The Chinese and Opium under the Republic: Worse than Floods and Wild BeastsIn the nineteenth century, opium smoking was common throughout China and regarded as a vice no different from any other: pleasurable, potentially dangerous, but not a threat to destroy the nation and the race, and often profitable to the state and individuals. Once Western concepts of addiction came to China in the twentieth century, however, opium came to be seen as a problem "worse than floods and wild beasts." In this book, Alan Baumler examines how Chinese reformers convinced the people and the state that eliminating opium was one of the crucial tasks facing the new Chinese nation. He analyzes the process by which the government borrowed international models of drug control and modern ideas of citizenship and combined them into a program that successfully transformed opium from a major part of China's political economy to an ordinary social problem. |
Contents
| 1 | |
1 Establishing a Meaning for Opium | 9 |
2 The Narrative of Addiction in China and the West | 35 |
3 The International Campaign against Opium | 57 |
4 Warlords and Opium | 89 |
5 Opium the Nationand the Revolution | 111 |
6 Hankou the AntiOpium Inspectorate and Control of the Opium Trade | 151 |
The Six Year Plan to Eliminate Opium | 177 |
8 Defining Drugs | 195 |
9 War Poppies and the Completion of the Plan | 215 |
Conclusion | 231 |
Notes | 239 |
| 277 | |
| 295 | |
Other editions - View all
The Chinese and Opium under the Republic: Worse than Floods and Wild Beasts Alan Baumler Limited preview - 2008 |
The Chinese and Opium under the Republic: Worse than Floods and Wild Beasts Alan Baumler No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
acceptable active addiction anti-opium Anti-Opium Association areas Association attempt became become began British called campaign carried central government century Chiang China Chinese claimed clear clinics collecting colonial Commission common conference connected continued create cure deal drug effect eliminate elite encouraged entirely established eventually fact Finance force foreign Fujian given goal gradually groups growing Hankou ideas important individual Inspectorate interest involved issue jinyan later laws least less licensed limited merchants million monopoly moral movement Nanjing narrative Nationalist needed officials opium control opium policy opium smoking opium suppression opium trade organizations peasants period political poppy position possible problem production profit provinces Qing reformers registered reported selling sent Shanghai shipped Sichuan smoking smuggling social society sold success taxes things tion took users warlords yuan Yunnan Zhejiang