Chapter Eighteen
COMMUNIST CONSPIRACIES
The 1850s were a trying decade for Karl Marx.
Expelled from three countries (and barred even from Switzerland), in 1849 he
had settled in London with his family. Not long after their arrival, however,
the Marxes were evicted from their lodgings and their few possessions
confiscated by bailiffs. In the next ten years, three of his children died,
most probably from the strains of destitution, as Marx stumbled between
financial crises, squandering his journalistic income and handouts from his
friend Engels on maintaining a respectable middle-class facade (a useless
personal secretary, seaside holidays, ball-gowns for his would-be debutante
daughters), all the while agitating for the overthrow of capitalism by the
global proletariat.
Despite the chaos of his own circumstances,
Marx retained a robust belief in his ability to pronounce on the affairs of the
world. And through the decade, his attention turned sporadically to China. The
series of articles on the subject that he composed for the New York Daily
Tribune had little good to say about Palmerston and his
‘Christianity-canting and civilisation-mongering’ government,1
or about the merchant interests who were, by 1857, driving the two sides
towards ‘this most unrighteous war’ that will lead the Chinese ‘to regard all
the nations of the Western World as united in a conspiracy against them.’2
For China, Marx decided, the first Opium War had been an epochal catastrophe:
‘The tribute to be paid to England after the unfortunate war of 1840, the great
unproductive consumption of opium, the drain of the precious metals by this
trade’ had broken the country.3
Worse than that, the British had calculatingly poisoned an empire, for ‘the
opium seller slays the body after he has corrupted, degraded and annihilated
the moral being of unhappy sinners, while every hour is bringing new victims to
a Moloch which knows no satiety, and where the English murderer and Chinese
suicide vie with each other in offerings at his shrine.’4
Yet at the same time, Marx was unable to
muster much admiration for China, this ‘giant empire,
containing almost one-third of the human
race, vegetating in the teeth of time . . . contriving to dupe itself with
delusions of celestial perfection . . . Before the British arms the authority
of the Manchu dynasty fell to pieces; the superstitious faith in the eternity
of the Celestial Empire broke down; the barbarous and hermetic isolation from the
civilised world was infringed . . . That isolation having come to a violent end
by the medium of England, dissolution must follow as surely as that of any
mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is
brought into contact with the open air.5
The inevitable result of this clash was ‘one
formidable revolution . . . afforded by the English cannon forcing upon China
that soporific drug called opium . . . It would seem as though history had
first to make this whole people drunk before it could rouse them out of their
hereditary stupidity.’6
There was little that was original in Marx’s
conclusions about China and its Opium Wars. Key elements of his analysis – in
particular, his scorn for the decadence of the Chinese empire – are to be found
scattered across previous China-watchers’ accounts. Heavily influenced by
earlier European sinophobes of the nineteenth century, Marx propounded a vision
of China that stripped it of both complexity and agency: that saw it as an
inert empire capable only of being ‘woken’ by the West in the Opium War. The
one novelty that Marx added to the standard racist repertoire of Victorian
commentaries on China was a similarly intense disgust for Western imperialism.
By 1860, Marx had moved on from China, to
concentrate instead on failing to complete Volume 1 of Capital; he seems
never to have returned seriously to the subject. Less than a century later,
however, his views would become enshrined in Chinese nationalist thought as the
definitive account of ‘the Celestial Empire’ and the Opium Wars. This account
would become the founding myth of Chinese nationalism: the beginning of the
Western imperialist conspiracy against a rotting ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial’
China, from which only communism could save the country. At the heart of
anti-Western Maoism, therefore, lies a profound reverence for European opinion.
And to tell the strange story of how the
opinions dashed off by a bourgeois from the Lower Rhine became holy writ in
China, we must first return to the labours of another financially challenged
chancer of the late-nineteenth century (and the architect of a one-party
Chinese nation-state): Sun Yat-sen. It was Sun’s late, ambivalent decision of
the 1920s – taken in desperation to win Soviet funding for his faltering
revolution – to name imperialism as the cause of all modern China’s problems
that transformed the Opium War into the inaugural trauma of Chinese history,
and into a vital ingredient of twentieth-century patriotic propaganda.
Born in 1866 into a peasant family a little
north of Macao, educated in Hong Kong and Hawaii thanks to the generosity of a
brother who had sailed off to make his fortune overseas, Sun was the archetypal
product of China’s forced opening to the West. By his late twenties, he had
competent English, had graduated from a Hong Kong college with rudimentary
knowledge of Western medicine and had converted to Christianity.
In 1894, he made a brief attempt at a more
conventional career in the imperial bureaucracy, travelling north to deliver to
the Qing head of state, Li Hongzhang, a long petition that offered his services
to modernizing China. Preoccupied by war with Japan, Li did not make time to
see him. This snub seems to have been enough to convince Sun that he must
concentrate his energies on bringing down the entire edifice of Qing rule, and
before the year was out he had founded a secret revolutionary cell in Hawai’i,
the Revive China Society, dedicated to overthrowing the Manchus. After his
first planned uprising in 1895 failed disastrously, he fled China with a price
on his head and began a career as a professional itinerant revolutionary.
Through this dispossessed period, Sun would develop his vision of a republican,
nationalist state that would in later decades help win him a place in modern
Chinese history as ‘father of the nation’.
Over the course of the next sixteen years,
Sun flitted between countries (Britain, France, Japan, the United States) and
social groups (bandits, pirates, monarchists, anarchists, foreign ministers,
missionaries, overseas Chinese businessmen, American mercenaries), begging for
money and help for his anti-Manchu revolution, artfully telling each
constituency what they wanted to hear. In London one season, he would extol the
virtues of the British legal system; in Japan the next, he would excoriate the
horrors of Western colonialism to Pan-Asianists. A year later, he would be
wooing China’s secret societies with toasts in pigeon’s blood, while offering
parts of south China to French imperialists if they first pledged to finance
his ‘federated republic’.
