China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Alan Baumler, Piedmont College
Chair: Charles W. Hayford, Independent Scholar
Discussant: John M. Jennings, U.S. Air Force Academy
The relationship of the state and the individual to opium was crucial throughout China’s modern period. These papers examine government and popular attitudes towards opium through a very long period, and thus examine a crucial part of China’s self-definition. Several themes persist throughout. Opium policy was always concerned with molding popular opinion, both to legitimate the extension of state power and to encourage social reform. At the same time, opium was also a tremendously dangerous issue for governments since no other problem had the same potential to destroy the government’s legitimacy both at home and abroad. Opium was an issue that could be used by outsiders to legitimate their critiques of government, and at the same time made it difficult for governments to resist these critiques. Governments could thus not remove the opium issue from the public sphere. Before the full formation of a modern public sphere in the Qing, during the discursive chaos of the Republic, and during the current Chinese government’s attempts to limit public debate, opium was always a public issue. Given the ideological dangers of the opium issue, and the need for millions of individual Chinese to change their behavior, Chinese governments could not simply force obedience. On the opium issue, the state had to build a consensus.
In the Qing elite efforts focused on formulating an understanding of the problem and a series of technologies to deal with it. Republican efforts drew on these ideas and attempted to reconcile them with the complex set of ideas held by ordinary Chinese. The Communists are presently using this discourse of opium to re-legitimize the state’s right to commit violence against individuals. The three periods can thus be seen as part of a continuous development of a definition of China and of a state and public apparatus for negotiating this definition.
Paul Howard, University of Pennsylvania
Among the ambitious reforms of the late Qing New Policies period, none was so startlingly successful as the Opium Suppression Campaign initiated in 1906. Reversing a decades-old policy of "prohibition through taxation," the campaign sought to completely eradicate a substance that most Chinese now regarded—at least publicly—as poisonous to individual health, social morality, and even national vitality. The opium smoker, once an accepted (if not respected) feature of the Chinese social landscape, now represented for many a symbol of China’s weakness.
This paper examines the roots of this remarkable, though ultimately unsustainable, state experiment in comprehensive drug prohibition. I begin by tracing the development of Qing policy on opium from 1729, the year of the first opium prohibition edict, to 1858, when the Treaty of Tianjin institutionalized the state’s accommodative method of dealing with the growing opium "problem." I then focus on the subsequent forty-five year period, a time when the moral and political legitimacy of the Qing eroded as the consumption and domestic production of the drug rose to unprecedented levels. During this period, a tenuous consensus emerged among reformist officials, socially activist elites, and others (such as religious sectarians) that opium suppression was essential if national disaster was to be avoided.
I contend that this atmosphere of political crisis and nationalistic fervor was crucial for the mobilization of so many anti-opium activists, but that paradoxically the campaign was a victim of its own success. The anti-opium movement initially achieved remarkable moral and political victories, but the economic and political costs of maintaining a prohibitionist policy after the collapse of the imperial state proved to be unbearably high.
Alan Baumler, Piedmont College
Republican opium policy was characterized by brief bursts of activity and longer periods of drift. This was partially due to fluctuating government interest, but was also due to a lack of consensus on how to understand the opium problem. Chinese ideas about opium centered around a single "official" position on opium; most Chinese partially accepted it and their ideas were in part a reaction to it. All Chinese governments officially regarded opium as a drain on the Chinese race that had to be eliminated. Other ideas also existed, however. Inside governments the lure of opium revenue remained strong. Peasant poppy growers often did not accept official ideas about opium. Another set of ideas was held by some upper-class opium users, who saw opium addiction as a result of, not a cause of, the weak will and poor moral character of the lower classes. Finally, there was a "scientific" position, which held that modern medicine and social control methods could gradually eliminate opium while the government was still profiting from the trade.
This paper will chart the typical ideas about opium held by members of particular groups, but individual’s ideas about the drug often drew on several of these positions, and only in a crisis would there be an attempt to reconcile them. The point of this study is not to anachronistically reconcile these ideas, but to show how they co-existed, and how the state and other actors learned to manipulate these ideas without ever being able to replace them entirely with a single view of the opium problem.
Yongming Zhou, Duke University
From the beginning of the 1990s, the Chinese government has adopted a draconian law against drug offenders. Numerous public trials have been held and every year more than several hundred drug traffickers are executed, yet this policy seems to have raised little discontent from the public. Considering the state had lost its legitimacy of using state violence after the Tiananmen Incident of 1989, the Government was very successful in using an anti-drug campaign to show its coercive power to the public without evoking anti-government sentiment in the early 1990s.
This paper will analyze various factors the authorities used in the making of an anti-drug discourse and show its continuity and discontinuity in contemporary China. After claiming China as a drug-free country for two decades and relating it as a symbol of socialist new China, the Chinese government had to reinterpret the drug phenomenon after the problem reemerged in the beginning of the 1980s. I will try to shed some light on how the new anti-drug discourses have shaped the way the current anti-drug campaign has been carried out.
The main change is that the authorities try to depoliticalize the drug problem as a concrete social evil rather than as a signifier of the new China identify, on the one hand; and continue to relate the drug problem to the history of the Opium War as a means to conduct patriotism propaganda, on the other hand. Compounded by the discourse on AIDS in China, where most HIV positives are intravenous drug users, the discourse has portrayed drug users as the culprits of spreading out this deadly foreign plague. Harmful, dangerous and unpatriotic, it is in this context that drug offenders are viewed to deserve the severest punishment by the public, and the government is using the anti-drug campaign as a part of efforts to reestablish its legitimacy in post-Tiananmen China.