The China Drug Trade

An Assessment of Responsibility
By Brian Hammer, People’s News Agency

The two Opium Wars between China and Britain in the mid 1800's powers effectively ended Chinese sovereignty and began its slide into subservience to Western and then Japanese powers. One of the instruments used to undermine Chinese sovereignty was the addictive drug opium. Using Murphey’s East Asia: A New History as the starting point, this paper will analyze the nature and extent of the opium trade with a view to assessing final responsibility for it and thus make the relation between commerce, colonization, and drug use more accessible.

Murphey is quite clear in attributing responsibility for the growth of opium use to the Chinese. Prior to Western involvement, it had been used medicinally in China but became a recreational drug in the late 1700s. “Chinese addicts and their merchants and middlemen created the market for imported opium,” and even though the government banned it, profits of the trade were high so it continued. “No foreign pressures were necessary.” “Westerners ... merely delivered it to Chinese smugglers on the coast, who then distributed it throughout the country through a vast network of dealers. It was in short a Chinese problem, although foreign traders can hardly be exonerated.” (1, italics added)

Opium use had a long history in China. Originally utilized for nine centuries medicinally, it began to be used for pleasure in the mid 1600s when mixed by the Spanish with tobacco (2). The first anti-opium edict, issued in 1729 when foreign imports totalled 200 chests, failed to stem the trade, which grew to over 4,000 chests annually in 1790; 5,000 chests in 1820; 16,000 chests in 1830; 20,000 chests in 1838, and 70,000 chests in 1858. (3) The Chinese emperor, fed up with this contraband and its harmful effects on Chinese health and finances, acting through his official Lin Zexu seized and destroyed 20,000
chests of unsold opium on British ships just below Canton in 1839. (3) In retaliation, the British government seized Chinese ports and tribute junks on the Yangtsze and bombarded Canton. Victorious militarily, Britain acquired “the island of Hongkong; an indemnity of 21 million dollars, and Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai were opened up as ‘treaty ports’ for the importation of opium” and other British trade in the Treaty of Nanjing (1842). (3) As the Chinese government continued to resist, another war followed, the British victory and Treaty of Tientsin (1858) requiring China pay an indemnity of three million dollars and open five more treaty ports, the sale of opium
legalized in 1858. (3)

Though Chinese addicts, smugglers, and corrupt officials helped make the opium trade possible, any final determination about responsibility for drugging China requires a more detailed view of British trade imperatives. During the 1700s, Chinese, tea, porcelain and silk were in great demand in the West. China, however, wanted little offered in return, so Britain developed an unfavorable trade imbalance. The British remedied this by exporting raw cotton and opium from their colony India to China, making them able to finance purchases of Chinese products without a loss. (4)

The drug trade was essential to Britain in two ways. First, it solved the fiscal crisis accompanying the British conquest of Bengal, “providing from six to fifteen percent of British India’s tax revenues during the 19th Century”. (2) Second, in the larger picture opium buttressed one plank of the triangular British global trade system, the financial aspect of its ascendency as a global power.

    Trade figures for the 1820s, for example, show that the triangular trade was large and well balanced: 22 million pounds sterling worth of Indian opium and cotton to China; next, 20 million pounds worth of Chinese tea to Britain; and, then, 24 million pounds of British textiles and machinery back to India. (2)

Originally a luxury and medicinal good characterized by low demand and supply, the British elevated opium to commodity status. (2) When they conquered Bengal in 1764, a syndicate of Indian merchants in Patna controlled the business, making advance purchases from Indian peasant farmers and selling the finished product to Dutch, British and French merchants. (2) The British took control of the Bengal business in 1773 when the British Governor-General of Bengal made opium sales a British monopoly. (2) The British East India Company had “exclusive right to purchase opium from Bengal’s farmers and auction it for export”. Since the drug was illegal in China, however, Company ships could not load opium, which was left to private merchants, mainly Armenian until 1819 and then British, who bid for the drug at Company auctions in Calcutta. (5, 2)

