The Opium Business by Peter Thilly;

Author:Peter Thilly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

But alongside this moral consensus about opium’s undesirability, there was across China what proved to be an intractable fiscal consensus that opium was a profitable business, and as such, a ready-made opportunity for state revenue. The Qing state was still unable to quit opium revenue when it collapsed, and the warlord governments that followed along with the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party all operated opium monopolies to supplement military and administrative budgets.143 In Fujian, there was also what might be called an institutional consensus, about what kinds of systems and practices could be used to regulate and control the drug. Prohibition bureaus, from the beginning, took over preexisting institutions and systems of opium den registration, classification, and taxation. Like the nineteenth-century lijin bureaus in Fujian and the opium farms in Southeast Asia, these prohibition bureaus were contracted out to coalitions of wealthy opium investors seeking an edge over their competition. With the help of men like Ye Qinghe and his Taiwanese associate Zeng Houkun, the Guomindang and warlord rulers of Fujian after 1911 embedded opium tax farming within the modern Chinese state.

In the final years of the Qing dynasty, few would have guessed that the end of dynastic rule would involve such a stunning recrudescence of the opium business. But indeed there was more opium coming in and out of southern Fujian during the 1920s and 1930s then at any other point in the province’s history. Opium was being grown in unprecedented quantities, not only in places like Tong’an and Hui’an counties where cultivation had been taking place since the early nineteenth century, but also in places that had never seen opium poppies. In Xinghua district just north of Quanzhou, an investigator from the International Anti-Opium Association in 1934 reported that 70–90 percent of the fields were planted with the poppy. In the words of the investigator: “I have seen square miles of white flowers and the atmosphere is heavy with the scent.” The local population, he asserted, were commonly heard saying that “the people must now eat opium instead of grain.”144

Where was it all going? Who was smoking all of this opium? The export orientation of the Fujian opium economy during these years—intimately tied to the revenue and regulatory structures surrounding opium discussed here, as well as the rapid growth in domestic production and the import of vast quantities of Persian opium—is the subject of the next chapter.

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