by Julia Lovell
For most of his career, Sun was necessarily more preoccupied by his domestic political opponents than by foreign threats. Through the 1900s, he was careful to avoid open criticism of Western imperialism: his public statements always attributed the root of China’s problems to the dictatorship of the Manchus (whom Sun excoriated for having failed to build a Western-style democracy).17 In 1912, even as he declared opium prohibition to be one of the most urgent tasks of the new republic, he observed that ‘Lin Zexu’s burning of the opium generated unprecedented calamity for the country . . . it did not conform to treaties; it was uncivilized, illegal behaviour.’18 To the end of his life, he considered his greatest mistake to have been to cede the presidency to Yuan Shikai in 1912 – rather than to have offered repeatedly to hand over large portions of the Chinese republic to would-be foreign backers. (In 1913 alone, he volunteered Manchuria to the Japanese government in exchange for 20 million yen and a couple of army divisions.) In 1923, Sun objected to a student slogan that exhorted the Chinese to ‘Resist the Great Powers abroad and overthrow the warlords at home’. ‘These two problems cannot be discussed in the same breath’, he reprimanded the sloganeers. ‘If the home government is good then foreign relations present no problem.’19
If, in the early 1920s, China’s old Opium War adversary Great Britain had produced backing as substantial as that promised by the Soviet Union, Sun’s budding agreement with Lenin might well have come to nothing. In February 1923, a mere month before the USSR pledged $2 million to his revolutionary government, Sun was taking tea in well-heeled Hong Kong drawing rooms and proclaiming that ‘we must take England as our model and must extend England’s example of good government to the whole of China.’20
But by 1924, his ongoing financial and political crises had persuaded Sun to complete the intellectual journey dictated by Soviet backing, and in a series of lectures on his Three Principles of the People – the text that would become a major part of his political legacy after his death the following year – he began to identify imperialism as Republican China’s greatest enemy. By wresting control of Customs from the Qing, the first Opium War had left China with a severe ‘economic disability’, resulting in the annual loss of $1.2 billion. ‘China has suffered at the hands of the Great Powers for decades . . . [It] has become a colony of the Great Powers.’21 In fact, China was far worse than a colony, he told his listeners – it was, he extemporized, a ‘hypocolony . . . not the slaves of one country but of all.’22 The ‘historic task’, he decided, must now be to unite for ‘the overthrow of the intervention of foreign imperialism in China’, for ‘China’s disintegration is not the fault of the Chinese, but, instead, is caused exclusively by foreigners.’23 Through his lectures, Sun painted a simplistic picture of a peaceable, virtuous China surrounded by rapacious foreign powers eager ‘to destroy a nation in one morning.’ In order to rescue the country, he concluded, his Nationalist Party was duty-bound to ‘acquaint our 400 million people with our present position. We are just now at the crisis between life and death.’ If the Chinese did not – under the leadership of the Nationalist Party – recover their sense of nationalism and ready themselves to fight imperialism, ‘our nation [will] be destroyed [and our] race will be exterminated.’24 The Nationalists, in other words, were China’s only chance of salvation.