After a decade of failed rebellions, he read
in October 1911 – in a newspaper, while breakfasting at the foot of the Rocky
Mountains – that a string of revolutionary uprisings, beginning with a botched
bomb explosion in central China, had brought down the Qing dynasty. (Sun was in
the United States to work out the details of an anti-Qing conspiracy with a
hunchbacked adventurer called Homer Lea, who was offering $3.5 million worth of
soldiers and weapons in exchange for full economic control of the republic that
would ensue.) Rather than rush straight back to China, however, Sun booked a
ship ticket to London, where he promised the British government that in return
for their support of the new regime he would appoint British officers to the
command of the Chinese navy and enthrone a British official as his ‘political
adviser’.7
Finally returning to China on Christmas Day
1911, he accepted the presidency for thirty-four days, before handing over the
infant republic to a former Qing general, Yuan Shikai, whose personal command
over the Beiyang army in the north-east – the country’s largest, most
modernized military force – had enabled him to dominate negotiations between
the Qing and the revolutionaries over the preceding weeks. In 1913, Sun found
himself on the run again after Yuan had ordered the assassination of a newly
elected prime minister, thereby destroying the new government’s shaky
democratic structures.8
For the next decade, Sun returned to frequenting the drawing rooms of the
international rich and powerful, offering slices of his future Chinese republic
to the highest bidder.
But despite his promises to would-be foreign
friends, he made little progress in finding funding for his republican dream.
Following Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, his subordinates divided the country
into personal enclaves and began battling each other for overall control. In
1917, after the warlord fashion of the day, Sun headed for his native Canton
and, decked out in plumed helmet, fringed epaulettes and white gloves,
proclaimed himself Grand Marshal of a cash-starved military government that
existed principally on paper – he could muster, at the peak of his command,
some twenty battalions and one gunboat. By 1922, even by the standards of his
career to that point, Sun’s position was looking precarious. On 16 June, his
headquarters in Canton were bombarded by a former ally, Chen Jiongming, a
Cantonese commander who objected to Sun’s schemes to force Guangdong to pay for
a northern expedition to reunite the country under his leadership. In the fire
that resulted, Sun was forced to flee his house pursued by rifle shots and
shouts of ‘Kill Sun! Kill Sun!’ He spent the next seven weeks sweltering on
board a gunboat, waiting in vain for reinforcements to restore him to his seat
of power, while his old friends the British did nothing except send a ship to
taxi him to Hong Kong.9
Impelled at least partly by hopelessness,
around this time Sun began to give thought to overtures from the Soviet Union.
The Russians, it emerged, were willing to provide his fractious Nationalist
Party (Guomindang or GMD – the organization that he had founded in 1912, to
replace his similarly fractious Revolutionary Alliance of the 1900s) with funding,
arms and political and military training. Sun, in return, would allow members
of the young Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921 with help from the
Comintern, into the ranks of the Nationalists, to form a United Front. Sun
hoped that the Soviets would make him a Chinese Lenin, injecting the cash,
weapons and discipline necessary to turn the Guomindang into a force that could
reunite the country by defeating the warlords who had carved up China. The
Russians planned to further their long-term aim of world revolution by
advancing in China the primary political stage – national bourgeois revolution
assisted by Chinese Communists – from within which, they hoped, communist
revolution would spring.
But to secure Soviet money, Sun had to make a
stand on a handful of key Communist policies. Displaying solidarity with the
proletariat was one: organizing strikes, reducing rents, redistributing land
and so on. In theory, this step made good sense, promising to turn Sun’s
Nationalist Party into a genuinely mass organization. In practice, it would
prove problematic, for Sun had little stomach for class struggle. Since 1905,
Sun’s political manifestoes had glibly called for the ‘equalization of land
rights’, while failing to acknowledge the social and economic conflict this
process would necessarily bring with it. As a man permanently short of funds,
Sun was naturally drawn to the rich and powerful, within and without China: to
politicians, merchants, industrialists and wealthy landlords.10
Resisting ‘the world-suppressing yoke of
imperialism’ was a second important Soviet principle with which Sun needed to
concur – for imperialism, Marx had upheld (and Lenin agreed), was the highest
stage of capitalism.11
Again, in theory, this stipulation should not have posed any great difficulty
for a Chinese political movement aspiring to mass popularity. By the 1920s,
China had been suffering from foreign aggression for some eighty years; the
past decade alone had been studded with new outrages. Taking advantage of
China’s post-revolutionary chaos, the Japanese government had in 1915 served
Yuan Shikai with their Twenty-One Demands, asserting economic and political
sovereignty over slices of Manchuria and Mongolia. Four years later, the
British, French and Americans at Versailles had rewarded Japanese naval
assistance in the First World War with another large portion of north-east
China. Indignant Chinese youth had responded by plunging into the protest of
the May Fourth Movement – a surge of radical nationalism named after the
violent anti-imperialist demonstrations of 4 May 1919.
Again, in reality, mobilizing and harnessing
anti-imperialist zeal in Republican China was not so straightforward.
