Drug Abuse

APPENDIX

China: The Historical Setting of Asia's Profitable Plague

By LEONARD P. ADAMS

I wish to thank the following for their help: first and foremost, Nina S. Adams; Leonard and Elizabeth Adams, David Buxbaum, Roger DesForges, Anne Everett, Jayne Werner Freeman, Fred Coss, John Hall, Stephen Headley, Mark Selden, Bernard and Nettie Shapiro, and Jonathan Spence. I am also grateful to the staffs of the following institutions: in London, the Public Record Office, the India Office Library, the London Missionary Society Library, and Mr. John Williamson of the Karl Marx Memorial Library; in Paris, the Archives d'Outre-mer and Miss Annick Levy of the Centre du Documentation sur I'Asie du Sud-est et le Monde Indonesien.-L.P.A.

ASIAN TRADE during the early nineteenth century was a picturesque affair. As Britain built her great eastern empire, the India-China route developed as the hub of commercial activity. Enterprising Europeans ran swift clipper ships to colorful Chinese ports, where cargo was often transferred to smaller boats, including: "scrambling crabs," built for speed, that bristled with dozens of long oars. Yet the romantic image of the China trade is marred by some unpleasant realities: the crucial commodity shipped from colonial India to China was opium, and fast Chinese boats were needed because China's imperial government prohibited the importation and use of the drug.

Britain, the Great Provider

By the late eighteenth century, opium had been used in much of Asia for several centuries. The drug had been taken as a medicine in China since Arab traders brought it from the Middle East in the seventh or eighth century A.D. Spaniards introduced the habit of smoking tobacco to the Philippines, and it spread from there to China about 1620.(1) The Dutch in Formosa smoked a mixture of opium and tobacco to combat the effects of malaria, and a small number of Chinese acquired this habit as Well. (2) Gradually, some of those who smoked omitted the tobacco from this narcotic blend and changed to opium, most of which was imported from India by Portuguese traders. The reasons for opium smoking varied considerably: for the rich it was primarily a luxury, a social grace, while the poor sought in it a temporary escape from their condition.

Although small amounts of opium were harvested in many parts of Asia, India was the chief producer of the drug for international trading. During the Mogul era, a number of her rulers attempted to tax opium sales for government profit.(3) But as of the 1770s no single government possessed the will, the organization, or the political and naval power to foster new markets and to internationalize the Asian drug trade on a large scale.

Britain's move to colonize India changed this situation dramatically. In 1772 Warren Hastings was appointed governor of the recently conquered territory of Bengal and faced the task of finding a dependable source of tax revenue. Given the Mogul precedent, he proceeded to sell the concession that granted the buyer the exclusive rights to oversee opium production, buy the harvest, and deliver the product to the British opium factory at the port of Calcutta, where it was auctioned off to wholesale merchants for export. (4) The drug, Hastings piously declared, was not a consumer necessity "but a pernicious article of luxury, which ought not to be permitted but for purposes of foreign commerce only. (5) And so it was. The British in India not only permitted but encouraged foreign sales of opium.(6) The Indian opium concession, which later became a directly administered government monopoly, brought the government over half a million pounds sterling during Hastings' term in India alone.(7) Opium exports, primarily to China, provided roughly one-seventh of the total revenue for British India. (8) British officials and others objected to the trade, largely on moral grounds. But for policy makers from Hastings' era to the early part of the twentieth century, the morally questionable nature of the traffic was outweighed by the enormous profits it yielded.

In this early period, competition for British-supervised opium, variously known as Bengal, Benares, or Patna, came mainly from Malwa opium, which was grown in central and northwestern Indian states not under direct British rule. But during the early nineteenth century thecolonial government gained control over most of the routes and ports used for shipping Malwa opium. This gave them the power to tax and thus regulate Malwa exports. The British also increased the production of Bengal opium, attempting both to undercut competition from Malwa and to take advantage of the rising demand in China. (9)

British officials justified this increased production with arguments whose tone would be echoed by many subsequent rationalizations of Britain's role in the trade. As one of Hastings' successors noted, the policy of increasing Bengal production to the limits of the market would mean a reduction in the profit per unit of opium sold, but it will not tend to increase the consumption of the deleterious Drug nor to extend its baneful effects in Society. "The sole and exclusive object of it is to secure to ourselves the whole supply by preventing Foreigners from participating in a trade of which at present they enjoy no inconsiderable share-for it is evident that the Chinese, as well as the Malays, cannot exist without the use of Opium, and if we do not supply their necessary wants, Foreigners will."(10)

The "foreign" threat to British hegemony in the opium trade soon became more imagined than real. Portuguese traders dealing in Malwa opium were rapidly outclassed. The American role in the China opium trade was never very great, although those involved often made substantial fortunes. For a time Americans monopolized the shipment of Turkish opium to China, but the cost of transport made serious competition impossible.(11)

Opium not only became a bulwark of the tax base of colonial India, during much of the nineteenth century it served as the economic pivot around which the whole China trade revolved. Prior to about 1800 the British traded mainly their own and Indian goods, especially raw cotton, for Chinese tea and silk. But the relative self-sufficiency of China's economy, which perennially frustrated foreign traders, meant that China sold more than she bought, and Western merchants were forced to bring silver to China to make up the balance. After about 1800 the British increasingly substituted another currency: Indian opium.(12) The Chinese paid for opium in silver at the port of entry. Merchants then exchanged this silver for Chinese goods to be sold elsewhere in Asia or in Europe. Opium shifted the balance of the China trade: the situation became economically as well as socially unfavorable to the Chinese.

Although the British gave the opium traffic their official blessing, the Chinese did not. Opium smoking was prohibited in 1729; smoking, cultivation, and importation of opium were specifically banned in 1800.(13) But by the beginning of the nineteenth century the once powerful Ch'ing dynasty had been seriously weakened politically and financially by official corruption and domestic rebellion. As the century wore on, China's internal problems were aggravated by Western attempts to force open the country for trade and, later, for industrial development. Opium speeded up the decay, for Chinese officials and soldiers, underpaid, discontented and often idle, were among the first to take up opium smoking, weakening their government still further.

