The Chinese and Opium under the Republic: Worse than Floods and Wild Beasts

Introduction. Worse Than Floods and Wild Beasts: Opium, Politics, and Society in Republican China

Introduction Worse Than Floods and Wild Beasts Opium, Politics, and Society in Republican China On January 7, 1919, Zhang Yipeng, a special representative from Duan Qirui’s government in Beijing assembled fifty notables at the New Happiness and Contentment Warehouse on Sichuan road in Shanghai. The assorted government officials, educators, bankers, merchants, and social reformers were to assist Zhang in destroying 1,207 chests of Indian opium. Zhang opened the first chest to find forty balls of opium, which were removed, chemically tested and returned to the chest, which was then weighed and its registration number was checked off. They got through eighteen chests that morning, took two hours for lunch, and then managed twenty-four chests in the afternoon. At this rate, the process would take a month, and as the days went by the number of notables attending dropped, and the journalist who dutifully reported on each day’s events for the Shenbao began to fill his articles with the names of the chemicals used to test the opium and even the numbers of the chests.1 On January 17, the first batches of opium were shipped under heavy security across the Huangpu River to Pudong and the process of burning began. It was witnessed by over two hundred people, including many Chinese and foreign reporters.The entire process was finally completed on February 3, 1919. What was destroyed at Pudong were the last stocks of Indian opium to be legally imported into China. In 1906, China launched a national and international campaign against the opium trade.The destruction of the Pudong opium was the culmination of this campaign, and could be considered the end of the India-China opium trade, a trade English reformers and Chinese statesmen had campaigned against for decades.The burning of opium could be ascribed to the Chinese government’s growing ability to control its people, denying them access to opium and convincing them that opium-smoking was not proper behavior for 1 citizens of a modern nation. The burning could also be ascribed to the Chinese state’s growing ability to manipulate the international system. The burning was the outcome of a bilateral Anglo-Chinese opium reduction agreement, a signal victory for China’s New Policies diplomacy. The atmosphere at Pudong was not festive, however.The Pudong burning could also be connected to China’s corruption, weakness, and neocolonial status .The Beijing government had not seized this opium, they had bought it, and they had bought it to sell it. The opium had been in the hands of a consortium of foreign merchants in Shanghai, who had been unable to sell it because of the strictness of Chinese anti-opium regulations.2 The central government purchased the opium from the foreign merchants as the beginning of a state opium monopoly—a complete betrayal of the professed aims of the anti-opium movement. As this plan gradually became known it was attacked by “public opinion,” and the 1919 opium burnings were the result .3 At least for a time, the burnings ended the possibility of a formal state opium monopoly, but opium production and use was reappearing all over China in 1919, making a mockery of the anti-opium campaigns. The recrudescence of opium after 1919 was shocking to many, but it was also unsurprising.The Late Qing anti-opium campaigns were an attempt to create a new China by purifying her people and government, or, to put it another way, to replace an older discourse on opium with a new one. Later scholars pointed to the campaigns as “The largest and most vigorous effort in world history to stamp out an established evil.”4 This charactarization fits well with the self-image of the reformers. They had come to the realization that a certain social habit was a bad one and that a systematic, organized and uncontroversial campaign to eliminate it was necessary. Opium suppression was no different than the campaigns against footbinding or in favor of establishing modern schools. The anti-opium campaigns were an attempt by a social and political elite to discipline the masses, with all the implications of coersion that implies. There were many opium burnings both before and after 1919. Symbolically , they consisted of not only putting opium in a box, but putting China’s opium problem in a box, and then burning it. However, opium was not an inert substance. It took its meaning from a host of economic, social, and political meanings attached to it...