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Conclusion
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Conclusion In China today, opium is a problem that is presented as one of the perennial issues of modern Chinese history.1 This is not surprising given that modern Chinese history begins with the First Opium War. The history of the century following that war is often organized around themes of China’s exploitation by foreign powers; the disorganization of Chinese society and the failure of Chinese citizens and governments to live up to their roles. Opium fit well into these narratives and, more generally, into the moralizing approach that saw China as a victim of imperialism and feudalism.2 This study argues that the grand narrative of China’s addiction to opium conceals as much as it explains. Su Zhiliang identifies three anti-opium campaigns (Lin Zexu, the Late Qing, and the Communists).3 Besides the fact that this formulation leaves out the Nationalist’s Six-Year Plan it also obscures the immense differences between these campaigns. The economic and fiscal position of opium, the presumed effect of the drug on the people, the nature of the people, the ideological importance of the trade, the international situation, all of these were quite different in all of the four major anti-opium campaigns. The figure of Lin Zexu looms large in much of twentieth-century antiopium propaganda, and while I have argued that his actions are less relevant to the modern situation than the anti-opium crusaders thought, their attraction to him is not surprising. For Lin, opium was a comparatively minor problem that could be eliminated through an act of will. China’s opium problem was caused by foreign merchants who could be awed through a display of imperial power and a problem of corrupt officials, which could be dealt with by honest officials. It is not surprising that this view of opium as a problem that could be solved by elite willpower was popular with later elites. It is somewhat surprising: they missed the enormous differences between Lin’s views and their own; the scope and intrusiveness of the opium trade was far smaller in 1839; Lin’s attempt to gather up and burn all the opium in China in 1839 was a tragic failure; but the attempt to do the same thing in 1919 was a farce. Lin’s view of the problem he faces was radically different from that of the later reformers. Both groups referred to a guo huo, which can be translated as national disaster. For Lin, this meant the fall of the Qing dynasty and in the 231 twentieth century the extinction of the Chinese in Social Darwinian competition . Both were worried about the effects of opium-smoking on the population of China, but Lin’s view of this was fundamentally elitist.The modern concept of citizens was, of course alien to him, and while he did worry about the common people and their health his chief concern was with officialdom and the army. To the extent that nineteenth-century thinkers were concerned with the economic effects of opium it was in the context of Confucian ideas of frugality and grain supply rather than modern ideas of economic growth and international competition. The British position in the first Opium War is superficially understandable from a twentieth century point of view. The British state profited from opium sales, and was willing to go to war to defend those profits. In 1839, the British were not behaving evilly in a modern sense, however. Twentieth-century reformers felt that the wrongness of the opium trade was self-evident and that the only reason a state or individual could participate in it was that they were completely indifferent to moral behavior. In fact in the nineteenth-century opium taxes were just another example of tax farming. Like alcohol or prostitution, it was a disreputable trade that was best limited, and the best way to both limit the trade and profit from it was some form of state control. All over Asia, governments controlled the opium trade as a source of revenue, and dealt with problems of control and regulation. There were those in Britain, most notably the Quakers behind the Society for the Abolition of the Opium Trade, who believed that the trade was innately wrong. Most governments accepted views enshrined in the report of the 1895 Royal Commission on Opium; opium was less dangerous to Asians that to Europeans, and the best way to deal with it was a racially-based hierarchy that would protect the...