The edict of 1800 closed Canton, the only port at which foreigners were then officially allowed to trade, to opium. But this ban, like most later defensive gestures, merely helped move the opium traffic beyond the area where it might have been supervised, however ineffectively. The market near Canton rapidly became glutted, and with the connivance of corrupt officials and merchants, drug sales by Europeans spread along China's southeast coast beyond government control. Many of the Chinese pirate gangs involved in opium smuggling on the coast and inland were organized as secret societies. (14) The link between opium, Chinese criminals, and secret societies, whose traditional role of political resistance made them perennially outlawed and feared by the central government, only strengthened the official revulsion toward foreigners and their "moral poison."

From 1811 to 1821 imports of both Bengal and Malwa opium averaged over 340 tons a year.(15) In the late 1820s and 1830s, because of the ease with which opium could be smuggled and the profits involved, the flow of opium became a flood. During the period from 1829 to 1839, annual imports from India averaged 3,683,542 pounds, or more than 1,841 tons, almost six times the average for the period 1811 to 1821.(16) British opium policy in India was the primary cause of this expansion. By the mid 1830s the British had acquired tax control over most of the trade routes used for shipping Malwa opium. But a decrease in the tax rate on Malwa, combined with a conscious effort to expand Bengal cultivation, increased the supply of opium tremendously. Also, there were now more foreign merchants to import the drug.(17)

The spectacular amount of opium entering China, the emperor's decision to-take a strong stand against it, and British demands for free trade and diplomatic equality resulted in the Opium War of 1839-1842. Although the British resented the term "opium war," it seemed altogether appropriate to the defeated Chinese. Opium not only provoked the war, it helped China lose it, although given Britain's firepower the outcome was never in doubt. During one battle, for example, an officer named Chang, who was in charge of important reserves, took time off to satisfy his craving for opium. The man smoked his pipe from dawn to dusk and finally, when his aides were still debating whether to advance or retreat, "the sound of cannon and musketry-fire drew closer and closer. Panic seized his troops and with one accord they fled. . . . Chang himself was still puffing away at his opium pipe. At last he staggered into a litter and was carried away." (18) A little less than one third of the 21 million dollar indemnity extracted by the victors was payment for the opium that the imperial commissioner, Lin Tse-hsu, had seized and destroyed at the beginning of the war. The British also won concessions to their principle of free trade, a principle upheld in practical terms largely for the sake of a monopoly-produced, illicitly sold narcotic.

China Grows Her Own

Following the Opium War, the Chinese were still diplomatically and militarily unable to stop the drug flow into their country, and Britain continued to peddle increasing amounts of Indian opium. In the peak year of 1880 China imported more than 6,500 tons, most of which was produced in India. (19) However, China began to grow her own on a massive scale in the 1860s. After 1880 the demand for foreign opium decreased, until by 1905 the amount brought in was roughly half the 1880 figure. By the early twentieth century China's annual opium crop was over 22,000 tons.(20)

There were several reasons for this important change. First, China's policy of outlawing opium had never worked. And while the government of India profited from the opium revenue, which added much financial luster to that jewel in the British crown, China's government was becoming more hard-pressed for funds. In addition to the money it owed the British for having lost the Opium War, China had to pay the costs of suppressing the massive Taiping Rebellion, which broke out in 1850. Large areas of China were ravaged, and perhaps 30 million people died as a result of the fighting. China's running dispute with the West, especially with Britain, continued as the British shipped more opium and intensified their demand that China's interior be opened to the dubious benefits of Western penetration and free trade.

A second Anglo-Chinese war broke out in 1856, and China lost again. In 1858 the Chinese signed a trade agreement that put a small tax on imported opium. This did not mean that they completely ceased their efforts to control and suppress the drug. During the mid 1870s, for example, the famous general Tso Tsung-t'ang reportedly "cured" addicts by slitting their lips so that they could not smoke their pipes. (21) Yet despite this and many other less brutal, more constructive gestures, the agreement of 1858 began a forty-eight-year period of de facto legalization of domestic cultivation as well as importation.

Although at first the home-grown product was considered inferior to Indian opium, it was cheaper, and its quality rapidly improved. In many areas it sold for less than half the price of the foreign smoke (22) and the fact that it could be resmoked more times than prepared Indian opium further enhanced its consumer appeal. In addition, poppy was a valuable crop for peasants, since raw opium sold for wholesale prices two to four times those paid for wheat. (23) And the low weight and bulk of opium made it easier to transport over rough terrain and thus tempting to produce, particularly in areas whose trade routes consisted largely of narrow, winding trails.

The mountainous provinces of Szechwan and Yunnan lay more than a thousand miles from the weakened central government at Peking. Both were well suited for poppy growing. The southern province of Yunnan, which borders Burma, Laos, and Tonkin (now part of northern Vietnam), became an opium producer second only to the western province of Szechwan. While the central government received relatively little from taxes on the cultivation and sale of domestic opium, revenue from the drug became a mainstay of provincial budgets. (24) In addition to filling a large local demand, opium was Szechwan's major export: over twothirds of its harvest went to other parts of China. (25) While Yunnan produced less than Szechwan, the economic function of its opium was just as important. In 1875 fully one-third of the arable land of the province bloomed with poppy. (26) The drug was Yunnan's most important product, amounting to L 1.2 million of L 1.7 million in total exports by 1903. (27)

Until the Europeans began to colonize mainland Southeast Asia, there was no concept of rigid border demarcation among the local kingdoms and tribes. From Burma to Tonkin the China-Southeast Asia frontier region was sparsely inhabited by a variety of groups distinctboth from the ethnic Han Chinese and from the dominant Southeast Asian ethnic groups, whose capitals lay further south. It is impossible to say precisely when tribal groups along this frontier first began producing opium, but it became important in the world's drug traffic only after World War II. Opium poppy cultivation in the area was largely unnoticed until the late nineteenth century, and then it was dwarfed by Chinese and British Indian production.