Assuredly, certain groups in Chinese society were prone to fury about foreign
aggression: in particular, the students, teachers and writers who, through
articles, demonstrations and petitions, drew attention to the country’s
mistreatment at the hands of the Powers. They filled journals and newspapers
with appalled editorials about China’s international predicament; they voted to
brand shop signs, textbooks, flags and packaging (for cigarettes, wine, straw
hats, stockings) with the words ‘National Humiliation’; they commemorated traumatic
anniversaries as ‘National Humiliation Days’. There was money to be made from
the Humiliation industry, too. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the
Demands, one newspaper advertised a special souvenir product: ‘National
Humiliation’ towels, to help remind the Chinese people (through daily
ablutions) that the shame of foreign aggression had to be wiped away. Another
company six years later tried a similar pitch for tooth powder: ‘you will
naturally associate this in your mind with the great “national humiliation” and
ponder ways to brush it clean.’12
But this anger was mixed with fear that, without
the vigilance of the nation’s intellectual leaders, ordinary Chinese would
easily forget the horrors of foreign oppression. The Chinese, editorialists
complained through the 1910s and 1920s, had a serious national humiliation
attention deficit disorder: ‘an enthusiasm for things that only lasted five
minutes’.13
Fulminations against external aggression in early Republican newspapers
frequently veered into denunciations of popular indifference. ‘There are a
great many Chinese citizens’, one commentator of the early 1920s worried, ‘who
do not appreciate the seriousness of the current national crisis and their
responsibility to do something about it. This is a new national humiliation and
also a great crisis.’ One newspaper cartoon from 1922 pictured a
disapproving-looking individual standing by an enormous thermometer showing
that the country’s ‘National Humiliation Commemoration Fever’ had dwindled to
almost nothing.14
Even China’s most passionate
anti-imperialists – those who threw themselves into the May Fourth Movement –
were inconsistent in their attitudes to the West. On the one hand, the protests
– which quickly developed into strikes and boycotts of foreign goods across
China’s cities – decried the Great Powers’ partition of China. But on the
other, May Fourth nationalists (just like their radical predecessors from the
turn of the century) worshipped Western ‘civilization’: its science, its
democracy, its literature and culture. The basic task, proclaimed Chen Duxiu,
one of the movement’s intellectual leaders, ‘is to import the foundation of
Western society, that is, the new belief in equality and human rights.’ For
people like Chen, the real enemy was not the West, but China’s own Confucianism:
‘We must be thoroughly aware’, he reminded his readers in 1916, ‘of the
incompatibility between Confucianism and the new belief, the new society and
the new state.’15
All that these nationalists could agree on was that something was intrinsically
wrong with China and the Chinese – the country’s sufferings at the hands of
imperialism were consequences of this more fundamental malaise. ‘The majority
of our people are lethargic,’ Chen worried in 1917, ‘and do not know that not
only our morality, politics and technology but even common commodities for
daily use are all unfit for struggle and are going to be eliminated in the
process of natural selection.’16
China’s National Humiliation commemoration
fever dwindles.
Sun Yat-sen had as much trouble turning on
the imperialist powers as the next cosmopolitan patriot. This was partly for
pragmatic, financial reasons: since he had fled China for his life in 1895, his
revolutionary hopes had been kept alive by dollars, francs, pounds and yen. Sun
owed the West not only an intellectual and emotional debt, but also his life.
In London in 1896, he had been kidnapped by the Qing legation and threatened
with deportation to China (and certain death), until a British media campaign
on his behalf surrounded the embassy with crowds threatening to demolish the
building unless the prisoner was released. (In Beijing in 1984 for fraught
negotiations over Hong Kong, Mrs Thatcher took care to remind her Chinese
counterparts of this merciful British intervention.) But his ambivalence also
sprang from a realistic assessment of the relative importance of internal and
international politics, and from a matter-of-fact refusal to blame foreigners
for most of China’s difficulties.
For most of his career, Sun was necessarily
more preoccupied by his domestic political opponents than by foreign threats.
Through the 1900s, he was careful to avoid open criticism of Western
imperialism: his public statements always attributed the root of China’s
problems to the dictatorship of the Manchus (whom Sun excoriated for having
failed to build a Western-style democracy).17
In 1912, even as he declared opium prohibition to be one of the most urgent
tasks of the new republic, he observed that ‘Lin Zexu’s burning of the opium
generated unprecedented calamity for the country . . . it did not conform to
treaties; it was uncivilized, illegal behaviour.’18
To the end of his life, he considered his greatest mistake to have been to cede
the presidency to Yuan Shikai in 1912 – rather than to have offered repeatedly
to hand over large portions of the Chinese republic to would-be foreign
backers. (In 1913 alone, he volunteered Manchuria to the Japanese government in
exchange for 20 million yen and a couple of army divisions.) In 1923, Sun
objected to a student slogan that exhorted the Chinese to ‘Resist the Great
Powers abroad and overthrow the warlords at home’. ‘These two problems cannot
be discussed in the same breath’, he reprimanded the sloganeers. ‘If the home
government is good then foreign relations present no problem.’19
If, in the early 1920s, China’s old Opium War
adversary Great Britain had produced backing as substantial as that promised by
the Soviet Union, Sun’s budding agreement with Lenin might well have come to
nothing. In February 1923, a mere month before the USSR pledged $2 million to
his revolutionary government, Sun was taking tea in well-heeled Hong Kong
drawing rooms and proclaiming that ‘we must take England as our model and must
extend England’s example of good government to the whole of China.’20
But by 1924, his ongoing financial and
political crises had persuaded Sun to complete the intellectual journey
dictated by Soviet backing, and in a series of lectures on his Three
Principles of the People – the text that would become a major part of his
political legacy after his death the following year – he began to identify imperialism
as Republican China’s greatest enemy. By wresting control of Customs from the
Qing, the first Opium War had left China with a severe ‘economic disability’,
resulting in the annual loss of $1.2 billion. ‘China has suffered at the hands
of the Great Powers for decades . . . [It] has become a colony of the Great
Powers.’21
In fact, China was far worse than a colony, he told his listeners – it was, he
extemporized, a ‘hypocolony . . . not the slaves of one country but of all.’22
The ‘historic task’, he decided, must now be to unite for ‘the overthrow of the
intervention of foreign imperialism in China’, for ‘China’s disintegration is
not the fault of the Chinese, but, instead, is caused exclusively by
foreigners.’23
Through his lectures, Sun painted a simplistic picture of a peaceable, virtuous
China surrounded by rapacious foreign powers eager ‘to destroy a nation in one
morning.’ In order to rescue the country, he concluded, his Nationalist Party
was duty-bound to ‘acquaint our 400 million people with our present position.
We are just now at the crisis between life and death.’ If the Chinese did not –
under the leadership of the Nationalist Party – recover their sense of
nationalism and ready themselves to fight imperialism,
‘our nation [will] be destroyed [and our]
race will be exterminated.’24
The Nationalists, in other words, were China’s only chance of salvation.