Once Sun’s Nationalist Party had finally vowed to rally the Chinese to the cause of anti-imperialism, however, it still had to find the means to impress this new orthodoxy on the minds of its citizens. By the early 1920s, it was clear to aspiring political elites that for decades anti-Western feeling had ebbed and flowed in response to particular crises, without coalescing into a unified political force. A strong, cohesive nation required a one-party nation-state. The problem with the Chinese, the supposed republican democrat Sun Yat-sen concluded in 1924, was that they had too much freedom. ‘We have had too much liberty without any unity . . . [B]ecause we have become a sheet of loose sand . . . we must break down individual liberty and become pressed together into an unyielding body like the firm rock which is formed by the addition of cement to sand.’25 The Chinese people, in the estimation of the newly reformed Nationalist Party, needed discipline. ‘The masses’, in an Orwellian phrase of the early 1920s, needed to be ‘partified’, Lenin-style; they needed a pervasive, unified national language of anti-imperialist slogans and symbols, clearly identifying the country’s enemies (imperialism and its lackeys) and its saviours (the Nationalists and their sometime allies, the Communists).26 At the First Congress of the reorganized Nationalist Party in 1924, anti-imperialism became one of the basic criteria by which Chinese citizens would be given membership of the national revolution to come: ‘Those who betray the nation, those who give their loyalty to the imperialists or to the warlords, will be permitted neither freedom nor rights.’27
The task would prove beyond Sun Yat-sen. Soon after he had travelled north in 1925 to conduct talks with the warlord government in Beijing, he succumbed to liver cancer. Almost instantly, though, his successors embarked upon modern China’s most humourlessly committed attempt at nation-building: ‘with the president dead,’ the Nationalists’ Central Executive Committee quickly concluded, ‘party discipline is the only thing that can protect . . . us.’28 Sun’s survivors began by reinvigorating its Propaganda Bureau, ensuring that a party line actually existed, that it was disseminated to all party branches, and that newspapers, magazines and public lectures toed it.29 (This was a major achievement: as late as 1924, the newly appointed editor of the Nationalist Party newspaper had to work on ensuring that it stopped at least openly insulting Sun Yat-sen.) While Nationalist armies – trained and supplied by the Soviets – pushed up through the country between 1926 and 1928, fighting or bribing warlords into submission, Sun’s successors (led by Chiang Kai-shek, the man who took over the helm of the party) deified their late, flawed leader as the political sage of a Nationalist Party that aspired to monopolize all claims to represent the ‘Chinese nation’. As they surged north, fighting to reunify the country, Nationalist forces showered the country with tens of thousands of slogans, leaflets, images of the Great Leader and new blue-and-white Nationalist flags. Sun’s anti-imperialist Three Principles of the People and last testament (drafted by subordinates desperate for a legacy and merely signed off by the semi-comatose dying man) became the soundtrack to public life in the Nationalist state founded in 1928. Every Monday, in offices, schools and garrisons, employees, students and soldiers would gather to bow three times to his portrait, to listen to a reading of his Testament and to contemplate silently for three minutes.30
But if the Nationalists were serious about engineering a nation out of anti-imperialist feeling, tampering with history books was an obvious step to take. ‘Who controls the past, controls the future’, as Ingsoc put it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘Who controls the present controls the past.’ And it was thanks to the propaganda drive of the 1920s and 1930s that the events of 1839–42 stopped being a quarrelsome side-story (a ‘dispute’ or ‘expedition’) of the nineteenth century and became instead the aggrieved, unprecedented national tragedy that the ‘Opium War’ remains in China today.
A touching illustration on page four of the sixth issue of Children’s Magazine (Ertong Zazhi) from 1936 shows two plump little brothers, one a head taller than the other, standing with their arms around each other, the older presumably imparting some fraternal wisdom to the younger on the subject of the article’s title: ‘A Chat about the Opium War’. The following dialogue between the two boys ensues. ‘What was the Opium War about?’ the little one wants to know. Well, his big brother explains, it all started with Lin Zexu trying to stop British opium imports.
‘So they attacked Dinghai and Tianjin, and the Qing emperor was so useless he blamed Lin Zexu for causing the war, dismissed him and appointed Qishan instead to negotiate for peace.’
‘What a silly emperor!’
‘And because Qishan was so clueless, the English took Wusong and Nanjing. The Qing e
mperor was so surprised that he signed the Treaty of Nanjing that destroyed our sovereignty and humiliated the nation.’
‘Those horrible fierce imperialists!’