China rather than Southeast Asia remained the focus of the Asian drug traffic. By the early 1900s there were roughly 15 million addicts. (28) For Chinese addicts, their habit came from the need to forget or ignore the painful realities of their lives. The craving to continue smoking, regardless of the cost, added yet another element of misery. Although some very rich habitues could afford both opium and food, many lesser family fortunes literally went up in smoke.(29) Poorer addicts often died of starvation. The Chinese government was unable to solve the problem within its own ranks: candidates for office were reported to have died from the effects of withdrawal during the arduous three-day examinations.(30) A Western observer on a trip to Szechwan complained that all but 2 of her 143 official escorts were on the pipe. And twice she was forced to wait to have her passport copied while the scribes recovered from their narcotic siesta.(31) However, if opium caused extensive anguish, it was also an ultimate cure; swallowing an overdose was a popular method of committing suicide.(32)

As opium addiction spread, not only in Asia but in Europe and the United States as well, organized opposition to Britain's part in the trade grew stronger. Western missionaries complained that addiction among 3 the "heathen" Chinese rendered the task of conversion more difficult.(33) But to many Chinese, both missionaries and foreign drug merchants were intruders selling goods that disrupted their society and violated their ideals. Thus the problem was not only one of curing before conversion; missionaries and opium were linked in the minds of increasing numbers of Chinese as different aspects of a single, foreign menace.(34)

Pressure from missionaries and others on the English government led to the creation of the British Royal Commission on Opium, which gathered evidence during 1893 and 1894. The commission concluded that prohibiting cultivation would place a considerable financial burden on the Indian taxpayer, who would have to compensate for the loss of the opium revenue. And it would do no good for Britain to halt production, the commission argued, as long as China's government was too weak to suppress the vice. Denunciations of the traffic by those familiar with the Chinese situation were largely ignored. The question, as the commission saw it, was not how to eliminate Indian production but whether to do so, and the answer, as usual, was no-it was still too profitable to be abandoned.(35) These conclusions hardly satisfied the antiopium movement. Nor could the commission's findings alter the fact that Chinese production was forcing the British out. The House of Commons, which had not pronounced the trade immoral until 1891, did so again in 1906, this time unanimously. (36)

China's political situation changed dramatically toward the end of the nineteenth century. Humiliating defeat by Japan in the war of 1894-1895 led to urgent demands for sweeping government reform. Western retaliation against the Boxer Rebellion of 18991900 saw China once again beaten militarily and burdened financially. This newest degradation, the latest in a series extending back to the original Opium War, finally convinced the imperial court as well as the growing numbers of progressive Chinese that China must undergo reform if she were to survive.(37) Opium was a clear-cut symptom and symbol of foreign intrusion and national decay. If China were to become strong again, she must rid herself of the "flowing poison.''

The Tarnished Crusades

 

In 1906 the Chinese government started an opium suppression campaign that began a third major phase in the development of Asia's drug traffic. The officially sponsored British contribution was finally eliminated, and domestic cultivation was temporarily, yet drastically, reduced. But as opium became scarce and thus more expensive smokers seeking a substitute as well as those looking for a medicinal cure were increasing led to use morphine, and later its derivative heroin. Secondly, limiting the supply of Chinese opium temporarily changed the pattern of the drug trade with Southeast Asia.

An imperial edict of 1906 announced plans for the elimination of China's opium problem over a ten-year period. The Chinese diplomat Tang Shao-yi, himself a reformed addict, had initiated talks with the British government in 1904. His Majesty's Government signed an agreement that went into effect in 1908, committing itself gradually to reduce the export of Indian opium intended for Hong Kong and China. However, many British officials, particularly those ruling India, were less than wildly enthusiastic about this decision, and continued to express skepticism about China's determination and capacity to conduct an effective suppression campaign. China's production had reduced India's share of the total trade, and opium was no longer the dominant commodity in the China trade, but the government of India was still making some L 3 million annually from opium sales to China. Said the Government of India Finance Department:

If we are called upon to cooperate with China by incurring this great sacrifice of a revenue which we have enjoyed for many years, we are justified to demand that the measure shall be carried out with the utmost consideration of our interests and in such a manner as shall occasion us the least possible inconvenience.(38)

His Majesty's Government stood prepared to resist any effective Chinese tactics that would "discriminate" against foreign opium. (39) Among other things, this meant that the British, who had perfected the technique of opium monopoly for government profit, strenuously objected to the creation of Chinese monopolies intended to regulate and reduce the traffic in imported and domestic opium. British documents for the first years of the suppression campaign are full of accounts of incidents in which Chinese attempts to restrict opium sales provoked outraged cries from opium merchants, who were almost invariably backed up by British officials.(40)

The antiopium campaign was the most successful of all reforms initiated by the Chinese government before the 1911 revolution. Large numbers of opium dens were shut down, and in many cases officials in the countryside moved effectively to eliminate cultivation. But as the drive gathered strength and the supply was reduced, one result was that its price soared. With an eye on profits, the British had agreed only to reduce their exports from India, not to help control imports to China. The distinction was important, for imports of Indian opium actually increased slightly during the period 1907-1911.(41)

Nonetheless, the British government's attitude was changing. An international conference on opium held at Shanghai in 1909 increased the pressure on colonial powers to end the trade. British officials provided evidence of the effectiveness of China's suppression campaign that their more skeptical colleagues could no longer ignore.(42) Even the India Office, although besieged by complaints from opium merchants, became less opposed to a more rapid rate of prohibition.(43)As a result, in 1911

China and Britain signed a second agreement imposing stricter controls on Indian opium exports. Furthermore, British opium was now to be excluded from those provinces where joint Anglo-Chinese inspection showed that domestic production had ceased. Between 1911 and 1915 almost all of China's provinces were declared closed to foreign opium, either with or without the rather cursory formal inspection.(44) Although relatively small quantities of smuggled Indian opium continued to appear in China, the massive official trade was finally eliminated.

By reducing the amount of available opium, China's suppression campaign resulted in the influx of large quantities of European morphine, manufactured from opium produced in the Middle East. Morphine is the primary narcotic element in opium, but the dangers of morphine addiction were not immediately recognized. Its use during the 1880s by Western missionaries in China as a cure for opium addiction had earned it the name "Jesus opium." (45) Morphine imports to China were not restricted until after 1902, when 195,133 ounces of the drug entered legally.(46) From 1903 on it was heavily taxed and the traffic went underground.

