The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  Anti-opium activists reviled the government’s pragmatic efforts to generate useful, state-building money out of the drug: ‘As we look around at the conditions within China, opium is everywhere, how sickening! HOW SICKENING! We truly hope that the government authorities will . . . completely prohibit opium, and earnestly eradicate it in order to save the tarnished reputation of our country and forever consolidate the foundation of this nation.’57 The government gave earnest public pledges that it ‘will absolutely not derive one copper from opium revenue. If anything of this sort is suspected . . . we can regard this government as bankrupt and place no confidence in it.’58 ‘If we want to save China,’ Chiang Kai-shek added, ‘we must begin with prohibiting opium, and that prohibition must begin with the highest echelons of the leadership . . . Prohibit the poison if you want to save the country, the people, yourself, your sons and grand-sons.’59 ‘The opium evil’, he explained elsewhere, ‘constitutes a greater menace to the nation than foreign aggression, because the former leads to self-degeneration and self-suicide, whereas the latter is invited by mutual dissension, weakness and degeneracy.’60 In private, the regime did its best to silence inconvenient opponents by frightening off their sponsors, by smearing them with accusations of drug-smuggling, by sending them death threats; or simply by planting bombs in their houses. In 1931, the government was buffeted by one of its biggest drug scandals, when a group of Shanghai constables intercepted an opium shipment that a company of Nationalist soldiers were busy unloading. The men of the law were promptly taken prisoner until the precious drug had found its way to its gangland destination.61

  In 1934, the government began to execute relapsed users of opiates, informing opium-smokers that they would ‘be shot without further ceremony’ if they returned to the habit after treatment. In 1936, nine such individuals were paraded through the streets of Xi’an then killed in front of thousands of spectators.62 ‘Opium is good for curing minor sickness, for dealing with boredom, and for helping you think’, one of Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘opium-suppression’ officials flagrantly contradicted government policy in 1940. ‘Just light a pipe and you will be happy . . . your mind will open like a flower and you will be able to clearly distinguish things.’63 ‘In the country all that one can see is poppy growing everywhere,’ observed a newspaper in 1932, ‘in the cities there are opium dens along every street, government offices openly collect taxes on opium, and citizens openly smoke it . . . the whole of China depends upon opium . . . This condition is far more lamentable than the Opium Prohibition Memorial Day.’64

  In the early 1940s, the north-eastern city of Mukden – the old Manchu capital – retained at least a touch of its old dynastic grandeur. In 1625, when the Qing were still only aspiring rulers of China, they had built themselves there a miniature replica of the Forbidden City (a diminutive seventeen acres, to the original’s hundred and seventy) in which to perfect their practice of imperial rituals. Outside its palace complex, though, Mukden was heavily marked by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. In 1942, the north-eastern edge of the city (just outside a thick, crenellated wall of Ming vintage) had acquired a prisoner-of-war camp, housing around 1,200 American, British, Dutch and Australian soldiers taken since the fall of Singapore; almost 40 per cent of them would be dead of malnutrition and ill-treatment by the time of the Japanese surrender. Along the grey streets of the city itself, a scattering of smarter establishments – newly, attractively spruced up in red and white paint – might have stood out. Their fronts proclaimed they were selling a mysterious substance called ‘Official Paste’ – opium. Elsewhere, a casual observer might have spotted a number of shacks – perhaps 200 – receiving dozens of visitors per day. These were, an eyewitness from 1931 had noted, ‘dope huts . . . In a single shop, about forty to fifty persons come to receive [morphine] injections every day’.65

  By 1942, the Second World War was going badly for Chiang Kai-shek and his government. In 1937, a Japanese move against Shanghai and Nanjing had driven the Nationalists from their seat of power on the east coast. As Chiang and his followers retreated into the hinterland, his armies destroyed Yellow River dykes to halt the Japanese advance – an act that caused at least half a million civilian deaths by drowning and disease. By the close of that year, Chiang had lost his industrial base and, four long years before the Americans joined the war effort, began struggling to reconstruct his regime in impoverished Sichuan. But as the Nationalists tried to build roads and rationalize taxes, they also found time to fight a new war of words on opium. In 1938, Madame Chiang Kai-shek accused the Japanese of a ‘diabolically cunning’ plot to ‘drench’ China with opium, with a view to ‘demoralising the people until they were physically unfit to defend their country, and mentally and morally so depraved that they could easily be bought and bribed with drugs to act as spies when the time came in order that their craving might be satisfied.’66 ‘The Japanese are many times worse than the British ever were!’ agreed a journalist two years later. ‘Even at the time of the Opium War, some Britons criticized it, like true English gentlemen. The Japanese, by contrast, are trying to poison our people, to annihilate our race.’67 Foreign correspondents in China through the 1930s denounced the ‘ash heap of Mukden’, littered with moribund drug fiends. The Japanese occupation government apparently encouraged opium use in Beijing by telling its police to turn a blind eye to proliferating dens in the former capital. Unpassported Korean and Japanese gangsters were, these same observers noted, busily peddling opium and heroin ‘to the degradation of thousands of Chinese . . . sowing seeds of bitterness and hatred, which it will take years to eradicate.’68

