The Chinese and opium under the Republic : worse than floods and wild beasts / Alan Baumler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baumler, Alan, 1965-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Opium trade--China.

Opium trade.

China.

Physical Description:

xi, 298 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2007]

Summary:

In 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:

Introduction: Worse than Floods and Wild Beasts: Opium, Politics, and Society in Republican China 1

Chapter 1 Establishing a Meaning for Opium 9

Chapter 2 The Narrative of Addiction in China and the West 35

Chapter 3 The International Campaign against Opium 57

Chapter 4 Warloads and Opium 89

Chapter 5 Opium, the Nation, and the Revolution 111

Chapter 6 Hankou, the Anti-Opium Inspectorate, and Control of the Opium Trade 151

Chapter 7 Purifying the People and Defending the State: The Six Year Plan to Eliminate Opium 177

Chapter 8 Defining Drugs 195

Chapter 9 War, Poppies, and the Completion of the Plan 215.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-294) and index.

ISBN:

0791469530

9780791469538

OCLC:

63195955