BOOK REVIEWS

Timothy Brood and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan 1839-1952

This collective work arises out of a conference held in Toronto in May 1997 entitled “Opium in East Asian History”. The book’s editors state in their preface that they have not been able to publish all the papers, presenting here “only” 17 articles. This nonetheless means a dense volume, faultlessly edited and with a remarkable bibliography—in short, a reference work on the state of research in an area the scope of which is in constant expansion. In Opium Regimes can be found both the results and, conversely, the weaknesses of the history of opium in Asia—beginning, indeed, with the choice of writers. Among these are several young PhDs offering monographs based on first-hand documentation, mixed with old-hands in the field who are today proposing ambitious recastings of the phenomenon of opium, however no author from mainland China is included, nor are there any specialists tackling the problem of contraband and trafficking in any real detail((1). The work’s editorial team has given priority to setting up a “positive” problematic, one centred on the political economy of the drug. But, while this does deal with the paramount questions of interests, actors and the impact of opium, it underestimates the notion of scale. This is directly linked to the problem of sources, discussed neither by the editors nor practically by any of the writers, which is something that constitutes the greatest weakness of the book and the trickiest problem in this field of research. In this connection, it is vital to remember that there exists virtually no coherent statistical series and that the bulk of the documentation comes from official sources, with prohibition laws covering the greatest part of this period, and that consequently we often see only the “flip side of the coin”. In this context, we need to tread carefully in dealing with opium policies, given that the available documents make for difficult use, and in any case warrant an open discussion. Moreover, there is unfortunately no use made of alternative sources such as the various Chinese chronicles and memoirs, despite the fact that the works of the Chinese historian Dong Yiming suggest the great richness they contain((2). This observation is tied in with the fact that Chinese historians have only recently begun to explore the subject in any critical way, but by the same token it underscores their massive absence in what one could define as “the birth certificate” of the modern study of the phenomenon of opium in Asia.

The book is comprised of four chapters that tackle in succession the historical dimensions of the trade (Chapter One, two articles), the distribution and consumption of the drug (Chapter Two, five articles), its control and the consequent forms of resistance (Chapter Three, six articles), and the paradoxical exit of the drug between the period of Japanese occupation and the Communist “liberation” (Chapter Four, four articles). Although the works do not take China exclusively as their reference (one article deals with opium in nineteenth century Japan and another with the opium farms in South-East Asia), this book is essentially a history of the drug in China. The period under consideration extends from the beginning of the Opium Wars to their resolution, generally accepted as occurring in 1952, that is characterised by the prohibition of opium once and for all and by what was in effect the drug’s destruction, as well as the treatment of addicts. Within this frame of a century, opium was a multi-facetted substance, with many implications, the various effects of which were to play a decisive role in the formation of the Chinese state. One of the writers sums this up clearly, “the challenges of state-making in modern China would have been considerably simplified had large-scale imports of opium not been introduced by the British. Whatever alternative scenarios we may imagine, the historical connections between opium and Chinese state-making remain empirically important. The dynamics of modern Chinese state-making bore the burden of opium, an issue that Chinese officials and elites perceived as a moral problem with social, economic, and political dimensions unlike those any other country in the world has faced”((3). The work’s editors have wanted to stress the intertwining of these various facets and what was finally the intrinsically political impact of the control of opium. To this extent, they designate its actors, who were almost always in competition with each other, as opium “regimes”, which accounts for the fundamentally polemical title of the work. Such a choice remains debatable, as it conflates structures of unequal scale whose foundations are furthermore not based in any equal way on the exploitation of the drug. In this respect, lumping together the East India Company and the Chinese national organisation for the fight against opium appears a very risky move indeed.

The presentation of these various dimensions corresponds in fact to the key moments in the history of opium in Asia, that began for essentially economic reasons((4), but ended up becoming of major political importance. Opium, either through the integration of its production and consumption and the creation of a captive market, or through the concentration of its distribution, enabled considerable amounts of capital to be generated. C. Trocki shows how the opium farms allowed Chinese capitalist accumulation in South-East Asia by means of colonial economic policy. Taxes on opium-furnished budgets, and a monopoly on distribution contributed to the setting up of competitive industries by ensuring virtually free labour((5), while the buying up of farms brought about significant concentrations of capital that went beyond the administrative and political limits of the colonies. The importance of opium for the colonial budget in the case of Hong Kong is taken up by Christopher Munn, who does set out, however, the difficulties experienced by the British authorities working with local businessmen. In the end, the farm system could not guarantee adequate control over the income from opium and appeared antequated in the early twentieth century when the trade became morally indefensible. It is this aspect that really determines the modern history of opium, and the massive use made by the Japanese army of revenue from it to finance the war effort in China offers a good example a contrario. The setting up of collaborationist regimes depending largely on opium revenues indicates indeed Japan’s “lateness” with respect to this general trend more than it does the implementation of any supposed plot designed to subject a whole nation to dependency on the drug((6). Gregory Blue’s article on the opium trade of the English points to a similar development from 1913, when the British government agreed to stop exporting Indian opium to China.