During the suppression campaign, morphine was used widely as both a "cure" and as a narcotic. It was less easily detected by inquisitive officials than was opium smoking. More important, because of morphine's potency compared with opium and the ease with which it could be smuggled, it was extremely cheap. In 1909 a British government chemist reported that swallowing morphine would produce the same narcotic effect as smoking opium but at one-ninth the cost.(47) Although most Chinese addicts preferred to swallow or smoke morphine, injections were even cheaper. When cut, one ounce of morphine yielded one to two thousand shots.(48) Generally, however, only the poorest Chinese injected the drug.(49)

At first, most of the morphine entering China came from Europe and the United States via Japan. While their government strictly controlled the drug at home, Japanese nationals began to sell morphine in China and then to manufacture it there.(50) And by 1920, according to one estimate, enough was arriving annually via Japan alone to give every person in China four doses. (51)

Chinese poppy cultivation, particularly in the Southwest, probably never completely ceased during the suppression drive. But there was much less opium available to smokers. In Yunnan this was reflected by a larger demand for Burmese opium, especially during the years 1911-1917, as well as by an increase in smuggling from Burma and Thailand. (52) Smuggling became a highly organized business involving the investment of large amounts of money with the promise of tremendous profits. One caravan dispatched from Yunnan to the Shan States in northern Burma consisted of I 10 men equipped with 72 guns, who paid the equivalent of L 17,000 for opium.(53) Another group traveling to Rangoon in 1917, probably to buy Indian opium, included 300 people divided into bands, which bargained collectively for all the opium they bought.(54)

Not all the opium in the Burma-Yunnan trade was used in China. The Yunnan government had contracted to supply opium to the French monopoly in northern Indochina. By 1912, when the local product could no longer be bought easily or cheaply, the Yunnan authorities were sending agents into the northern Shan States to buy opium, which they then sold to the French. (55)The same type of trading went on to a limited extent within Tonkin itself. Poppy was being grown illegally by the Meo tribesmen on the Black River and by the Nungs, who lived in the Kwangsi-Tonkin border region between the Red and Clear rivers. In 1912 each of these tribes produced about twenty-two hundred pounds of lower-grade opium, ordinarily worth less than half of what Chinese opium brought when sold to the French monopoly. Chinese traders were accused of buying this opium in order to" peddle it to the French as Chinese opium for an easy 100 percent profit.(56)

Morphine usage and smuggling were but two problems of many resulting from the suppression campaign. The plan for rapid eradication of domestic opium had several serious flaws. Some of these stemmed from the stubbornness of the problem. Opium smoking had become deeply entrenched as a social and economic institution. The habit ravaged lower-class smokers, as the cycle of poverty, despair, and addiction persisted. And there were many upper-class smokers for whom opium, particularly the more expensive foreign brands, was a prized luxury, a status symbol. Even the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi, whose edict began the campaign, used the pipe. (57) One gentleman diligently taught his married daughter to smoke lest the family be considered too poor to afford it.(58) Permanent cures, especially for the poor, were few and far between. By 1913 one estimate was that no more than 10 percent of Yunnan's smokers had given up their opium.(59)

In areas where the economy was geared to opium growing, simply destroying the crop created hardship and resentment, not reform. Moreover, if the authorities were corrupt, "suppression" was often an exercise in hypocrisy: Accompanied by such show of force as they have been able to command, the officials in charge have sat down outside a few unhappy Kachin and Lisaw villages suspected of the crime of planting opium, surrounded the guilty headmen and extorted from them the last available rupee, and then after duly skirting or passing in well-screened chairs through the offending fields, returned to their headquarters and duly reported that they have seen no opium growing throughout their extensive and arduous campaigns. (60)

Political upheaval was perhaps the main cause of China's failure to eliminate opium. The imperial structure, which had endured for centuries, could not institute sufficient reforms to prevent its own downfall and finally gave way in the 1911 revolution. The new Republican government, under the militarist Yuan Shih-k'ai, vowed to continue the fight against opium. But China was rapidly disintegrating into areas controlled by independent military rulers. Yunnan and Szechwan, never subject to absolute control from Peking, enjoyed de facto independence after 1911. For many poppy cultivators, as well as regional governments, the revolution meant the end of interference by the central government. Growers in Szechwan and other provinces resumed production of large quantities of opium in 1912, By 1916 the Yunnan authorities were quietly encouraging opium sales in order to raise money for their treasury. (61) And by 1918 Yunnan's government, following other provinces, had abandoned all pretence of suppression and was openly promoting poppy cultivation.(62)

China had ceased to be a unified country. Successive governments claiming central power in Peking became progressively weaker, the prize of warlords whose presidencies were national in name only. Their armies needed money, and in 1918 the current pretenders in the capital were encouraging the revival of the lucrative opium traders.(63) Many groups and individuals, chiefly in the cities, continued to oppose opium use. But they were for the most part ignored as the drug became the major source of financial support for China's warlord armies. On the cast coast, in the province of Fukien, about 70,000 troops under five principal generals as well as the navy and marines are all being supported by opium taxation. Predecessors of the present generals had collected land taxes three years in advance, and the only means left for raising necessary funds . . . was either to collect one or two further years of land taxes or impose a special tax, which could only be raised by opium cultivation. The latter was decided on. Wherever troops were stationed, opium growing was made compulsory. Magistrates issued the orders and soldiers enforced them. Riots have been frequent and in several places numbers of peasants have been shot down and villages burnt.(64)

Although British India was finally obliged to stop exporting opium for the China market, there was no similar restraint placed on opium sales to and by Southeast Asian monopolies. Business was good; the decrease in China's supply when suppression was most effective lessened the threat from smuggled opium. Even after the Chinese drive failed, opium sales remained a bulwark of colonial budgets. When colonialists could no longer ignore international protest over the drug traffic, their government monopolies were advertised as a means of drug control, while continuing to yield profits to the official pusher.

Although during the 1920s China regained the position of foremost opium producer, the size of her crop probably never again reached the astronomical levels of the years before 1907. Lower production was in large part due to the massive influx and subsequent domestic manufacture of the opium drugs morphine and heroin.

Initially, most of the heroin used in China was of European, mainly French, manufacture derived from Middle Eastern opium. The mid 1920s saw a steady increase in French heroin shipments direct to China and also to Japan, where most of it was transshipped for the China market. Like morphine, heroin was believed at first to be effective in combating opium addiction. Both could be legally imported in small quantities for medical use, but the distinction between legal and illegal, medically valid and narcotic, blurred as addiction spread, smuggling increased and legally imported drugs were diverted into the illicit market. By the mid 1920s recipes such as the following, for 10,000 "antiopium" pills, were common: combine 2 ounces heroin, 1/2 ounce strychnine, I ounce quinine, 5 ounces caffeine, 48 ounces sugar of milk, and 10 ounces of refined sugar. Mix well. As an indication of how many of these pills were being produced, 2,701 pounds of strychnine, whose only legitimate use in China was for fur trapping, was legally imported in 1923. Caffeine imports for the same year totaled 48,236 pounds.(65) Legal French exports of heroin to China alone for the years 1925-1929 reached 3,082 pounds. (66)

