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Book Review
| David Anthony Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 361. $50 (ISBN: 0674016491).
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| This valuable study is an example of the new Qing history, which looks at the Qing (1644–1911) as a multi-ethnic empire rather than focusing exclusively on the Han core areas. Opium was a problem with few classical antecedents, which meant that that there was a wide-ranging debate on the nature of the problem and the best ways to solve it, making the book a good introduction to legal policy-making in the Qing. Although the problem of opium was new, reaction to it drew on traditional discourses about reforming elite morals, controlling heterodox behavior, and maintaining grain production. Thus the book provides a good introduction to the concerns of the Qing state and the methods it had for dealing with them. Perhaps the most ground-breaking aspect of the book is Bello's extensive treatment of the different policies used to control opium in the West (primarily Xinjiang) and the Southwest (primarily Yunnan and Guizhou). The focus on the periphery fills a gap in the existing scholarship, which not surprisingly centers on the Southeast coast and the confrontation with the British. More importantly, in these remote regions opium policy was carried out through the structures of indirect rule that typified the non-core regions of the Qing empire, making this the best existing study of policy implementation in the Qing imperium. |
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Scholarship on opium in Asia has been bedeviled by attempts to read modern discourses on drug use back into earlier periods. Bello deals with the court debate over the proper response to opium, and thus the Qing's original understanding of the nature of the opium problem, in greater depth than any existing study. Opium was first prohibited in 1729, although it was not a matter of great concern to the court for the next eighty years. In the early nineteenth century opium became an increasing concern but the court's understanding of the problem changed several times, with new understandings overlaying, rather than replacing old ones. In the 1830s the court debated the possibility of legalizing opium, and in the course of this debate the definition of the opium problem broadened. Initial efforts had focused on traffickers in foreign opium, but the state eventually saw a need to control poppy growing and smuggling in many remote areas. Most significantly, policy began to focus on the individual opium smoker as the core of the problem, although the state was more concerned with purchases of opium than its consumption. Thus it was only in the context of suppression that the China came to have an opium problem. |
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The Qing eventually began an empire-wide program of opium suppression, primarily motivated by fears that the opium trade was draining China of silver. The problems with prohibition were considerably more complex in the remote regions of the Southwest and Northwest, and thus these regions were most discussed at court and this gives the best picture of the Qing understanding of its problems and the strengths and weaknesses of its administrative apparatus. In the periphery the baojia system of local control, which was only sporadically effective in controlling opium consumption in the core, was often not available at all. Local government was often in the hands of native chieftains (tusi) in the Southwest and begs in the Northwest rather than the regular bureaucracy. Rather than dealing with a single source of foreign opium as in Canton, Chinese officials were faced various sovereignties on the borders. It was in these regions that domestic opium production was most widespread and most difficult to deal with. Local officials eventually concluded that what the court saw as an alien trade to be rooted out was in fact becoming deeply rooted in local economic and administrative structures. |
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The Qing state was capable of collecting and synthesizing information from all over China to come up with a relatively clear picture of the nature of the opium trade. Officials made a number of plausible suggestions for ways to root out the problem, including a rigorous program of crop substitution. Bello concludes, however, that the Qing state's commitment to minimalist government, especially in the periphery, made the state unwilling and possibly unable, to impose the level of centralization needed to control the opium trade. The state was largely indifferent to the economic situation of peasant poppy growers and officials who relied on the profits of the trade to finance local government, and thus it was unwilling to propose any solution that took their needs into account. At the same time the state was unwilling to abandon its highly centralized model of opium suppression, which would have required enthusiastic participation at the local level to succeed. |
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| Alan Baumler
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| Indiana University of Pennsylvania |
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