Once Sun’s Nationalist Party had finally
vowed to rally the Chinese to the cause of anti-imperialism, however, it still
had to find the means to impress this new orthodoxy on the minds of its
citizens. By the early 1920s, it was clear to aspiring political elites that for
decades anti-Western feeling had ebbed and flowed in response to particular
crises, without coalescing into a unified political force. A strong, cohesive
nation required a one-party nation-state. The problem with the Chinese, the
supposed republican democrat Sun Yat-sen concluded in 1924, was that they had
too much freedom. ‘We have had too much liberty without any unity . . .
[B]ecause we have become a sheet of loose sand . . . we must break down
individual liberty and become pressed together into an unyielding body like the
firm rock which is formed by the addition of cement to sand.’25
The Chinese people, in the estimation of the newly reformed Nationalist Party,
needed discipline. ‘The masses’, in an Orwellian phrase of the early 1920s,
needed to be ‘partified’, Lenin-style; they needed a pervasive, unified
national language of anti-imperialist slogans and symbols, clearly identifying
the country’s enemies (imperialism and its lackeys) and its saviours (the
Nationalists and their sometime allies, the Communists).26
At the First Congress of the reorganized Nationalist Party in 1924,
anti-imperialism became one of the basic criteria by which Chinese citizens
would be given membership of the national revolution to come: ‘Those who betray
the nation, those who give their loyalty to the imperialists or to the
warlords, will be permitted neither freedom nor rights.’27
The task would prove beyond Sun Yat-sen. Soon
after he had travelled north in 1925 to conduct talks with the warlord
government in Beijing, he succumbed to liver cancer. Almost instantly, though,
his successors embarked upon modern China’s most humourlessly committed attempt
at nation-building: ‘with the president dead,’ the Nationalists’ Central
Executive Committee quickly concluded, ‘party discipline is the only
thing that can protect . . . us.’28
Sun’s survivors began by reinvigorating its Propaganda Bureau, ensuring that a
party line actually existed, that it was disseminated to all party branches,
and that newspapers, magazines and public lectures toed it.29
(This was a major achievement: as late as 1924, the newly appointed editor of
the Nationalist Party newspaper had to work on ensuring that it stopped at
least openly insulting Sun Yat-sen.) While Nationalist armies – trained
and supplied by the Soviets – pushed up through the country between 1926 and
1928, fighting or bribing warlords into submission, Sun’s successors (led by
Chiang Kai-shek, the man who took over the helm of the party) deified their
late, flawed leader as the political sage of a Nationalist Party that aspired
to monopolize all claims to represent the ‘Chinese nation’. As they surged
north, fighting to reunify the country, Nationalist forces showered the country
with tens of thousands of slogans, leaflets, images of the Great Leader and new
blue-and-white Nationalist flags. Sun’s anti-imperialist Three Principles of
the People and last testament (drafted by subordinates desperate for a
legacy and merely signed off by the semi-comatose dying man) became the soundtrack
to public life in the Nationalist state founded in 1928. Every Monday, in
offices, schools and garrisons, employees, students and soldiers would gather
to bow three times to his portrait, to listen to a reading of his Testament and
to contemplate silently for three minutes.30
But if the Nationalists were serious about
engineering a nation out of anti-imperialist feeling, tampering with history
books was an obvious step to take. ‘Who controls the past, controls the
future’, as Ingsoc put it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘Who controls the
present controls the past.’ And it was thanks to the propaganda drive of the
1920s and 1930s that the events of 1839–42 stopped being a quarrelsome
side-story (a ‘dispute’ or ‘expedition’) of the nineteenth century and became
instead the aggrieved, unprecedented national tragedy that the ‘Opium War’
remains in China today.
A touching illustration on page four of the
sixth issue of Children’s Magazine (Ertong Zazhi) from 1936 shows
two plump little brothers, one a head taller than the other, standing with
their arms around each other, the older presumably imparting some fraternal
wisdom to the younger on the subject of the article’s title: ‘A Chat about the
Opium War’. The following dialogue between the two boys ensues. ‘What was the
Opium War about?’ the little one wants to know. Well, his big brother explains,
it all started with Lin Zexu trying to stop British opium imports.
‘So they attacked Dinghai and Tianjin, and
the Qing emperor was so useless he blamed Lin Zexu for causing the war,
dismissed him and appointed Qishan instead to negotiate for peace.’
‘What a silly emperor!’
‘And because Qishan was so clueless, the
English took Wusong and Nanjing. The Qing emperor was so surprised that he
signed the Treaty of Nanjing that destroyed our sovereignty and humiliated the
nation.’
‘Those horrible fierce imperialists!’
The younger one – probably around seven years
old – responds to a description of the clauses of the Treaty of Nanjing with
word-perfect political correctness. ‘Oh, I’m so angry I could die! The emperor
and his ministers were so stupid! I could kill them all! They deserve to die!’