As China became a major heroin consumer, Shanghai, her largest, most industrialized city, emerged as a primary center for heroin manufacture and distribution. From there the drug moved south, seeking new outlets. In 1927 heroin appeared in Hong Kong in the form of a pink antiopium pill that was smoked rather than swallowed.(67) Hong Kong authorities in 1930 confiscated 847 pounds of heroin, more than w s seized in that year in any other country except France.(68) During the 1930s Shanghai was the source of much of America's illicit heroin. (69)

Shanghai's eminence as an international drug capital was closely linked with the rise to power of China's Nationalist movement. During the chaotic 1920s warlord struggles for power and money accelerated the disruption and impoverishment of the country. Among the groups trying to reestablish a centralized state was the Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist party, whose objectives were at first more progressive than those of most of the warlord competition. In 1924 the KMT under Sun Yat-sen allied itself with the fledgling Chinese Communist party in order to strengthen itself politically and promote badly needed reforms. However, as Chiang Kai-shek gained power within the party after Sun's death in 1925, he began to break with the Communists and move toward an alliance with more conservative groups. During the Northern Expedition of 1926-1928 Chiang's KMT armies expanded his political and economic base, defeating warlord rivals and gaining support from many people who demanded an end to warlordism, along with reforms in land, labor, and social policies.

Yet the manner in which Chiang took control repudiated most of the KMT's progressive ideals. Struggles with warlords often ended in coalition, not change, as they agreed to join the Nationalist government while retaining control of their own territories. The KMT leader sought support in the countryside from the old ruling class, the gentry; social and economic injustice intensified and the urgent need for land reform was ignored. However, Chiang's ambition of attaining power over the entire country was never realized, although the Nationalists did become established in China's major coastal cities, which remained their primary base of support until the Japanese invasion of 1937.

Chiang's control of Shanghai was made possible with the aid of two main groups. Wealthy merchants and foreign capitalists supported the KMT with the understanding that there would be no reforms that threatened their interests. And Shanghai's major criminal groups strengthened their own hold on official power by enabling Chiang to destroy the city's Communist party and labor movement in 1927.

These Shanghai criminal organizations were dominated by two secret society groups called the Green and Red Circles or Gangs. Secret societies, whether political, social or criminal, were traditionally an important force in Chinese society whenever central authority broke down. During the nineteenth century the Red and Green Gangs had drawn their membership from people involved in transporting grain and smuggling salt along the Grand Canal, China's primary north-south inland waterway. After 1911 these groups shifted their activities to the cities of central China, particularly to Shanghai. (70)

Shanghai had been an important Chinese center for the opium traffic since the 1840s, when Britain's victory in the Opium War opened the port to foreign trade and the establishment of foreign-controlled areas or concessions, which by the 1930s included almost a third of the city's 3.5 million people. The city's tradition of involvement in opium and other vices that tend to accompany the Western presence in Asia was tailor-made for the Green and Red Gangs. Both evolved into criminal organizations whose role in the narcotics trade and in the antiCommunist movement suggests parallels with the roles of the Sicilian Mafia and Corsican syndicate groups in Europe.

One of Shanghai's most influential citizens was Tu Yueh-sheng, narcotics overlord, anti-Japanese patriot and leader of the Green Gang, who began his career in Shanghai's French Settlement, a noted center of illicit activities where criminals were permitted to operate freely. In exchange for tax profits on vice, the French turned the administration of the settlement over to the gangs.(71) Tu became the protege of a man known as Pockmarked Huang, who was the chief of detectives in the French concession and a major Green Gang leader.(72) In addition to owning several opium dens, Huang served an important function as intermediary in negotiations and disputes between various groups in the foreign-controlled and Chinese settlements.

Prior to 1918 Shanghai's opium traffic was based in the British concession, under the control of Chinese from the Swatow area of Kwangtune province. In 1918 the British concession cracked down on opium, depriving the Swatow group of its base and opening the traffic to takeover by the Green Gang operating from the French concession .(73) During the 1920s Tu Yueh-sheng unified the competing gangster organizations involved in the drug traffic and extended his influence from the French Settlement out to the more prosperous International Settlement.

Tu became one of the "Big Three" among the Shanghai gangsters, working with Pockmarked Huang and Chang Hsiao-lin. This unholy triumvirate controlled the city's underworld in early 1927, when Chiang's Northern Expedition forces approached. In late February 1927 labor unions allied with the KMT moved against warlord control and foreign economic domination and began a general strike, planning to welcome Chiang's armies to a liberated Shanghai. For his part, Chiang Kai-shek was actively courting the support of wealthy conservative and foreign businessmen; a strong united labor movement was a major impediment. Consequently, in late February, Chiang's forces delayed their advance toward the city, hoping that reprisals by the British-run International Settlement police and the Chinese garrison commander would break the strike and destroy its leadership.(74)

Despite bloody reprisals, labor organizers ordered a second strike tobegin March 21, a massive display of workers' power that shut down the city once again in anticipation of the KMT's victorious advance. Although there was disturbing evidence that Chiang was beginning to conduct a violent purge of Communists and suspected Communists in the cities under his control, the Communist leadership, with the encouragement of Comintern advisers, doggedly continued to support the alliance and, with increasing difficulty, ignored the ominous signs of KMT treachery.

The strike caused considerable consternation in the Chinese and foreign business communities, and Chiang set about persuading these interests to support him, simultaneously avoiding a public declaration of outright hostility toward the Communists. On arriving in Shanghai in late March, he met first with Pockmarked Huang and later with leading Chinese industrialists and bankers who became satisfied that under Chiang's control there would be no further trouble from organized labor. The gratified businessmen then presented him with a "loan" of 3 million Shanghai dollars, the first of a series of lucrative donations. (75)

Chiang had some three thousand troops under his command in the city, pitted against a larger but poorly armed force of workers and Communists. He doubted whether his soldiers could be trusted to turn against the workers' groups, which they considered their main allies, and turned to Tu Yueh-sheng and his colleagues for help.(76) It is widely believed that Chiang in his youth had become a fully initiated member of Shanghai's Green Gang. (77) Regardless of whether this is the case, Chiang and the Green Gang shared a common interest in destroying Shanghai's labor movement. By serving Chiang the gangs could and did increase their influence and wealth. At Chiang's behest, Tu organized a "moderate" labor group, the Common Advancement Association, which recruited and armed thousands of gangsters throughout the City.(78) The Communists and other labor leaders, pathetically, tragically determined to maintain the charade of alliance with the KMT, were taken by surprise and massacred, many of them by Tu's gangsters, beginning April 12, 1927 (79) and continuing sporadically for months. (80)