British merchants consolidated their control of the trade in 1797, eliminating local purchasing agents in favor of a system of direct collection. This lasted over a century, involving first the Company and then the colonial state, who “controlled opium cultivation, processing, and export”. At its late 1800s peak, the enterprise had “over a million registered farmers growing poppy plants exclusively for the company on some 500,000 acres of prime land”. (2) British personnel directed some 2000 Indian agents in extending credit and collecting opium, selling it to private merchants who “bribed Canton’s mandarins and smuggled the chests into southern China”. (2) The scale and mode of operations shows British merchants and later the colonial state had a heavy investment in its immense profitability and continued success.

The British drug trade was threatened, however, when Malwa opium grown north of Bombay and sold to private traders, notably Portuguese, captured 40 percent of the China market by 1811. (5, 2) Company directors then decided on unlimited Bengal production, by 1841 doubling it to 176,000 acres. (5, 2) Company regulation loosened in the 1820s, however, collapsing in 1834 when the Company lost its charter and opening the field to American and British sea captains. Thereafter, “China’s opium imports increased nearly ten fold — from 270 tons in 1820 to 2,558 tons twenty years later. Opium addiction spread rapidly, reaching some three million Chinese addicts by the 1830s.” (2) From 1773 to 1858, Indian opium exports to China rose from 75 to 4,810 tons (2)—a multiple of about 64 and an average increase of about 75 percent yearly.

The Chinese emperor’s efforts to stamp out the poison in the face of smuggling and corrupt officials threatened opium profits and an integral part of Britain’s great trade triangle. Britain consequently undertook military action, but in a more graphic way than mentioned thus far. A Rev. John Liggins pamphlet from the time reports on the bombardment of Canton as follows:

    As a specimen of how both wars were carried on, we quote the following from an English writer: “Field pieces loaded with grape were planted at the end of long, narrow streets crowded with innocent men, women and children, to mow them down like grass till the gutters flowed with their blood.” In one scene of carnage, the Times correspondent recorded that half an army of 10,000 men were in ten minutes destroyed by the sword, or forced into the broad river. (3)

Britain finally forced legalization of opium in China in 1858 after the Second Opium War (1856-1858). “In negotiations over the tariff provisions of this new treaty that ended the war, the British emissary Lord Elgin forced the Chinese to legalize opium imports.” (2) Defeated again, the Chinese government undertook a policy of domestic drug production to decrease revenue loss inflicted on the country previously by the Bengal and Malwa monopolies.

In sum, the thesis that Westerners “merely delivered” drugs to eager elements of the Chinese population does not hold up well under scrutiny. Rather, it was non-Chinese, mainly the British, who commercialized the trade, utilized smugglers, attacked China twice, and finally forced legalization of the drug, Malwa operations probably playing a secondary role. Corruptible Chinese officials and Chinese addicts did provide a market, but this market would never have surpassed luxury item status were it not for the non - Chinese who created the supply: Without supply, demand most likely would have remained empty and unfulfilled to the extent it was not created by the supply in the first place. Further, the Chinese government did all it could to stop the trade, unlike the British government, who relied on it and acted aggressively to promote it. To suggest British merchants were morally exempt market agents is also implausible. “Using its full military and mercantile power, Britain played a central role in making China a lucrative drug market.” (2) Both British merchants and the British government had a clear and compelling investment in the trade. Full Chinese responsibility for their drug culture, in turn, probably would have required them to grow their own poppy fields, not possible until it was forced on the emperor. In market terms responsibility may have been equal, but in terms of sovereignty, it was the British who were accountable, aggressively violating Chinese sovereignty. Rather than equal, responsibility seems more accurately allocated as one part Chinese, three parts non-Chinese, with the British leading the way.

Posted by proutist-universal on July 9, 2005 4:24 PM
Comments
Your Friend's Email Address:


Your Email Address:


Message (optional):