The younger one – probably around seven years old – responds to a description of the clauses of the Treaty of Nanjing with word-perfect political correctness. ‘Oh, I’m so angry I could die! The emperor and his ministers were so stupid! I could kill them all! They deserve to die!’ ‘Don’t get angry,’ counsels his sage brother. ‘Just remember everything that I told you – you’ll take revenge when you get older.’ ‘Of course,’ chirps the seven-year-old. ‘This blood debt has to be repaid.’31
This exchange sums up what every schoolchild in Nationalist China was supposed to know about the Opium War: that it was a tale of evil imperialists and foreign poison humiliating China; and that all right-thinking Chinese people, of all ages, should be inspired to take revenge for it. Two or three decades earlier, what Chinese people today now know as the Opium War (‘Yapian zhanzheng’) remained an event in China’s long, difficult nineteenth century, buried beneath the more general subheadings of ‘Internal and External Troubles of the Nineteenth Century’ or ‘the Western Migration East’, and sandwiched between difficulties in Xinjiang and the sprawling violence of the Taiping Rebellion. An average history textbook would run through a handful of factual details – the growing Chinese fondness for opium; the crackdown of 1839; the arrival of gunboats; the main battles; the treaty and the size of the indemnity – then move on to the next unpleasant nineteenth-century occurrence (usually domestic rebellions; occasionally sheep banditry in Mongolia).32
Through the 1920s, though, the historiography of the Opium War acquired a fresh sense of resentment. By the end of this decade, the conflict and the first ‘Unequal Treaty’ that Qiying and Yilibu had signed off with such careless haste had become the turning point in a modern history dominated by imperialist aggression. It was (ahistorically) named the ‘beginning of China’s diplomatic defeats’ after ‘5,000 years of isolation’ from the outside world; ‘a humiliation to the country – the greatest ever in our history’ that ‘brought dishonour to countless descendants’.33 ‘The Opium War, for the first time, branded the iron hoofprint of imperialism on the bodies of our people’, pronounced one history textbook.34 ‘From this time on,’ observed another, ‘the invasions and oppressions of the imperialists would daily encroach further on the Chinese people.’35 ‘The Opium War is intricately linked with the national fate of modern China’, commented a 1931 tract on the conflict. ‘At last, foreigners were able to realize their old dream of looting China; how furiously we sigh to remember it now. This book offers a warning to you all, to incite bitter hatred of the common enemy.’36 ‘Since the Opium War,’ a magazine editorial analysed, ‘international imperialism has forced opium on our country, miring our great rivers and mountains in black fog . . . we have been massacred, robbed of our sovereignty – we’ve become worse than a colony. We’ve become a poisoned people.’37
The aim was to persuade the populace to blame all China’s problems on a single foreign enemy: to transform the Opium War and its Unequal Treaty into a long-term imperialist scheme from which only the Nationalists could preserve the country, thereby justifying any sacrifice that the party required of the Chinese. ‘From the Opium War . . . the unanimous demand of the people has been to avenge the National Humiliation’, Chiang Kai-shek informed his subjects. ‘The success of the Nationalist Revolution [and] China’s destiny depends upon the efforts of my countrymen.’38 If something is not done, another essayist proclaimed, ‘generation upon generation of our children will be enslaved for ever.’39 Reassessment of the Opium War coincided with other anti-Western commemorations introduced after 1924: week-long anti-imperialism fiestas (orchestrated by the new Grand Anti-imperialist Alliance) protesting acts of foreign violence – such as the shooting of eleven Chinese protestors by British-led constables in Shanghai on 30 May 1925. Enlisted Nationalist soldiers were educated by four-hour lectures on the past and present oppression of imperialism: ‘England imports opium into China’, ran the official script for these talks. ‘The British bombarded Canton, demanded indemnity and, moreover, occupied and still occupy Hong Kong.’40 ‘With their thirteen million square miles of colonies, the British imperialists are the leaders of world imperialism’, exclaimed a party weekly in 1930. ‘They’ve oppressed every small race to death . . . Because of British imperialism, our nation is neither free nor equal . . . if you want proof, just remember how the British have invaded us for the last eighty years . . . Let us lift the curtain on evil British imperialism, and reveal its viciousness.’41
Yet however hard Nationalist China’s pedagogues tried to turn the Opium War into a monument to China’s victimization by the West, the old self-disgust of earlier patriots crept back in. Reminders of British wickedness were accompanied by references to the war’s ‘failures’ and ‘defeats’, caused by the ‘arrogance’, ‘stupidity’ and ‘indecision’ of the Qing government, by the ‘slumbering, ancient, declining’ and ‘undisciplined’ masses, and by the treachery of the ‘bad merchants’. ‘We weren’t ready,’ one 1936 analysis of the war concluded, ‘we were divided . . . we were suspicious of each other . . . the responsibility lies, for the most part, on our shoulders . . . the Opium War is more useful than harmful to us – it can transform our thinking and correct our mistakes.’42 ‘It marked the beginning of our period of transformation and enlightenment’, agreed Drug Prohibition Monthly in the same year. ‘English imperialism was the induction injection for the reform of Chinese society.’43 ‘European and American imperialists invaded China,’ an article commemorating the centenary of the war lamented, ‘but the Chinese people were responsible for their own weakness – we can’t blame other people.’44