As a result of this coup, Shanghai's gang leaders grew even more powerful. In appreciation for their services and their delivered and anticipated performance as intermediaries between Chiang and the foreign community, the Big Three were appointed as "honorary advisers" to the Nationalist government." Furthermore, Tu Yueh-sheng was made a major general at Chiang's headquarters,(81) in addition to serving as a municipal official and as an employee of the American-owned Shanghai Power Company. (82) As the purge continued, after 1927 the gangsters, with KMT and foreign support, thoroughly infiltrated Shanghai's labor movement in order to prevent a recurrence of the pre-1927 "threat" from organized labor. In September 1931, for example, one non-Communist labor organizer who had led a tramways strike in the French Settlement was denounced, arrested, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment after a trial that lasted ten minutes.(83)

Chiang Kai-shek's opium programs further illustrate the gap between the KMT's original political idealism and the sordid reality of conditions under his dictatorship. Like the warlords, Chiang needed money to finance his military campaigns, and in August 1927 the Nationalists legalized the trade, setting up a monopoly to tax opium sales. Before public pressure forced the scheme's abolition in July 1928, the government had made an estimated 40 million Chinese dollars.(84) Unofficial government sponsorship of the opium trade continued, and Tu Yuehsheng was a central figure until 1931, when he reportedly cured his own addiction and dropped out of gambling and the drug traffic, leaving its operation to other members of the Green Gang. To compensate for Tu's financial loss, one of his close friends was given control of the newly formed state lottery, while Tu devoted his full attention to suppressing Shanghai's labor movement.(85)

The most well-publicized Nationalist campaign against opium was begun in 1934. Chiang was beginning a "New Life" movement, which derived from the Confucian belief that individual reform is the key to curing the ills of society. The programs of the "New Life" movement, outmoded and hopelessly inadequate, never began to solve China's pressing social problems. But its idealism and Chiang's own professed Christianity were incompatible with the drug traffic. A national opium suppression bureau was organized whose regulations involved penalties of life imprisonment or death for pushers. (86)

Although improving social welfare was the stated aim of this antiopium campaign, its major objective was to gain control of the financial base of Chiang's warlord opponents. (87) The KMT leader appointed himself commissioner for opium suppression in 1935. By 1936 he had succeeded in rerouting opium moving toward the coast from Yunnan and Kweichow so that it was sent north through Hankow on the Yangtze River and then to Shanghai, thus depriving Kwangsi Province of the opium revenue. (88) Opium production was reduced, but the government generally hoarded seized opium instead of destroying it. According to one source, during the period 1934-1937 the government made an estimated 500 million Chinese dollars from its suppression program.(89)

Japan mounted a full-scale invasion of China in 1937, driving the KMT government into the interior. Although the war in the Pacific halted the flow of heroin from China to the United States after 1941, the drug traffic within China continued. During the war the KMT and the Japanese freely traded a variety of goods, including opium, across mostly stagnant battle lines. Japan played an official role in the narcotics business in occupied China. In Manchuria the Japanese authorities used opium as a revenue source; in 1938 its sale accounted for 8 percent of general budget receipts. Nanking under Japanese occupation had an estimated fifty thousand heroin addicts. And in Shanghai, about one-sixth of the 1.5 million dollars spent every month on drugs was used to buy heroin.(90)'

The Japanese invasion separated Chiang Kai-shek from his main source of financial support. But his government had a store of Szechwanese opium that had been confiscated during the suppression drive. Tu Yueh-sheng took charge of shipping the seized opium to the coast, and eventually it was sold at Macao and Hong Kong, both then under Japanese control, Some of the same stock was finally sold by Shanghai's official monopoly, which operated under Japanese protection.(91)

After Japan's defeat in 1945, Chiang's forces made a speedy return to Shanghai, acting with the support of the American government and the cooperation of the defeated Japanese in order to reaffirm KMT control and forestall the Communists. Once again corruption and vice, including narcotics, flourished with the participation of China's Nationalist officials. (92)

China remained the opium center of Asia until the Communist forces won the civil war in 1949. The new Chinese government was determined to eradicate opium and had both the will and the organization to do so. During the civil war, one visitor commented that "in five months of travel in the communist areas I found not the slightest trace of opium in any form." (93) Successful opium suppression required a drastic change at all levels of the economy. The campaign against cultivation extended to the most remote areas of China, and poppy growers were persuaded to produce other crops.(94) Penalties against drug merchants were ruthlessly enforced by a government that had no economic or political obligations to those engaged in the trade. Shanghai was cleaned up, its Western business interests forced out, its corruption eliminated. According to a high Hong Kong customs official, since 1949 there have been no seizures of opium coming from mainland China.(95) China is no longer a factor in the international narcotics traffic.

The postwar elimination of China as a major drug center and the end of the colonial era and its monopolies in Southeast Asia improved prospects for solving the narcotics problem in Asia. Instead, Southeast Asia has more than filled the gap left by China, particularly in terms of supplying heroin for the U.S. market.

Appendix

1. Ch'en Ching-jen, "Opium and Anglo-Chinese Relations," Chinese Social and Political Science Review 19 (1935-1936), 386-437, 386-388.

2. Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, vol. 1. (London: Longmans Green, 1910), pp. 172-173.

3. For a brief account see David Edward Owen, British Opium Policy in India and China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934), P. 10.

4. Ibid., pp. 22 ff.

5. Ibid., p. 23.

6. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, India controlled the trade of the Far East through an export surplus that consisted chiefly of opium (E. J. Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire: The Pelican Economic History of the British Empire, vol. 3, 1750 to the Present [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1969], p. 149).

7. Owen, British Opium Policy in India and China, p. 37.

8. Ibid., p. vii.

9. Ibid., pp. 80-81.

10. Ibid., p. 87, quoting governor-general in council to the Court of Directors (of the East India Company), July 30 1819, in India Office Letters from Bengal, vol. 81.

11. No more than one-tenth of the total importation of opium from both India and the Middle East was carried on American ships or received on consignment by American firms (Arnold H. Taylor, American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic 1900-1939: A Study in International Humanitarian Reform [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 19691, p. 8).

