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Chapter 3 The International Campaign against Opium As the Chinese state began asserting more control over the opium trade in the late nineteenth century, it did so as part of a general trend all over East Asia and the world. In the early part of the century, Asian colonial and national states tried to increase their control over opium primarily as a revenue measure. This trend continued into the later part of the century, both out of a continuing desire to increase revenue and, because it was ideologically less acceptable for states to allow the trade to be controlled by private actors. Opium consumption was also becoming problematic. As new concepts of addiction emerged, national states in the West tried to control the trade in opiates for reasons of public health. China, as one of the only national states that relied on selling opium to its own people, borrowed both motivations: public health and state-building. In addition to providing models, the international community also created a series of international agreements that regulated the international trade in drugs and proscribed proper domestic drug policies. Although China was signatory to only some of these agreements, they provided a framework used by both foreigners and Chinese to judge the progress of Chinese opium policy and thus the progress of China in general. In this chapter I analyze the metropolitan and colonial models of drug control and their lessons for China, and briefly explain the development of the international drug control system and its implications for China.1 DRUGS AND MONEY IN COLONIAL ASIA Although opium eventually created a moral hierarchy in Asia it was initially a financial hierarchy. When Asian states began to limit the opium trade for public 57 health reasons in the late-nineteenth century they did so on top of a good two centuries of attempts to regulate the trade for reasons of revenue. Although in theory public health goals replaced revenue goals by 1900, in practice the two overlapped each other for quite some time. All of the colonial states of Asia produced or sold opium and got a significant percentage of state revenue from the trade.2 Opium had been important to the Dutch and English East India Companies from the seventeenth century.3 Prior to 1850, opium policy in both producing and consuming areas focused on increasing state control over opium marketing.The Dutch had set up a monopoly opium farms to sell opium to Javanese and Chinese users by 1809, and the British monopolized production in India from 1763.4 Although these systems would later be criticized as immoral and inefficient they fit the limited needs and capacities of the pre-1850 colonial states quite well. Each system attempted to tax opium at the point where it would require the least social penetration to do so: in the ports where it was imported or exported. The Dutch system, in particular, relied on local merchants to serve as tax farmers and regulate opium sales. This not only limited state control of the trade, according to Carl Trocki, but also limited state investment. These farms were common throughout colonial Asia. “Whether in Penang or Singapore under the British, Batavia or Medan under the Dutch, Saigon under the French, Bangkok under the Chakkri kings, Manila under the Spanish, or even Hong Hong under yet another British colonial government, by the 1870’s virtually all of the opium farms of colonial Asia were operated in quite the same fashion.”5 As the nineteenth-century colonial state extended its power, the farm system became increasingly anomalous. Although with minimal state investment , farms were easy to set up, they put a tremendous amount of economic and political power in the hands of private merchants. Opium farmers were, in theory, state contractors, but in practice they were difficult to dismiss, as they were likely to be the only ones in the district with the connections and capital to run the farm, and could always revert to smuggling if stripped of their state powers. Opium was the key to this entire system: all these employees and connections cost money, and in order to pay for this, control of the opium trade was essential. The opium farm supported a class of Chinese merchants who held considerable amounts of state power and extracted and kept revenue (i.e. state involution was occurring). If the farms were abolished, there would no longer be an intermediary between the Dutch state and the Javanese peasant. Chinese revenue farmers...

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