  The horror of the Japanese invasion and allegations of Japanese attempts to stupefy the country with opiates brought a new resonance to the imperialist conspiracy theories spun about the Opium War. (Whether or not Japanese-controlled regimes cynically pushed drugs to the Chinese to break their spirit of resistance, they certainly profited from them. The puppet state of Manchukuo in the north-east drew a sixth of its revenue from opium sales and exports.69) But the occupying Japanese and their Chinese collaborators also made use of the Opium War as a rhetorical tool to distract attention away from Japanese atrocities. In August 1939, by which point millions of Chinese had been killed or wounded in the war with Japan, Beijing’s puppet government convened ‘Down With Britain’ rallies against the Opium War, arguing that they were merely giving an outlet to Chinese outrage that ‘had been boiling since the Opium War’.70 Stop fighting Japan, one Pan-Asianist editorial urged its Chinese readers the following year. ‘Europe’s disarray is Asia’s opportunity . . . We’ve seized the opportunity for revenge. We should expunge the bloody humiliation [of the Opium War] with all determination! . . . We must recognize our true enemies and kill them with all our strength. Every Chinese person has the responsibility to commemorate the centenary of the Opium War and to remember that Asia is for the Asians!’71 Meanwhile, occupied Shanghai – the headquarters of the Chinese film industry – planned an all-star-cast blockbuster about the war to ‘encourage all Chinese people to oppose Britain and America.’72

  Between 1925 and 1926, a tall, confident figure with a mop of black, swept-back hair sat in the director’s chair of the newly reorganized Propaganda Bureau of the Nationalist Party, combing piles of newspapers for deviations from party orthodoxy. Mao Zedong did not have long in the job. Within another two years, there would be no place for a Communist like him anywhere in the Nationalist Party organization. On 12 April 1927, after months of secret negotiations with Shanghai’s wealthiest financiers and their private underworld enforcers, the Green Gang, Chiang Kai-shek set an armed force of some 1,000 gangsters at the city’s labour unions, the hubs of Communist activity; 100 unionists were gunned down at a single protest rally alone. Forces rallied by the Communists were similarly massacred in Changsha, Wuhan, Nanchang and, finally, Canton, where leftists were quickly identified by the dye marks left round their necks by their red kerchiefs and drowned in bundles of ten or twelve in the
river by the city.

  Over the next two decades, the civil conflict between the Nationalist and Communist Parties would dominate political and military life in China – sometimes to the extent even of sidelining the war with Japan. The Japanese invasion was, Chiang Kai-shek declared in the early 1930s, merely ‘external . . . like a gradually festering ulcer on the skin. The [Communist] bandit disturbance is internal. It is . . . a disorder of the heart. Because this internal disease has not been eliminated, the external disorder cannot be cured.’73 Violence would climax in the final stages of the civil war between 1945 and 1949, during which hundreds of thousands of civilians would perish; perhaps 650,000 died of starvation in the Communist siege of a single north-eastern city alone.

  Despite their vicious political rivalries, China’s new political parties concurred perfectly on how China was to be manipulated into an effective nation-state: through ideological discipline and unity. As Propaganda Chief Mao barked in 1925, ‘either step right, into the counter-revolutionary faction, or step left, into the revolutionary faction . . . There is no third route . . . Anyone who offers support for counter-revolutionary actions . . . shall be counted as our enemy.’74 And their populist rhetoric notwithstanding, at base both held similarly dismissive views of the Chinese people, and of their need for reprogramming with one-party nationalism. China, the Nationalist Party’s first director of propaganda judged in 1925, was a ‘blank sheet of paper. Colour it green, and it is green; colour it yellow and it is yellow.’ Mao Zedong, his successor, agreed: the Chinese, he believed, were ‘poor and blank. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it.’75

  Although, after 1949, the victorious CCP would expend much energy in excoriating the ‘reactionary idealist, mechanical materialist, feudal, comprador, fascist ideology’ of their old Nationalist enemies, both parties shared almost identical views of China’s modern history.76 The job of demonizing the Opium War was completed by the Communists, once most of the early work had been done for them by the Nationalists’ official history industry. Many elements in the Communist version plagiarized earlier Nationalist models, portraying the war as the start of the plot by foreign imperialism (‘the foremost and most ferocious enemy of the Chinese people’) to ‘impoverish . . . suppress . . . and poison the minds of the Chinese people’, leaving them ‘hungry and cold’.77 But once Mao was done with it (going back to it in at least fifteen separate essays), the Opium War was no longer just a turning point in modern Chinese history; it was its inaugural event: ‘the first lesson’ of the Chinese revolution, and the start of a century of capitalist-imperialist oppression.78 China’s modern history now became, quite simply, ‘a history of struggle by the indomitable Chinese people against imperialism and its running dogs’; the Opium War – this strange, ambivalent story of collaboration and civil war – became the ‘people’s unrelenting and heroic struggle’, ‘a national war’ against imperialism.79 ‘For a whole hundred years,’ a 1951 history recycled Mao’s views, ‘imperialism trampled our Chinese people underfoot. After 1842, China sank into a tragic state of slavery, and was transformed into a semi-colony by every imperialist country. The founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, by contrast, is the most glorious achievement of this century; our will has been forged by the painful wound of suffering.’80

