Histoire d'une drogue en sursis. L'opium à Canton, 1906–1936. by Xavier Paulès (review)

For a number of years, scholars of modern China have taken it as a given that opium, its consumption, and importance as a source of revenue were among the many contradictions in Republican China; a modernizing regime relied on opium revenues and therefore turned a blind eye to its sale and consumption. The morality tale of opium addiction, causing the fall of family and national fortunes, was a trope employed in literature, anti-opium propaganda, and film, although most commonly used in film after 1949. This year stands as the dividing line between a China in decay and a China reborn, and the suppression of opium, itself the ultimate symbol of China's 19^th-century fall from the ranks of powerful states, was another Chinese Communist success story.

Over the last 20 years, scholars have begun to move beyond these stereotypes and have researched opium use, its regulation, political and financial importance, and the suppression campaigns, both in the context of Chinese history and an international history of drug use. Revisionist historians have questioned the narrative of mass addiction in southern China, while others have now begun to explore the importance of opium to the occupation regimes in China proper and Manchuria. In these histories, Japan replaces the West as the imperial power, using opium to literally calm and control the Chinese.

What has been missing is a detailed study of every facet of opium production, sale, use (both as narcotic and its place in social life), regulation, and suppression in one geographical place. Xavier Paulès has written a microhistory of opium, focusing on the city of Canton. His monograph, based on his 2005 dissertation, is a detailed examination of all of the above, including an analysis of anti-opium propaganda, opium production, and suppression in the context of warlord politics, the social meanings and use of opium, and opium use within the context of Canton's geo-history from 1906 to 1936. He draws on diplomatic sources in many languages, Canton police records, mass media, memoirs, and political documents to give us the most complete picture of the many sides and contradictions of the drug. In the process, he opens a very interesting discussion on the social meanings of opium use and its transformation as a signifier for the poor, the sick, the addicted, the unfilial, and the unpatriotic. It is an ambitious goal, and one which is largely very successful. The one criticism would be that the monograph covers so much—the political, social, economic, ideological—that the reader may be frequently turning to Google to keep track. (New Guangxi Clique, Old Guangxi Clique—which warlord at which time?) Thankfully, Paulès provides maps, reproductions of the images he analyzes, and short biographies of the principal actors.

Each chapter concentrates on one or more specific themes. Chapter 1 examines the structural and material back history of Canton's opium trade, including the origins of its opium and effects on the user. This chapter focuses on what Paulès calls the politics of opium, a concept that includes the public and administrative debate over the regulation or eradication of opium and the place of opium in warlord finances. Paulès argues that those who wanted to manage or eradicate opium were caught in a contradiction. From 1906 to 1913, the Qing's successful eradication campaign created the template which the new Republic wished to emulate, and no political figures could ignore. Militarized politics and competition over what form the new republic would take (federalist, centralist) made continuing slow eradication impossible; opium revenues were too essential to the warlords struggling to shape the city, province, and state. This has been studied before, but Paulès explores the complexities. Endorsing opium was political suicide, so Canton's leaders, while enjoying opium revenues, continued to endorse the discourse of control and eventual eradication. Paulès concludes that neither eradication nor open endorsement was possible.

Some of the...