‘Don’t get angry,’ counsels his sage brother. ‘Just remember everything that I
told you – you’ll take revenge when you get older.’ ‘Of course,’ chirps the
seven-year-old. ‘This blood debt has to be repaid.’31
This exchange sums up what every schoolchild
in Nationalist China was supposed to know about the Opium War: that it was a tale
of evil imperialists and foreign poison humiliating China; and that all
right-thinking Chinese people, of all ages, should be inspired to take revenge
for it. Two or three decades earlier, what Chinese people today now know as the
Opium War (‘Yapian zhanzheng’) remained an event in China’s long, difficult
nineteenth century, buried beneath the more general subheadings of ‘Internal
and External Troubles of the Nineteenth Century’ or ‘the Western Migration East’, and sandwiched
between difficulties in Xinjiang and the sprawling violence of the Taiping
Rebellion. An average history textbook would run through a handful of factual
details – the growing Chinese fondness for opium; the crackdown of 1839; the
arrival of gunboats; the main battles; the treaty and the size of the indemnity
– then move on to the next unpleasant nineteenth-century occurrence (usually
domestic rebellions; occasionally sheep banditry in Mongolia).32
Through the 1920s, though, the historiography
of the Opium War acquired a fresh sense of resentment. By the end of this
decade, the conflict and the first ‘Unequal Treaty’ that Qiying and Yilibu had
signed off with such careless haste had become the turning point in a modern
history dominated by imperialist aggression. It was (ahistorically) named the
‘beginning of China’s diplomatic defeats’ after ‘5,000 years of isolation’ from
the outside world; ‘a humiliation to the country – the greatest ever in our
history’ that ‘brought dishonour to countless descendants’.33
‘The Opium War, for the first time, branded the iron hoofprint of imperialism
on the bodies of our people’, pronounced one history textbook.34
‘From this time on,’ observed another, ‘the invasions and oppressions of the
imperialists would daily encroach further on the Chinese people.’35
‘The Opium War is intricately linked with the national fate of modern China’,
commented a 1931 tract on the conflict. ‘At last, foreigners were able to
realize their old dream of looting China; how furiously we sigh to remember it
now. This book offers a warning to you all, to incite bitter hatred of the
common enemy.’36
‘Since the Opium War,’ a magazine editorial analysed, ‘international
imperialism has forced opium on our country, miring our great rivers and
mountains in black fog . . . we have been massacred, robbed of our sovereignty
– we’ve become worse than a colony. We’ve become a poisoned people.’37
The aim was to persuade the populace to blame
all China’s problems on a single foreign enemy: to transform the Opium War and
its Unequal Treaty into a long-term imperialist scheme from which only the
Nationalists could preserve the country, thereby justifying any sacrifice that
the party required of the Chinese. ‘From the Opium War . . . the unanimous
demand of the people has been to avenge the National Humiliation’, Chiang
Kai-shek informed his subjects. ‘The success of the Nationalist Revolution
[and] China’s destiny depends upon the efforts of my countrymen.’38
If something is not done, another essayist proclaimed, ‘generation upon
generation of our children will be enslaved for ever.’39
Reassessment of the Opium War coincided with other anti-Western commemorations
introduced after 1924: week-long anti-imperialism fiestas (orchestrated by the
new Grand Anti-imperialist Alliance) protesting acts of foreign violence – such
as the shooting of eleven Chinese protestors by British-led constables in
Shanghai on 30 May 1925. Enlisted Nationalist soldiers were educated by
four-hour lectures on the past and present oppression of imperialism: ‘England
imports opium into China’, ran the official script for these talks. ‘The
British bombarded Canton, demanded indemnity and, moreover, occupied and still
occupy Hong Kong.’40
‘With their thirteen million square miles of colonies, the British imperialists
are the leaders of world imperialism’, exclaimed a party weekly in 1930.
‘They’ve oppressed every small race to death . . . Because of British
imperialism, our nation is neither free nor equal . . . if you want proof, just
remember how the British have invaded us for the last eighty years . . . Let us
lift the curtain on evil British imperialism, and reveal its viciousness.’41
Yet however hard Nationalist China’s
pedagogues tried to turn the Opium War into a monument to China’s victimization
by the West, the old self-disgust of earlier patriots crept back in. Reminders
of British wickedness were accompanied by references to the war’s ‘failures’
and ‘defeats’, caused by the ‘arrogance’, ‘stupidity’ and ‘indecision’ of the
Qing government, by the ‘slumbering, ancient, declining’ and ‘undisciplined’
masses, and by the treachery of the ‘bad merchants’. ‘We weren’t ready,’ one
1936 analysis of the war concluded, ‘we were divided . . . we were suspicious
of each other . . . the responsibility lies, for the most part, on our
shoulders . . . the Opium War is more useful than harmful to us – it can
transform our thinking and correct our mistakes.’42
‘It marked the beginning of our period of transformation and enlightenment’,
agreed Drug Prohibition Monthly in the same year. ‘English imperialism
was the induction injection for the reform of Chinese society.’43
‘European and American imperialists invaded China,’ an article commemorating
the centenary of the war lamented, ‘but the Chinese people were responsible for
their own weakness – we can’t blame other people.’44
In 1943, Chiang Kai-shek completed his own
judgement of the Opium War, denouncing in his book-length manifesto China’s
Destiny the ‘heartbreaking’ and ‘limitless evil effects’ of the country’s
‘First National Humiliation’, which ‘cut off the lifeblood of the state’ and
‘threatened our people’s chance of survival.’45
Throwing off the enslavement of the Unequal Treaties was ‘the most important
objective of the Chinese Nationalist Revolution.’46
In these same pages, though, he also made plain his contempt for the
‘stupidity’ of the Manchus and for the ‘decadent habits and evil practices’ of
the ordinary people. ‘The country was subjected only because it had subjected
itself . . . Must we not tremble? Must we not be ashamed and disturbed?’47
(His Western-educated wife, Song Meiling, took care to ensure that the
government did not translate her husband’s great work into English, for fear
that its anti-Western message would alienate the Americans and British from
whom the Nationalists desperately needed military aid to fight the Japanese.48)
Coexisting with this still ambivalent vision
of the Opium War was a set of similarly undecided attitudes to opium itself. In
Nationalist declarations, opium was legally and morally beyond the pale: in
1928, Chiang’s new government announced a ‘total prohibition’ (juedui jinyan).