12. Chang Hsin-pao, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 41, 132.

13. These and many other Chinese antiopiurn regulations are quoted and discussed in Yu En-te, Chung-kuo chin yen fa-ling pien-ch'ien shih (History of the Changes in Chinese Antiopium Laws) (Shanghai: China Press, 1934), pp. 16 ff.

14. Frederick Wakeman, Jr., "Les soci6t6s secr&es du Guangdong (18001856)," in Jean Chesneaux, Feiling Davis and Nguyen Nguyet Ho, eds., Mouvements populaires et Soci&js secr&es en Chine aux XIXe et XXe Si~cles (Paris: Frangois Maspero, 1970), p. 93.

15. Opium was exported from India in chests. According to H. B. Morse, Malwa and Persian opium weighed 135 pounds per chest and Bengal opium weighed 160 pounds (Hosea Ballou Morse, The Trade and Administration of China [London: Longmans Green, 19131, p. 355).

16. Owen, British Opium Policy in India and China, p. 80.

17. The East India Company's monopoly of the Britain-Asia trade was ended in 1834. The company had been undermined by the development of Singapore as a port, by its own inefficiency, and by increasing pressure from advocates of "free trade," by which they meant trade that would be government supported but not controlled. As a result the number of resident British merchants engaged in the China trade at Canton jumped from 66 in-1834 to 156 three years later (Maurice Collis, Foreign Mud: Being an account of the Opium Imbroglio at Canton in the 1830's and the Anglo-Chinese war that followed [London: Faber & Faber, 19641, p. 55).

18. Arthur Waley, The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958), p. 176.

19. China, Inspectorate General of Customs, Imperial Maritime Customs, Opium 11, Special Series no. 4 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General, 1881), p. 1.

20. Morse, The Trade and Administration of China, p. 378.

21. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers (1894), Reverend Hudson Taylor's testimony to the Royal Commission on Opium, Minutes of Evidence and Appendices, vol. 1, p. 30.

22. China, Inspectorate General of Customs, Imperial Maritime Customs, Native Opium 1887 11, Special Series no. 9 (R. E. Bredon, Hankow no. 385, June 17, 1887) p. 18.

23. S. A. M. Adshead, "Opium in Szechwan 1881-1911," in Journal of Southeast Asian History 7, no. 2 (September 1966), 93-99, 96. See also W. Donald Spence, Acting British Consul at Ichang, to the Assistant Secretary of India Finance and Commerce Department, no. 13 (confidential), April 11, 1882, in Parliamentary Papers, 1894, Royal Commission on Opium, vol. 2, app. 12, p. 384.

24. W. Donald Spence estimates that by the early 1880s the Szechwan government made not less than 1.5 million taels (Chinese dollars) per year from opium (Spence, to the Assistant Secretary of India Finance and Commerce Department), p. 384.

25. Spence puts total production in 1881 at over 21 million pounds of which almost 17 million pounds was exported (ibid., p. 387). A similar figure for Szechwan is given by R. E. Bredon, Hankow no. 385, in Native Opium 1887.

26. Spence, to the Assistant Secretary of India Finance and Commerce Department, p. 385.

27. Consul-General Litton of Yunnanfu to Rangoon Chamber of Commerce, October 3, 1903, enclosure in Southwest China Confidential, February 23, 1905 (FO 228/2414) in Great Britain, Foreign Office, Embassy and Consular Archives. China, Correspondence on Opium (FO 228/2414-2466 [1905-19171 and FO 228/3357-3371 [19181927]). These documents are in the Public Record Office in London. Hereafter all citations from these documents are given only by the reference number. Unless otherwise indicated, citations are communications from consul s-ge n eral, consuls or acting consuls, and are addressed to the chief of mission, either His Brittanic Majesty's Minister or his charg6 d'affaires in Peking. "Confidential" indicates that the document was intended only for staff circulation.

28. As is true of most statistics on opium in China, estimates of numbers of smokers vary tremendously. This figure is rather conservative. Compare, for example, Ch'en, "Opium and Anglo-Chinese Relations," p. 423.

29. Fei Hsiao-t'ung and Chang Chih-i, Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 295.

30. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 1894, Marcus Wood's testimony to the Royal Cotnmission on Opium, vol. 1, p. 49.

31. J. F. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and Among the ManTze of the Samo Territory (London: John Murray, 1899), p. 509.

32. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 189,t, Reverend Hudson Taylor's testimony to the Royal Commission on Opium, vol. 1, p. 30.

33. A. E. Moule, "Essay: The Use of Opium and Its Bearing on the Spread of Christianity in China," in Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries in China Held at Shanghai, May 10-24, 1877 (Shanghai, 1878), pp. 352-362.

34. Reverend R. Wardlaw Thompson, quoting Griffith John in Griffith John: The Story of Fifty Years in China (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1906), p. 408. For an account of the missionary campaign against opium in the late nineteenth century, see Hilary J. Beattie, "Protestant Missions and Opium in China 1858-1895," in Harvard Papers on China 22A (May 1969), 104-133.

35. See Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 1894, The Royal Commission on Opium, particularly the introductory section in the first volume on the purpose of the commission. See also Great Britain, India Office Private Secretary, "Opium Commission," April 24, 1895, in Home Office Archives (HO 45/9875/1315025).

36. Ch'en, "Opium and Anglo-Chinese Relations," p. 430.

37. An excellent account of this period is Mary C. Wright's introduction to the volume she edited, China in Revolution: The First Phase 19001911 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969).

38. Government of India Finance Department to Morley, Secretary of State for India, February 21, 1907 (F0228/2416), pp. 1-2.

39. Sir Edward Grey, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to Sir John Jordan, His Majesty's Minister Peking, telegram ref. no. 180, October 1906 (FO 228/2415).

40. For example, see Hewett, Hong Kong, to Sir Edward Grey, telegram ref. no. 20787, June 10, 1910 (FO 228/2432).

41. Ch'en, "Opium and Anglo-Chinese Relations," p. 432.

42. See Alexander Hosie, On the Trail of the Opium Poppy (London: George Philip and Son, 1914), esp. vol. 2, app. pp. 232 ff.

43. Ritchie, India Office to Foreign Office, Confidential, October 2, 1910, (FO 228/2435).

44. "List of Provinces Closed to Opium," 1916 (170 228/2463).

45. Beattie, "Protestant Missions and Opium in China 1858-1895," p. 121, citing Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China held at Shanghai May 7-20, 1890, pp. 356-359.

