Opium and China Revisited: How Sophisticated Was Qing Thinking in Matters of Drug Control?

Recent years have witnessed something of a turnaround in scholarship regarding China's relationship with the outside world. During the Mao years, China's suffering at the hands of others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while never downplayed, was usually blamed on China's own weaknesses and specific evil regimes. Had China been stronger, the official line went, it would have been able to fight off the aggressive intruders and gloriously defend itself. By defeating the last of these (the Japanese), unifying the motherland, and returning to a strict policy of self-reliance, the Communists thus restored China's integrity and truly earned the implicit legitimacy to rule. This approach was oddly invigorating both to the Chinese people/nation itself and to the foreigners who might simultaneously be pleased with China's renewed strength (vicariously) and with their own implicit vindication. Foreigners were off the hook-it was never "the people" who had done bad things to China, but their malevolent "governments"-a judgment that applied to even the Americans and the Japanese "people."

Then, along came victimization theory, which reversed the verdict on virtually every event in modern Chinese foreign relations. Now, every country and people (and, of course, all their descendants) in any way involved, directly or indirectly, in victimizing China forever owed the Chinese people a debt. If repeated Japanese apologies for the horrific behavior of the Japanese military in China during World War II is any indication, there may be no way ever to overcome this guilt. In every way imaginable-culturally, politically, socially, and militarily-the damage done will continue to fester for an indeterminate time into the future, or at least as long as postcolonial theory can have a field day with it. We have seen this syndrome in the resurgence of interest in the Nanjing Massacre in China and abroad. Let no one gainsay the genuine (and surely underacknowledged) suffering of those who died or were raped or whose relatives were victims of this complex of events. By the same token, however, the Nanjing Massacre has become a political football in which the real victims have been relegated to the status of metaphors for many of the victimization debaters.

Similarly, a North American scholar now resident in Germany recently spoke at a large international conference I attended in Beijing and circulated his ideas for a pan-Western apology to the Chinese for the Opium War. He explained that his wife is Chinese, and she felt that China had never been sufficiently apologized to for the mistreatment stemming from the Opium War and its deleterious impact on China. The fact that the war occurred 175 years ago in no way fazed him.¹

In his recent study of the closely related phenomenon of renascent Chinese nationalism, Peter Gries of the University of Colorado offers some intriguing analysis for why there is this recent spurt of outwardly directed Chinese nationalism-especially vis-à-vis Japan and the United States (e.g., after the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade). He looks at how China has gone in recent years from a nation of victors who "stood up" to a nation of passive victims.² Again, it bears repeating that such a critique is meant in no way to deny or denigrate genuine suffering, but as scholars (rather than moralists or clergymen) our task is to analyze everything sensitively and accept nothing at face value. Gries shows convincingly how the regime in Beijing has manipulated public opinion cynically around specific issues with which it is generally uninterested except insofar as they may work to its advantage in the present.

Nearly thirty years ago, the then leading figure in Western sinology, John K. Fairbank (1907-1991), wrote famously and with apparent genuine ire that the Western pursuance of the opium trade in China (and its prosecution of a war to keep the trafficking of opium...