Unofficially, however, the Nationalists – like the warlord regimes they fought
through the 1920s and 1930s – needed the opium trade for revenue. Between 1927
and 1937, the Nationalist government strove (often with surprising success,
given appalling obstacles such as Japanese invasion and worldwide depression)
to transform an impoverished, fragmented country into a modern unified state:
creating national ministries, commissions, academies; building roads, railways,
industries, dams.49
In the absence of crucial
resources such as income tax, opium duties would have to do instead. For the
creative tax-collector – and Republican China was full of them – there was a
wealth of surcharges to be extracted from opium: in duties on the drug itself
(plus its transport and retail); and licences to sell and smoke it. The state
even maintained a monopoly on opium-addiction cures.50
The citizens of the republic dodged these taxes with comparable ingenuity: one
filial individual smuggled opium between west and east China by concealing it
not just inside his father’s coffin, but inside his father’s skull inside the
coffin.51
In 1928, drug revenues helped keep the
country’s armies – at a total of 2.2 million, the largest in the world (costing
$800 million a year) – standing. A 1931 cartoon entitled ‘Shanghai business’
pictured three figures: to left and right two dwarfs labelled ‘industry’ looked
skyward at the towering colossus between them – Opium. In 1933, the size of the
opium traffic in China was estimated at $2 billion annually (5.2 per cent of
the country’s gross domestic product). In many regions and contexts, opium was
as good as, if not better than, money, and an essential commercial and social
lubricant – ‘light the lamps’ was standard Chinese for ‘let’s talk business’;
opium pipes were offered at weddings as conventionally as wine. The country literally
reeked of the stuff, thanks to the vats of the drug publicly boiled in the
streets of towns and cities: by the 1930s, China may have had as many as 50
million smokers (around 9 per cent of the population).52
Through the 1920s, concerned civilians
organized themselves into a National Anti-Opium Association, launching special
Anti-Opium Days, then Anti-Opium Weeks, and a monthly periodical Drug
Prohibition, on whose covers righteous, muscular Chinese thwacked and
thumped hideous tar-black monsters named Opium. (Four and a half million
signatures were collected for anti-opium petitions in 1924 alone.) ‘Why aren’t
our nation’s merchants content with engaging in legitimate business
activities?’ the Association wanted to know in 1927. ‘Why are they so willing
to serve as the slaves of foreigners? As the running dogs of warlords? As those
who injure both the people and the nation? . . . They curry favour with
imperialists and warlords, and entice our male and female countrymen to smoke
opium with devastating consequences.’53
In the meantime, the Nationalist government identified offices for collecting
opium tax as ‘opium suppression bureaus’, while opium merchant guilds could be
euphemistically labelled ‘medicinal merchants’ friendship associations’.54
‘Millions have been raised out of opium’, remarked the International Anti-Opium
Association in 1928. ‘Nationalist Government monopolies exist in every large
centre, and are so efficiently organised that enormous revenues result. And
although the evil of the so-called “Opium Wars” has invariably been referred to
on every Nationalist platform and in every proletarian demonstration, the
Government is raising the very last cent out of the cultivation and use of
opium.’55
Not for nothing did the Cantonese have the saying, ‘Opium addiction is easy to
cure; opium tax addiction far harder.’56
Anti-opium activists reviled the government’s
pragmatic efforts to generate useful, state-building money out of the drug: ‘As
we look around at the conditions within China, opium is everywhere, how
sickening! HOW SICKENING! We truly hope that the government authorities will .
. . completely prohibit opium, and earnestly eradicate it in order to save the
tarnished reputation of our country and forever consolidate the foundation of
this nation.’57
The government gave earnest public pledges that it ‘will absolutely not derive
one copper from opium revenue. If anything of this sort is suspected . . . we
can regard this government as bankrupt and place no confidence in it.’58
‘If we want to save China,’ Chiang Kai-shek added, ‘we must begin with
prohibiting opium, and that prohibition must begin with the highest echelons of
the leadership . . . Prohibit the poison if you want to save the country, the
people, yourself, your sons and grand-sons.’59
‘The opium evil’, he explained elsewhere, ‘constitutes a greater menace to the
nation than foreign aggression, because the former leads to self-degeneration
and self-suicide, whereas the latter is invited by mutual dissension, weakness
and degeneracy.’60
In private, the regime did its best to silence inconvenient opponents by
frightening off their sponsors, by smearing them with accusations of
drug-smuggling, by sending them death threats; or simply by planting bombs in
their houses. In 1931, the government was buffeted by one of its biggest drug
scandals, when a group of Shanghai constables intercepted an opium shipment
that a company of Nationalist soldiers were busy unloading. The men of the law
were promptly taken prisoner until the precious drug had found its way to its
gangland destination.61
In 1934, the government began to execute
relapsed users of opiates, informing opium-smokers that they would ‘be shot
without further ceremony’ if they returned to the habit after treatment. In
1936, nine such individuals were paraded through the streets of Xi’an then
killed in front of thousands of spectators.62
‘Opium is good for curing minor sickness, for dealing with boredom, and for
helping you think’, one of Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘opium-suppression’ officials
flagrantly contradicted government policy in 1940. ‘Just light a pipe and you
will be happy . . . your mind will open like a flower and you will be able to
clearly distinguish things.’63
‘In the country all that one can see is poppy growing everywhere,’ observed a
newspaper in 1932, ‘in the cities there are opium dens along every street,
government offices openly collect taxes on opium, and citizens openly smoke it
. . . the whole of China depends upon opium . . . This condition is far more
lamentable than the Opium Prohibition Memorial Day.’64
In the early 1940s, the north-eastern city of
Mukden – the old Manchu capital – retained at least a touch of its old dynastic
grandeur. In 1625, when the Qing were still only aspiring rulers of China, they
had built themselves there a miniature replica of the Forbidden City (a
diminutive seventeen acres, to the original’s hundred and seventy) in which to
perfect their practice of imperial rituals. Outside its palace complex, though,
Mukden was heavily marked by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. In 1942, the
