Chinese and Opium Under the Republic: Worse Than Floods and Wild Beasts

Examines China's attempts to control the opium economy in the early twentieth century.

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.