Along with the prime minister, there were four other ministers, an army of officials and a couple of hundred captains of industry. The revenues and jobs from big deals that might be contracted with China could be a godsend for a UK economy in dire straits.

To the Chinese, poppies have a totally different symbolic meaning — and one that should have been especially obvious to the British.

In November, the British also wear a poppy on their lapel to commemorate Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, in memory of the fallen soldiers of World War I. This is a local British custom, one that on this occasion David Cameron and his entourage sought to globalize. As they arrived in Beijing, their poppies were prominently displayed.

The problem is that, for the Chinese, the poppies have a totally different symbolic meaning — and one that should have been especially obvious to the British.

Today’s China has emerged as the world’s largest trading power and second-biggest economy. For much of the 19th century, Britain was by far the world’s largest trading power and biggest economy.

The British Empire — over which the sun never set — was primarily driven by commercial goals. Nowhere was this more so than with respect to China.

The “dream” of the Chinese market — as in the old adage that “just adding an inch to every Chinaman’s shirt tail will keep Manchester’s cotton industry going forever” — has been potent ever since the travels of Marco Polo.

As the British sought to enter into commercial relations with China in the late 18th and early 19th century, they were rebuffed by the Chinese court. The Brits were buying lots and lots of Chinese tea, but the Chinese were not buying British shirt tails — or anything else.

This stalemate lasted until the discovery that there was a great market for opium in China. And, wouldn’t you know it, the world’s best opium was being grown in Bengal, a British colony! (I recommend reading the novel by Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, on this subject.)

In 1839, a Chinese scholar and senior official, Lin Zexu, in a “letter of advice” to Queen Victoria, appealed to her higher sense of morality to prohibit the opium trade.

The Chinese sought to counter the opium trade on moral, legal and political grounds — but to no avail. Due to Chinese obstreperousness, Britain resorted to force in what came to be known as the Opium Wars.

The first occurred from 1839 to 1842 — following which the British grabbed Hong Kong. And the second lasted from 1856 to 1860 — during which the British were joined by the French and jointly pillaged and destroyed the Summer Palace. That act is the cultural equivalent of the Chinese pillaging and destroying the British Museum and the Louvre.

The Opium Wars heralded the more than century-long era of Chinese decline and humiliation. To cite only one figure: At the beginning of the 19th century, China accounted for some 30% of global GDP. By the middle of the 20th, it had declined to 3%.

The poppy therefore (even if of a different species) has a dramatically different connotation to the Chinese. Wearing it on a prime-ministerial lapel was at worst a provocation. And at best it was an act of quite amazing insensitivity and diplomatic gaucherie.

Even if focusing only on remembrance of World War I, there is some ambiguity in perspectives. What the British may see as glorious, the Chinese perceive as ignominious.

After the British-“inspired” Opium Wars, it was all downhill for China. China never became a colony per se, but rather what the revolutionary leader and father of the Chinese Republic Sun Yat-Sen termed a “poly-colony.”

China back then was described as a melon, slices of which the western imperial powers and Japan would cut for their own benefits in what were referred to as “spheres of influence.” The Chinese government no longer had sovereignty over China.

China back then was described as a melon, slices of which the western imperial powers and Japan would cut for their own benefits.

During World War I, China eventually joined the Allies in 1917, with the intention that it could thereby be a party to the peace settlement — and thus reclaim the territories that Germany had occupied, especially the Province of Shandong, which, among other notable facts, was the birthplace of Confucius.

Arising from a series of secret deals concocted during the war, instead of being returned to China, the Allies transferred Shandong to Japan (which in World War I had been on the side of the Allies).

This was one more humiliation too far. Outraged Chinese students formed something called the May 4th Movement, which heralded the rise of Chinese nationalism. The rest, as they say, Mao and all, is history.

But the ironies do not stop there. David Cameron was under great domestic pressure — as are most Western heads of government — to lecture the Chinese on human rights.

The pressure is all the more intense in light of the Nobel Peace Prize having been awarded to the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo. That David Cameron was able to do so with a straight face and a poppy on his lapel is testimony to the great power of Western hypocrisy.

In 1839, a Chinese scholar and senior official, Lin Zexu, had sought to lecture the British also on the subject of human rights. In a “letter of advice” to Queen Victoria, he appealed to her higher sense of morality to prohibit the opium trade:

“Let us ask, where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; that is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries — how much less to China!”

That David Cameron was able to lecture the Chinese on human rights with a straight face and a poppy on his lapel is testimony to the great power of Western hypocrisy.

Of course, several wrongs do not make a right. And it is not because the British violated human rights in China in the 19th and 20th centuries that the Chinese should be given carte blanche to violate human rights in China or elsewhere in the 21st.

Nor should they be encouraged to destroy the Louvre and the British Museum as retaliation for the Summer Palace. And the fact that the British invaded Tibet in 1903/04 is no justification for China’s invasion of the country, either.

But perhaps the most alarming aspect of this whole kerfuffle is that David Cameron and his entourage were probably not even aware, or only very dimly aware, of all the events described here.

By wearing the poppy, I am sure he was not intending to provoke or insult the Chinese. But that makes it almost worse.

If globalization is going to work, it will require that all of us, and especially our leaders, have the capacity not only to understand how other societies see the present, but also how they see the past.