Lin arrived in the port of Guangzhou, then known as Canton, in 1839 with orders from the emperor in Peking to stop the opium trade and restore the finances of the Qing dynasty, which had been upset by the outflow of silver to pay for drugs.

Lin’s determination to resist British power made him a heroic figure of resistance to Western exploitation for generations of modern Chinese leaders from the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 onwards.

He is known in China for seizing and destroying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of foreign opium at current prices in trenches dug on the banks of the Pearl River at Humen, near Guangzhou. Foreigners who witnessed the disaster, as Lin informed the emperor, “feel deeply ashamed.”

China’s public security minister, Wang Xiaohong, who is at the center of disputes with Washington over fentanyl, visited Humen this week and a museum there commemorating Lin’s actions in the 19th century. The minister, vowing to wage “a victorious people’s war against drugs in the new era,” said all Chinese must “defend and promote the spirit of Lin Zexu.”

Xi has taken up the Qing official’s example with particular zeal. During the 17 years he spent in Fujian, he spearheaded the renovation of sites associated with Lin, including the house where he was born and his family’s memorial.

The hall is now an exhibition complex highlighting the betrayal of the West, Lin’s righteous resistance and what a carved stone in a green courtyard describes as “China’s unceasing struggle against foreign aggression”. In line with Xi’s view that China should be open to the West, but on its own terms, the exhibits also praise Lin for promoting Western science and technology as a means of strengthening China.

Lin’s birthplace in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian, has become the Bethlehem of modern Chinese nationalism, with the small room in which he is said to have been born the focus of a state-funded heritage trail honoring his indomitable patriotism.

Mao Linli, a historian from Fuzhou and adviser to the foundation, said the lesson from Lin’s standoff with Britain is clear: Never bow to foreign pressure or cede the moral edge.

He said that if he were alive today, Lin, who served in Guangzhou from 1839 to 1841, would never accept the American demands. “He always stood on the side of justice,” noted Mao. “America started this war, not China. America must stop him,” he stressed.

Foreshadowing China’s current efforts to get Trump to back down on tariffs by severely limiting exports of rare earths vital to modern industry, Lin sought to pressure Britain and other countries involved in the illegal opium trade by threatening to freeze Chinese exports.

According to “The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes,” a classic book on the conflict based on Lin’s diaries and letters, China believed that “the British would die of constipation without the rhubarb and tea from China” and would retreat quickly.

In a letter he wrote to Queen Victoria in 1839, Lynn urged her to end the opium trade, pointing out that the drug was also illegal in Britain. He warned that China could cut off exports of “products without which foreign countries could not survive a day.”

The smugglers delivered over 1,000 tons of opium, but demanded compensation and objected to what they saw as intrusive Chinese restrictions on legitimate trade and pressured London to send in warships.

Lin destroyed the seized drugs by mixing them with salt and lime near Guangzhou’s Humen and refused to pay compensation.

Much less dependent on Chinese rhubarb and much stronger militarily than Lin had believed, Britain sent warships to the coast of China to attack Guangzhou and other Chinese port cities.

However, China’s official retrospective on this chapter of the Opium War focuses on praising Lin for his integrity, rather than whether he overreached in negotiations with Britain, as some historians have suggested.

At a Lin Zexu-themed restaurant in downtown Fuzhou, the owner’s 9-year-old son, Wang Yike, sang patriotic lyrics to diners at lunch last week that praised the British opium bust in 1839 as an act that “highlighted the righteousness of our nation.”

The boy, wearing the red scarf of the Young Pioneers of China, a communist youth organization, recited one of the commissioner’s best-known lines from the poem Xi kept on his desk: “If it benefits the nation, I will live and die for it.”