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Chapter 9 War, Poppies, and the Completion of the Plan The outbreak of war with Japan in 1937 changed everything in the short term, but very little in the long term. The occupation of almost the entire coastal area profoundly disrupted the flow of opium across China, and made the Nationalist ’s entire opium strategy unworkable.The considerable progress that had been made in eliminating poppy growing, controlling distribution and registering and ‘curing’ users in the occupied areas vanished immediately once the Japanese arrived .The Japanese regimes were interested in opium as a source of profit and to the extent the Japanese could control the trade they integrated their areas into the existing systems of the Japanese empire.To the very considerable extent that the Japanese could not control the trade it fell into the hands of local militarists and gangsters. In unoccupied China, the Communists continued their tight control over the opium trade while the Nationalists faced a dilemma.1 What was the purpose of the Six-Year Plan after the war started? Some of is old purposes were no longer valid. Chiang’s system of opium marketing in the coastal cities no longer existed and no longer provided leverage in dealing with producers. The plan had already had considerable success in reducing the power of the western warlords, and in any case with the capital now in Chongqing the dynamic of the relationship between them and Chiang was quite different. The plan had also been part of an attempt to convince the Americans in particular that China was a victim of Japanese imperialism, but that goal was now fulfilled by the invasion. Moral improvement of the Chinese people was still a worthwhile goal, but should it be a priority at this point? The Chinese state still needed revenue, but in the new wartime economy, opium revenue was somewhat different than it had been before. 215 The state was now attempting to extract every resource it possibly could out of the limited population of west China, and trades in consumer luxuries did not fit well. Critics had always claimed that opium sales were economically counterproductive for the state, but this became much more apparent in the war years. In the initial period of the war some assumed that opium suppression would be deemphasized as one of the many noble causes that would have to be subordinated to the war effort. Chiang Kai-shek gave up his opium responsibilities to focus on the war, placing He Jian in charge. He denounced the idea that opium suppression had been put on the back burner, and stated that the struggle against opium and drugs was an integral part of the struggle with Japan. In fact, now that Japan was openly at war with China the problems of Japanese opium smuggling and attempts to drug China could be dealt with more effectively.2 Chiang Kai-shek himself stated that opium suppression was as important as resistance to Japan, and this was reflected in policy.3 There were several motivations for this. As in the past, local commanders were selling opium to raise money and thus becoming more independent.4 Revenue was still important, and the state would still get money from opium. Although Free China was never crushed under a tidal wave of Japanese opium there was a real fear that this might happen, and controlling the opium system was seen as a way of preventing it.5 Most important, the goals of opium suppression fit at least as well with the goals of China at war as they had during the Nanjing decade.The SixYear Plan had included provisions for controlling poppy growing, and while these had not been totally ignored the state seems to have been less interested in controlling the behavior of peasants in remote parts of China. Now that these were all China had left they became much more significant. Purification of China also became more important.The original plan had called for getting rid of opium because smoking the drug weakened the people and selling it gave them too much financial power. The focus of the problem of controlling China’s finances shifted from controlling provincial-level warlords to controlling lower-level militarists and aboriginal tribes, but it became all the more intense because of that. Purifying the people also became more important. The process of registration and clinical treatment continued and expanded. The state also adopted a policy that would have been unthinkable before the war. Once...

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