  The point of remembering past bitterness was to remind the populace to savour the sweetness of the Communist present – even as the government itself caused tens of millions of deaths in man-made famines, in purges of counter-revolutionaries and in the civil war manufactured by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. ‘A young Chinese person in new China’, explained a 1950 textbook in the preamble to its Opium War chapter, ‘must have a basic understanding of modern history . . . and of the particular principles that governed the revolution . . . We must understand what our predecessors have suffered to establish the People’s Republic so we love the motherland all the more, so we can contribute everything we have to the future of the motherland . . . We have to understand why Mao’s thought is the only truth able to point out the way to revolutionary victory.’81 By insisting on the malevolence of China’s foreign antagonists, Mao’s Communist Party legitimized its own use of violence, against both imperialists and their alleged Chinese allies (Nationalists, capitalists, landlords and anyone suspected of sympathizing with them): ‘In the face of such enemies’, Mao dictated, ‘the Chinese revolution cannot be other than protracted and ruthless . . . In the face of such enemies, the principal means or form of the Chinese revolution must be armed struggle.’82

  But Mao was as willing to profit from opium as the next warlord – even though he had officially banned opium production in Communist-controlled areas in 1939, asserting that it ‘sickens the country and harms the people’.83 Two years earlier, the Communists’ finances – stretched by Mao’s ambitions to expand militarily through the north-western province in which they had settled in 1935 – had briefly stabilized. That year, Chiang Kai-shek had called a second United Front – this time against the Japanese. Over the next four years, the Communist economy survived on annual handouts from the Nationalists and the Soviet Union.84 After 1941, however, when relations between the two parties deteriorated back into effective civil war, the Nationalists severed their funding and blockaded the edges of the Communist zone, preventing essential imports from getting in. By the end of the year, the region’s finances were millions of Nationalist dollars in the red.85

  For decades, Communist propaganda held that the Maoists worked their way out of their predicament through frugality and popular democracy (by introducing rent reduction and cooperative farming practices), until a historian called Chen Yung-fa noticed at the end of the 1980s that account books for the period were scattered with references to a ‘special product’ that rescued the Communists from their trade deficit of the early 1940s and that, by 1945, was generating more than 40 per cent of the state’s budget. A little more detective work revealed that this was opium, processed in ‘Special Factories’ and transported south and west to generate export revenue for Communist armies. (‘Since opium entered China’, a Communist editorial of 1941 explained, ‘it has become the greatest source of harm to the Chinese people, inseparable from imperialist invasion . . . Imperialism has used opium to enslave and oppress the Chinese people. As the Chinese people have become ever weaker, ever poorer, opium has played a most detestable and poisonous destructive role.’86) But in 1945, as an American mission flew in to inspect Mao’s kingdom, it found itself gazing over nothing more controversial than swaying fields of sorghum and wheat. The opium poppies had been uprooted just in time to maintain – for the next forty years at least – the propriety of the Chinese Communist wartime image.

  After 1949, the new People’s Republic declared a total rupture with the corruption and hypocrisy of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and their opium policy. ‘It has been more than a century since opium was forcibly imported into China by the imperialists’, ran a General Order for Opium Suppression. ‘Due to the reactionary rule and the decadent lifestyle of the feudal bureaucrats, compradors, and warlords, not only was opium not suppressed, but we were forced to cultivate it . . . Now that the people have been liberated, the suppression of opium and other narcotics is specifically stipulated to protect people’s health, to cure addiction, and to accelerate production.’87 In mass rallies and public trials, smokers were rehabilitated; thousands of pounds of opium were publicly burned; traffickers were imprisoned, dispatched to labour camps or executed. Only Western fellow travellers to Communism were welcome in China; foreign businessmen – seen as hangovers of the bad old Unequal Treaty days (the treaties themselves had been mostly revoked in the Second World War) – were harassed and even imprisoned, and their assets nationalized.

  Popular enthusiasm could still have its old limits, though. Local government in the north-east remarked in the early 1950s that lecturing on ‘the history of the Opium Wars or the opium policy of the impe
rialists was not an effective way to reach the masses.’88

  Chapter Nineteen

  CONCLUSION

  The Opium War is a pretty shameful story. Perhaps it slipped your memory? It certainly hasn’t slipped [China’s] and is still unravelling.

  Guardian, 20101

  On 28 December 2009, a prisoner of the Chinese state was driven through the freezing streets of Urumqi to a Public Detention Centre. The following morning, around 6.30, he was woken and offered a breakfast of thin rice porridge, and the opportunity to brush his teeth. By 10 a.m., he was delivered, under paramilitary guard, to a mobile ‘death van’, strapped to a trolley and given a lethal injection.