From the Chinese point of view, the problem was posed in a different context, but otherwise in identical terms. The economic surplus value generated by the production, distribution and taxation of opium ran up against the increasing illegitimacy of dealing in narcotics. Indigenous opium policies all operated in this context, from the imperial effort led in the last decade of the Qing right up to the prohibitionist avatars of the nationalist regime. Their implementation depended for one thing on the determination and efficiency of the executive power, which it can be said was not without merit under the Qing, as Judith Wyman shows in her article on opium production in Sichuan province, which of all the provinces was the one most infiltrated by the drug culture in the late nineteenth century. These policies also required the collaboration of the local elite, which reacted in different ways in different areas, but contributed nonetheless to the results achieved in the early twentieth century, as in the case of Fujian province studied by Joy Mandancy. Finally, they varied according to the reaction of producers, whose evolution is charted by Lucien Bianco. This went from an initial reaction of non-comprehension in the face of an “unpredictable” change of policy, to one of resistance to excessive taxes in a context of legal and political incoherence. To this extent, it is to be regretted that the book contains no article on the opium policies of the various warlords, especially with respect to provinces that were as crucial for opium as those of the Chinese south-west such as Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi. However, in his central article on the origins of the plan to prohibit opium that was adopted by the Kuomintang regime in 1936, Alan Baumler does propose a general analysis of the political economy of opium during this period. He describes the way in which Chiang Kai-shek used a powerful ideological lever—the fight against opium—to put in place a monopoly of distribution and consumption of the drug, theoretically designed to control and gradually reduce trafficking, but in practice to ensure his finances and to drain those of rival political factions. Baumler appropriately concludes by stating that “although it happened in a context of more general failure, Chiang’s opium policies can only be considered a success, if a somewhat cynical one”. Indeed, the prohibition on opium made no headway until the arrival of the Communists, and those who denounced the drug situation in China were never under any illusion. This was particularly the case with the Chinese Association for the Fight against Opium, as Edward Slack shows in his piece recounting its short-lived existence between 1924 and 1937, the year its leaders decided on its dissolution in response to the 1936 plan and Chiang’s offer to finance the movement in exchange for the latter’s political support for the KMT.

Although it is difficult to judge the situation on the ground, we would be tempted to presume that the degree of tolerance of the Chinese people with respect to opium waned over this half-century and that the advent of a regime that was master of the political terrain and ready to solve the drug problem once and for all corresponded to a certain extent to the general expectation. We can observe some signs of this even before the end of the war at the time of the very long student demonstrations of 1943, described by Mark S. Eykholt. The role of the pro-Japanese regime of Wang Jingwei appears in this study as being clearly an important one, painting a picture of manipulation designed to break the Japanese monopoly on the drug’s distribution so as to take it over for itself and thereby obtain a greater margin of autonomy. Although the treatment of sources turns out to be particularly ambiguous here, the various movements launched during the nationalist period—the New Life and New Youth Movements—all contributed, despite their immediate political aims, to a new society that became cristallised in an exemplary manner in an attitude to opium. In this context, the apparently resounding success of the Communist ban, which operated between 1949 and 1952, must be seen from the perspective of a previously unknown mobilisation that was at once political and popular. Zhou Yongming gives us a partial representation of this in the final article of Opium Regimes, emphasising that the resolution of the century-old intoxication of China did not rest as much on executions as Western observers have for so long believed, but rather on a propaganda campaign based on denunciation. Zhou states that Communist social control was already capable of wiping out individual freedoms and breaking up family and social solidarities and that it consolidated its totalitarian sweep all the more after this victorious campaign. In the case of opium, the hypothesis of a real fervour mobilising the masses is not, however, to be discarded.

The study of opium in China seems to us today to reach this “cultural” limit. Only Alexandrer V. Des Forges’s article on the representation of opium in writings on Shanghai goes down this path in Opium Regimes. It gives us a mixed and internally diverse result, that links the corruption and degeneration of the city to the trafficking and consumption of opium, just as it links the city’s wealth and recreational culture to it. The critical description of the representation of opium and its cultural and social significance in China remains, however, to be written, in order to explain, beyond the political economy of which this book offers a first successful exposé, the singular phenomenon of the massive intoxication of China through the “black fairy”((7).

Translated from the French original by Peter Brown