Opium, State, and Society: China's Narco-Economy and the Guomindang, 1924-1937 (review)

Just a generation ago, the Western scholarly literature on opium in China was both numerically meager and chronologically narrow. Arthur Waley's The Opium War through Chinese Eyes and Chang Hsin-pao's Commissioner Lin and the Opium War introduced the collegiate world to the Western drug trade in China, its relationship to the Middle Kingdom's view of international relations, and the ensuing Opium War (1839-1842) and treaty settlements. An even more scanty and less substantial body of writings interpreted the Second Opium War (1856-1860). Thereafter, if the production of scholastic monographs serves as a reliable guide, the study of opium in China fell off the academic radar screen. Even though an abundance of Western and Chinese source materials in the form of government statistics, missionary investigations, and international commission reports documented the ongoing drug problem, conspicuous treatises tended to be primarily political, generated by World War II and the Cold War. Thus Frederick Merrill's Japan and the Opium Menace and assorted tracts accusing the Communist government in Beijing of drug trafficking represent the typical explorations of drug issues in China by mid-twentieth century. The decades between the end of the Second Opium War and the beginning of World War II remained largely neglected until the 1970s. Since then a growing corpus of absorbing, reliable work has begun to appear. Opium, State, and Society: China's Narco-Economy and the Guomindang, 1924-1937, by Edward Slack, who teaches at Indiana State University, illustrates the renewed research interest in Chinese drug entanglements that social scientists around the globe have developed.

After a brief historical overview of the difficulties China experienced as a result of more than a century of foreign and domestic drug production, traf fi cking, and consumption, Slack proceeds to explain "how the Nationalists [Guomindang/ Nationalist Party] reacted to the drug problem and the factors that determined that reaction" (p. 5). His first two chapters explore the many facets of the opium economy that operated in the later years of the warlord period (1916-1927) and the entire Nanjing decade (1927-1937). Opium appealed to a broad category of Chinese for various reasons. To farmers, an opium crop promised greater income or at least sufficient earnings to pay taxes; warlords and government officials put together budgets with opium revenue; underworld types, merchants, and shippers derived hefty profits from their part in the trafficking; banks not only laundered the profits, as one might expect, but also financed many of the merchants ' drug enterprises; and consumers achieved medical relief or recreational diversion. Indeed, it became downright patriotic to be involved in the drug enterprise. As one northern warlord put it, if you plant opium "the people will prosper, the provisions for the troops will be sufficient, opium from foreign nations and other provinces will not flood into Shandong, and those drugs such as morphine 'white pills' will gradually be eliminated" (p. 10).

The narco-economy spawned a host of consequences, most of which were negative. Perhaps twenty million addicts and conceivably another twenty or thirty million occasional users endangered the financial and moral well-being of the family and imperiled the economic welfare and security of the nation with their opium habits. The New Culture/May Fourth modernizing elite attacked those associated with the drug enterprise, branding them deviants, mobsters, or traitors. Opium merchants typically received the lion's share of the condemnation, assailed as "jianshang [wicked merchants] who only understand seeking profits and don't care about the public's welfare. They curry favor with the imperialists and warlords, and entice our male and female countrymen to smoke opium with devastating consequences" (p. 45). This remark came from the National Anti-Opium Association, one of many organizations that Slack identifies and analyzes that formed during the 1920s...