north-eastern edge of the city (just outside a thick, crenellated wall of Ming
vintage) had acquired a prisoner-of-war camp, housing around 1,200 American,
British, Dutch and Australian soldiers taken since the fall of Singapore;
almost 40 per cent of them would be dead of malnutrition and ill-treatment by
the time of the Japanese surrender. Along the grey streets of the city itself,
a scattering of smarter establishments – newly, attractively spruced up in red
and white paint – might have stood out. Their fronts proclaimed they were
selling a mysterious substance called ‘Official Paste’ – opium. Elsewhere, a
casual observer might have spotted a number of shacks – perhaps 200 – receiving
dozens of visitors per day. These were, an eyewitness from 1931 had noted,
‘dope huts . . . In a single shop, about forty to fifty persons come to receive
[morphine] injections every day’.65
By 1942, the Second World War was going badly
for Chiang Kai-shek and his government. In 1937, a Japanese move against
Shanghai and Nanjing had driven the Nationalists from their seat of power on
the east coast. As Chiang and his followers retreated into the hinterland, his
armies destroyed Yellow River dykes to halt the Japanese advance – an act that
caused at least half a million civilian deaths by drowning and disease. By the
close of that year, Chiang had lost his industrial base and, four long years
before the Americans joined the war effort, began struggling to reconstruct his
regime in impoverished Sichuan. But as the Nationalists tried to build roads
and rationalize taxes, they also found time to fight a new war of words on
opium. In 1938, Madame Chiang Kai-shek accused the Japanese of a ‘diabolically
cunning’ plot to ‘drench’ China with opium, with a view to ‘demoralising the
people until they were physically unfit to defend their country, and mentally
and morally so depraved that they could easily be bought and bribed with drugs
to act as spies when the time came in order that their craving might be
satisfied.’66
‘The Japanese are many times worse than the British ever were!’ agreed a
journalist two years later. ‘Even at the time of the Opium War, some Britons
criticized it, like true English gentlemen. The Japanese, by contrast, are
trying to poison our people, to annihilate our race.’67
Foreign correspondents in China through the 1930s denounced the ‘ash heap of
Mukden’, littered with moribund drug fiends. The Japanese occupation government
apparently encouraged opium use in Beijing by telling its police to turn a
blind eye to proliferating dens in the former capital. Unpassported Korean and
Japanese gangsters were, these same observers noted, busily peddling opium and
heroin ‘to the degradation of thousands of Chinese . . . sowing seeds of
bitterness and hatred, which it will take years to eradicate.’68
The horror of the Japanese invasion and
allegations of Japanese attempts to stupefy the country with opiates brought a
new resonance to the imperialist conspiracy theories spun about the Opium War.
(Whether or not Japanese-controlled regimes cynically pushed drugs to the
Chinese to break their spirit of resistance, they certainly profited from them.
The puppet state of Manchukuo in the north-east drew a sixth of its revenue
from opium sales and exports.69)
But the occupying Japanese and their Chinese collaborators also made use of the
Opium War as a rhetorical tool to distract attention away from Japanese
atrocities. In August 1939, by which point millions of Chinese had been killed
or wounded in the war with Japan, Beijing’s puppet government convened ‘Down
With Britain’ rallies against the Opium War, arguing that they were merely
giving an outlet to Chinese outrage that ‘had been boiling since the Opium
War’.70
Stop fighting Japan, one Pan-Asianist editorial urged its Chinese readers the
following year. ‘Europe’s disarray is Asia’s opportunity . . . We’ve seized the
opportunity for revenge. We should expunge the bloody humiliation [of the Opium
War] with all determination! . . . We must recognize our true enemies and kill
them with all our strength. Every Chinese person has the responsibility to
commemorate the centenary of the Opium War and to remember that Asia is for the
Asians!’71
Meanwhile, occupied Shanghai – the headquarters of the Chinese film industry –
planned an all-star-cast blockbuster about the war to ‘encourage all Chinese
people to oppose Britain and America.’72
Between 1925 and 1926, a tall, confident
figure with a mop of black, swept-back hair sat in the director’s chair of the
newly reorganized Propaganda Bureau of the Nationalist Party, combing piles of
newspapers for deviations from party orthodoxy. Mao Zedong did not have long in
the job. Within another two years, there would be no place for a Communist like
him anywhere in the Nationalist Party organization. On 12 April 1927, after
months of secret negotiations with Shanghai’s wealthiest financiers and their
private underworld enforcers, the Green Gang, Chiang Kai-shek set an armed
force of some 1,000 gangsters at the city’s labour unions, the hubs of
Communist activity; 100 unionists were gunned down at a single protest rally
alone. Forces rallied by the Communists were similarly massacred in Changsha,
Wuhan, Nanchang and, finally, Canton, where leftists were quickly identified by
the dye marks left round their necks by their red kerchiefs and drowned in
bundles of ten or twelve in the river by the city.
Over the next two decades, the civil conflict
between the Nationalist and Communist Parties would dominate political and
military life in China – sometimes to the extent even of sidelining the war
with Japan. The Japanese invasion was, Chiang Kai-shek declared in the early
1930s, merely ‘external . . . like a gradually festering ulcer on the skin. The
[Communist] bandit disturbance is internal. It is . . . a disorder of the
heart. Because this internal disease has not been eliminated, the external
disorder cannot be cured.’73
Violence would climax in the final stages of the civil war between 1945 and
1949, during which hundreds of thousands of civilians would perish; perhaps
650,000 died of starvation in the Communist siege of a single north-eastern
city alone.
Despite their vicious political rivalries,
China’s new political parties concurred perfectly on how China was to be
manipulated into an effective nation-state: through ideological discipline and
unity. As Propaganda Chief Mao barked in 1925, ‘either step right, into the
counter-revolutionary faction, or step left, into the revolutionary faction . .
. There is no third route . . . Anyone who offers support for
counter-revolutionary actions . . . shall be counted as our enemy.’74
And their populist rhetoric notwithstanding,
at base both held similarly dismissive views of the Chinese people, and of
their need for reprogramming with one-party nationalism. China, the Nationalist
Party’s first director of propaganda judged in 1925, was a ‘blank sheet of
paper. Colour it green, and it is green; colour it yellow and it is yellow.’ Mao
Zedong, his successor, agreed: the Chinese, he believed, were ‘poor and blank.
