The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia

The Tarnished Crusades
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
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