46. Morse, The Trade and Administration of China, p. 379.

47. Cited in F. D. Lugard, "Memorandum Regarding the Restriction of Opium in Hong Kong and China," March 11, 1909 (FO 228/2425).

48. Morse, The Trade and Administration of China, p. 380.

49. League of Nations, Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, Annual Reports on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs for the Year 1932, p. 109.

50. Peking and Tientsin Times, June 11, 1909, p. 7.

51. The International Anti-Opium Association (Peking), The War Against Opium (Tientsin: Tientsin Press, 1922), p. 49.

52. Finance Commission Office, Burma, to Revenue Secretary to the Government of Burma, August 12~ 1920 (FO 228/3362).

53. Eastes, Tengyueh no. 8, March 21, 1918 (170 228/3357).

54. Fei and Chang, Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan,pp.282-283.

55. H. W. Sammon, Yunnanfu no. 26, October 22, 1912 (FO 228/2451).

56. "L'Opium A Nos Fronti6res" in the Depeche Coloniale (Indochina) enclosed in Carlisle, Saigon no. 5 political. September 23, 1912 (170 228/ 2451).

57. G. E. Morrison, quoted in Cyril Pearl, Morrison of Peking (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 137.

58. The International Anti-Opium Association (Peking), The War Against Opium, p. 43.

59. "Opium in Yunnan'~-Seventh Report enclosed in Fox, Yunnanfu no. 34, June 30, 1913 (FO 228/2455).

60. Eastes, Tengyueh no. 3, "Opium Report for December Quarter," 1916 (170 228/2465).

61. Eastes, Tengyuch no. 20 (confidential), July 21, 1916 (FO 228/2465).

62. Eastes, Tengyueh no. 25, October 16, 1918 (170 228/3357).

63. G. E. Morrison, quoted in Pearl, Morrison of Peking, p. 371.

64. League of Nations, Annual Reports on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs for the Year 1924, Annex 3, Reports from the Chinese High Commissioners, p. 13.

65. "Opium-General Review," in H. G. W. Woodhead, ed., The China Yearbook 1925-1927 (Tientsin: Tientsin Press, 1927), pp. 620-647, 643-644.

66. League of Nations, Advisory Committee, Analysis of the International Trade in Morphine, Diacetylmorphine and Cocaine for the Years 1925-1929, 1931, p, 39.

67. League of Nations, Advisory Committee, Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, 12th Session, 1929, Annex 3, p. 202.

68. League of Nations, Permanent Central Opium Committee, Statistics for the Year 1930, pp. 102 ff.

69. League of Nations, Advisory Committee, Annual Reports for the Year 1932, 1934, p. 58. Interview with John Warner, Chief, Strategic Intelligence Office, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1971 (Alfred W. McCoy, interviewer).

70. Tadao Sakai, "Le Hongbang (Bande rouge) aux XIXe et XXe Si6cl,s,,, in Chesneaux, Davis, Ho, eds., Mouvements populaires et Socijtis secr~tes en Chine aux XjXe et XXe Si~cles, pp. 316-343, 316.

71. Y. C. Wang, "Tu Yueh-sheng (1888-1951): A Tentative Political Biography" in Journal of Asian Studies 26, no. 3 (May 1967), 433455. 435. Much of this study is based on a memoir written by one of Tu's private secretaries (see note 91 below).

72. Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 142,

73. Wang, "Tu Yueh-sheng (1888-1951): A Tentative Political Biography," p. 436.

74. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, pp. 135 ff.

75. Ibid., pp. 145, 151. Emily Hahn, Chiang Kai-shek: an Unauthorized Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 110-111. (Hahn's treatment is generally sympathetic toward Chiang, yet her account of his Shanghai coup closely resembles other less favorable treatments such as Isaacs'.)

76. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, pp. 145 ff.

77. Wang, "Tu Yueh-sheng (1888-1951): A Tentative Political Biography," p. 437. Cf. Harold Isaacs, "Gang Rule in Shanghai," The China Forum, May 1932, pp. 17-18, 17.

78. Wang, "Tu Yueh-sheng (1888-1951): A Tentative Political Biography," p. 437.

79. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, pp, 175 ff.

80. Isaacs, "Gang Rule in Shanghai," p. 18.

81. Wang, "Tu Yueh-sheng (1888-1951): A Tentative Political Biography," p. 437.

82. Edgar Snow, The Battle for Asia (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 7 9.

83. Isaacs, "Gang Rule in Shanghai," p. 18.

84. Garfield Huang, "Three Aspects of China's Opium Problem," The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 16, July 1930, pp. 407-415. (This estimate and other figures dealing with the KMT's involvement in the opium trade are speculative. Not surprisingly, no official figures are available.)

85. Wang, "Tu Yueh-sheng (1888-1951): A Tentative Political Biography," p. 442. According to Isaacs, Tu dropped out of the trade in deference to the KMT government's wish to strengthen its own control over the opium traffic ("Gang Rule in Shanghai," p. 18).

86. League of Nations, Advisory Committee, Annual Reports for the Year 1934, 1936, p. 90.

87. 1 am indebted to John Hall of the Contemporary China Institute, London, for this theory.

88. Loss of opium revenue was one of the motives behind Kwangsi's 1936 agitation against the Nationalist regime (F. T. Merrill, Japan and the Opium Menace [New York: The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Foreign Policy Association, 1942], p. 33).

89. Ibid., p. 32.

90. League of Nations, Advisory Committee, Report to the Council ort the Work of the 24th Session, 1939, pp. 9-10.

91. Wang, "Tu Yueh-sheng (1888-1951): A Tentative Political Biography," p. 445, citing Shih-i (pseudonym for Hu Hsij-wu), Tu Yuehsheng wai chuan (Hong Kong, 1962), pp. 51-53. (Hu Hsij-wu was a private secretary to Tu Yueh-sheng.)

92. Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder Out of China (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1946), p. 311.

93. Harrison Forman, Report from Red China (London: Robert Hale, 1946), p. 10.

94. For an account of how the campaign operated in one area, see Alan Winnington, The Slaves of the Cool Mountains: The Ancient Social Conditions and Changes Now in Progress on the Remote Southwestern Borders of China (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1959).

95. Interview with Mr. Graham Crookdake, Hong Kong, July 5, 1971 (Alfred W. McCoy, intervie~ver). (See appendix to Chapter 4.)

 

Next >