A clean sheet of paper has no blotches and so the newest and most beautiful
words can be written on it.’75
Although, after 1949, the victorious CCP
would expend much energy in excoriating the ‘reactionary idealist, mechanical
materialist, feudal, comprador, fascist ideology’ of their old Nationalist
enemies, both parties shared almost identical views of China’s modern history.76
The job of demonizing the Opium War was completed by the Communists, once most
of the early work had been done for them by the Nationalists’ official history
industry. Many elements in the Communist version plagiarized earlier
Nationalist models, portraying the war as the start of the plot by foreign
imperialism (‘the foremost and most ferocious enemy of the Chinese people’) to
‘impoverish . . . suppress . . . and poison the minds of the Chinese people’,
leaving them ‘hungry and cold’.77
But once Mao was done with it (going back to it in at least fifteen separate
essays), the Opium War was no longer just a turning point in modern Chinese
history; it was its inaugural event: ‘the first lesson’ of the Chinese
revolution, and the start of a century of capitalist-imperialist oppression.78
China’s modern history now became, quite simply, ‘a history of struggle by the
indomitable Chinese people against imperialism and its running dogs’; the Opium
War – this strange, ambivalent story of collaboration and civil war – became
the ‘people’s unrelenting and heroic struggle’, ‘a national war’ against
imperialism.79
‘For a whole hundred years,’ a 1951 history recycled Mao’s views, ‘imperialism
trampled our Chinese people underfoot. After 1842, China sank into a tragic
state of slavery, and was transformed into a semi-colony by every imperialist
country. The founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, by contrast, is the
most glorious achievement of this century; our will has been forged by the
painful wound of suffering.’80
The point of remembering past bitterness was
to remind the populace to savour the sweetness of the Communist present – even
as the government itself caused tens of millions of deaths in man-made famines,
in purges of counter-revolutionaries and in the civil war manufactured by Mao’s
Cultural Revolution. ‘A young Chinese person in new China’, explained a 1950
textbook in the preamble to its Opium War chapter, ‘must have a basic
understanding of modern history . . . and of the particular principles that
governed the revolution . . . We must understand what our predecessors have
suffered to establish the People’s Republic so we love the motherland all the
more, so we can contribute everything we have to the future of the motherland .
. . We have to understand why Mao’s thought is the only truth able to point out
the way to revolutionary victory.’81
By insisting on the malevolence of China’s foreign antagonists, Mao’s Communist
Party legitimized its own use of violence, against both imperialists and their
alleged Chinese allies (Nationalists, capitalists, landlords and anyone
suspected of sympathizing with them): ‘In the face of such enemies’, Mao
dictated, ‘the Chinese revolution cannot be other than protracted and ruthless
. . . In the face of such enemies, the principal means or form of the Chinese
revolution must be armed struggle.’82
But Mao was as willing to profit from opium
as the next warlord – even though he had officially banned opium production in
Communist-controlled areas in 1939, asserting that it ‘sickens the country and
harms the people’.83
Two years earlier, the Communists’ finances – stretched by Mao’s ambitions to
expand militarily through the north-western province in which they had settled
in 1935 – had briefly stabilized. That year, Chiang Kai-shek had called a
second United Front – this time against the Japanese. Over the next four years,
the Communist economy survived on annual handouts from the Nationalists and the
Soviet Union.84
After 1941, however, when relations between the two parties deteriorated back
into effective civil war, the Nationalists severed their funding and blockaded
the edges of the Communist zone, preventing essential imports from getting in.
By the end of the year, the region’s finances were millions of Nationalist
dollars in the red.85
For decades, Communist propaganda held that
the Maoists worked their way out of their predicament through frugality and
popular democracy (by introducing rent reduction and cooperative farming
practices), until a historian called Chen Yung-fa noticed at the end of the
1980s that account books for the period were scattered with references to a ‘special
product’ that rescued the Communists from their trade deficit of the early
1940s and that, by 1945, was generating more than 40 per cent of the state’s
budget. A little more detective work revealed that this was opium, processed in
‘Special Factories’ and transported south and west to generate export revenue
for Communist armies. (‘Since opium entered China’, a Communist editorial of
1941 explained, ‘it has become the greatest source of harm to the Chinese
people, inseparable from imperialist invasion . . . Imperialism has used opium
to enslave and oppress the Chinese people. As the Chinese people have become
ever weaker, ever poorer, opium has played a most detestable and poisonous
destructive role.’86)
But in 1945, as an American mission flew in to inspect Mao’s kingdom, it found
itself gazing over nothing more controversial than swaying fields of sorghum
and wheat. The opium poppies had been uprooted just in time to maintain – for
the next forty years at least – the propriety of the Chinese Communist wartime
image.
After 1949, the new People’s Republic
declared a total rupture with the corruption and hypocrisy of Chiang Kai-shek’s
Nationalists and their opium policy. ‘It has been more than a century since
opium was forcibly imported into China by the imperialists’, ran a General
Order for Opium Suppression. ‘Due to the reactionary rule and the decadent
lifestyle of the feudal bureaucrats, compradors, and warlords, not only was
opium not suppressed, but we were forced to cultivate it . . . Now that the
people have been liberated, the suppression of opium and other narcotics is
specifically stipulated to protect people’s health, to cure addiction, and to
accelerate production.’87
In mass rallies and public trials, smokers were rehabilitated; thousands of
pounds of opium were publicly burned;
traffickers were imprisoned, dispatched to labour camps or executed. Only
Western fellow travellers to Communism were welcome in China; foreign
businessmen – seen as hangovers of the bad old Unequal Treaty days (the
treaties themselves had been mostly revoked in the Second World War) – were
harassed and even imprisoned, and their assets nationalized.
Popular enthusiasm could still have its old
limits, though. Local government in the north-east remarked in the early 1950s
that lecturing on ‘the history of the Opium Wars or the opium policy of the
imperialists was not an effective way to reach the masses.’88
The Opium War -Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China by Julia Lovell
