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Chapter 5 Opium, the Nation, and the Revolution All state formations of the warlord period faced the same problems in dealing with opium. All needed and wanted opium profits, and to some extent, all had to reconcile this with opium suppression. Each also had to adapt their opium programs to the specific conditions of the opium trade in the area they operated in. Some warlord regimes made considerable progress in adapting to the economic realities of the opium trade, but most made little progress on the matter of legitimizing their behavior. The Guomindang regime that came to power in 1927, would build on these practical successes and go much further in terms of legitimating their behavior. In this chapter I focus on the first major attempt made by the new government to reconcile their opium policies with its professed goals of nation-building. This first attempt was a failure in most respects. The Guomindang government established its power on the basis of military force and on the basis of its promise to create a new China.The early part of the Nanjing decade was profoundly disappointing for both the regime and its supporters. Nanjing was unable to establish the level of control it felt necessary to carry out its tasks, and its supporters were disappointed with the reality of the new China they had sacrificed for.1 Although the intellectuals and urbanites who saw their opinions as the expression of national public opinion were not often able to influence the government’s policies , Nanjing was not able to entirely ignore their claims that the government was deviating from the principles of Sun Yat-sen. The issue which had the most potential for conflict between the two, and the most potential to cause a disastrous loss of legitimacy for the regime was opium. Although Nanjing claimed to be creating a new nation, at first the new government struggled to grow beyond its origins as a warlord regime. In 1927–1929 the Nationalists attempted to create a 111 national opium monopoly. Although there were able to take advantage of a number of innovations in opium control it proved to be impossible to legitimize this new system. THE GUOMINDANG AND OPIUM IN THE CANTON PERIOD The Nationalists’ plan in 1927 was to expand their Canton opium system to the entire nation, thus making profits and denying them to rivals. The Nationalists controlled the city of Canton and its environs from 1922, and in this period they laid the groundwork for the 1927 Northern Expedition. It was here that Sun Yat-sen finalized the Three Principles of the People and Plan for National Reconstruction , and here that Soviet advisors helped Chiang Kai-shek to establish the Whampoa Military Academy and Mao Zedong to establish the Propaganda Bureau. It was also here that the Nationalsts first began to deal with opium both as a financial boon and as an ideological threat. In practical terms, the Canton government was a warlord regime and opium money was one of its financial supports. Being at the end of the Yunnan-Guangxi opium route the Canton regime had the opportunity to profit from controlling distribution and sales. In the early 20s the trade was fairly disorganized as individual garrisons taxed opium as they saw fit and kept the money for themselves. To the extent the trade was controlled it was done by Sun’s erstwhile Yunnanese allies, but when they were ousted in 1925 and a more centralized system was set up.2 Rather than leave the trade in the hands of local garrisons, the government set up a province-wide monopoly tax system, where anti-opium medicine (pure opium)3 was transported and sold by private merchants licensed by the government .4 The announced goal of this plan was to end the trade gradually over five years, starting in 1926. Smokers over the age of twenty-five, who were medically unable to quit, would be licensed to purchase decreasing amounts of opium from the licensed opium shops. In practice, licenses were not necessary, and the gradual reduction of the total of opium smoked was the responsibility of the opium farmers, whose financial interests called for the opposite. The use of a tax farming system was typical of opium monopolies in this period, and only the lack of a charismatic figure like Du Yuesheng kept it from being an exact copy of the Shanghai model. The farm provided immediate cash, like all tax farms, but (in the case of...

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