In 1943, Chiang Kai-shek completed his own judgement of the Opium War, denouncing in his book-length manifesto China’s Destiny the ‘heartbreaking’ and ‘limitless evil effects’ of the country’s ‘First National Humiliation’, which ‘cut off the lifeblood of the state’ and ‘threatened our people’s chance of survival.’45 Throwing off the enslavement of the Unequal Treaties was ‘the most important objective of the Chinese Nationalist Revolution.’46 In these same pages, though, he also made plain his contempt for the ‘stupidity’ of the Manchus and for the ‘decadent habits and evil practices’ of the ordinary people. ‘The country was subjected only because it had subjected itself . . . Must we not tremble? Must we not be ashamed and disturbed?’47 (His Western-educated wife, Song Meiling, took care to ensure that the government did not translate her husband’s great work into English, for fear that its anti-Western message would alienate the Americans and British from whom the Nationalists desperately needed military aid to fight the Japanese.48)
Coexisting with this still ambivalent vision of the Opium War was a set of similarly undecided attitudes to opium itself. In Nationalist declarations, opium was legally and morally beyond the pale: in 1928, Chiang’s new government announced a ‘total prohibition’ (juedui jinyan). Unofficially, however, the Nationalists – like the warlord regimes they fought through the 1920s and 1930s – needed the opium trade for revenue. Between 1927 and 1937, the Nationalist government strove (often with surprising success, given appalling obstacles such as Japanese invasion and worldwide depression) to transform an impoverished, fragmented country into a modern unified state: creating national ministries, commissions, academies; building roads, railways, industries, dams.49 In the absence of crucial resources such as income tax, opium duties would have to do instead. For the creative tax-collector – and Republican China was full of them – there was a wealth of surcharges to be extracted from opium: in duties on the drug itself (plus its transport and retail); and licences to sell and smoke it. The state even maintained a monopoly on opium-addiction cures.50 The citizens of the republic dodged these taxes with comparable ingenuity: one filial individual smuggled opium between west and east China by concealing it not just inside hi
s father’s coffin, but inside his father’s skull inside the coffin.51
In 1928, drug revenues helped keep the country’s armies – at a total of 2.2 million, the largest in the world (costing $800 million a year) – standing. A 1931 cartoon entitled ‘Shanghai business’ pictured three figures: to left and right two dwarfs labelled ‘industry’ looked skyward at the towering colossus between them – Opium. In 1933, the size of the opium traffic in China was estimated at $2 billion annually (5.2 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product). In many regions and contexts, opium was as good as, if not better than, money, and an essential commercial and social lubricant – ‘light the lamps’ was standard Chinese for ‘let’s talk business’; opium pipes were offered at weddings as conventionally as wine. The country literally reeked of the stuff, thanks to the vats of the drug publicly boiled in the streets of towns and cities: by the 1930s, China may have had as many as 50 million smokers (around 9 per cent of the population).52
Through the 1920s, concerned civilians organized themselves into a National Anti-Opium Association, launching special Anti-Opium Days, then Anti-Opium Weeks, and a monthly periodical Drug Prohibition, on whose covers righteous, muscular Chinese thwacked and thumped hideous tar-black monsters named Opium. (Four and a half million signatures were collected for anti-opium petitions in 1924 alone.) ‘Why aren’t our nation’s merchants content with engaging in legitimate business activities?’ the Association wanted to know in 1927. ‘Why are they so willing to serve as the slaves of foreigners? As the running dogs of warlords? As those who injure both the people and the nation? . . . They curry favour with imperialists and warlords, and entice our male and female countrymen to smoke opium with devastating consequences.’53 In the meantime, the Nationalist government identified offices for collecting opium tax as ‘opium suppression bureaus’, while opium merchant guilds could be euphemistically labelled ‘medicinal merchants’ friendship associations’.54 ‘Millions have been raised out of opium’, remarked the International Anti-Opium Association in 1928. ‘Nationalist Government monopolies exist in every large centre, and are so efficiently organised that enormous revenues result. And although the evil of the so-called “Opium Wars” has invariably been referred to on every Nationalist platform and in every proletarian demonstration, the Government is raising the very last cent out of the cultivation and use of opium.’55 Not for nothing did the Cantonese have the saying, ‘Opium addiction is easy to cure; opium tax addiction far harder.’56