Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan, 1839-1952 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan, 1839–1952 Kathryn Meyer Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan, 1839–1952. (Berkeley: University of) We all already know that opium is an evil that brings dependency and destruction in its wake wherever it is habitually consumed. Books abound that demonstrate this point. Whether the market is Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries or American ghettos of the present day, vulnerable communities become more so when drug dealers arrive, making them easier targets for social and political dependency. Thus it is no surprise that opium sales were part of the larger process of European colonization of Asia. What has not been described so commonly are the subsidiary effects of the narcotics traffic. The sixteen contributors to Opium Regimes make significant strides in correcting this need by analyzing institutions that developed around the sale and consumption of opium in China in the early half of the 20th century. The results may challenge many of the assumptions we have about the opium trade. For example, we learn that early British opium sales and the movement to end it brought together diverse national groups and so contributed to early globalization, while anti-opium organization played a role in the development of budding Chinese nationalism and in the reassertion of state control. By “regimes” the editors mean any system used by authorities to control certain practices, in this case opium consumption. Thus the various articles include not just governments, international regulations, but the sort of organizations that we might consider as civil society. For instance Joyce Mandancy looks at Chinese bureaucratic leadership in the Anti-opium crusade in Fujian in 1906 to 1916. She shows the way that local elites used the programs sponsored by the central and provincial Chinese governments to promote their own control and nurture a budding nationalism. The essays involved approach the problem from a diverse group of disciplines and national points of departure. For instance, Gregory Blue, in “Opium for China: The British Connection,” describes how the British opium trade which led to war with China in 1840 and the subsequent opening of that country to foreign trade, acted to bring together multinational groups both in carrying out the traffic and in opposing it. “Drug Operations by Resident Japanese in Tianjin” by Motohiro Kobayashi describes the way that any attempts made by the Japanese consular authorities to control narcotics trafficking by Japanese nationals and Koreans as Japanese subjects living in China was undermined by the Japanese military who received under-the-table kickbacks from those in the business. “Opium/Leisure/Shanghai: Urban Economies of Consumption” by Alexander Des Forges describes the drug culture that grew out of opium smoking and the ways it was described in popular literature of the 1920s. Looking at the regimes formed by both the trafficking and control of the drug links these seemingly diverse essays. Alan Blumler in “Opium Control versus Suppression” describes the way in which the Guomindang six-year opium suppression campaign represents an official shift from moral condemnation of the traffic to pragmatic desire to control the trade and its profits. This became a political and financial tool that permitted the Chinese government to extend its influence into previously independent territory such as Yunnan province. Timothy Brooks in “Opium and Collaboration in Central China” demonstrates that the Japanese occupying army instituted much the same control system as the Guomindang; however, the nature of their occupation insured that while the first monopoly system met with international praise, the second was condemned. As the above essays demonstrate, opium, reaction against opium and the control of the traffic could be instrumental in state building and decolonization as well as the more destructive aspects of invasion and encroachment. The best example of the ways in which this could function comes from the excellent essay “Nationalism, Identity and State Building” by Zhou Yongming. Zhou describes the process used by the Chinese Communist Party after their successful revolution in ridding China of opium and narcotics and in the process of extending their own political agenda through the population in the early 1950s. This book makes a great contribution to the literature...