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Modern China and Opium
An intriguing historical examination of China's widespread opium epidemic
The Chinese and Opium under the Republic
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.
The Sinosphere and Beyond
The history of East Asia can be most productively studied through a transnational, translingual, and transcultural approach to the region. In The Sinosphere and Beyond, twenty-six leading and emerging scholars use such approaches in rich clusters of essays on Historiography, Sino-Japanese Encounters, Law and Justice, Politics, Art, Literature, and Translation. Each essay builds on the legacy of Joshua Fogel, whose scholarship defined the contours of the Sinosphere in the Western world and beyond. The collection will be of interest to scholars and students with specific research concerns within these broader rubrics: from the towering progenitors of Japanese Sinology to gendered, diplomatic, and cultural dimensions of Sino-Japanese encounters; from Sinitic poetry to legal culture and revolutionary life; from art commerce and levels of literary expression to the quandaries of translation. In addition to offering a broad range of case studies, the volume is testimony to the methodological importance of a dynamic intra- and transregional approach for an understanding of the layered history of East Asia.
Peasants without the Party
Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific. The leading specialist on China's twentieth century peasant resistance reexamines, in bold and original ways, the question: Was the Chinese peasantry a revolutionary force? Where most scholarly attention has focused on Communist-led peasant movements, Bianco's story is one of peasant thought and action largely unmediated by modern political parties. This volume pays particular attention to the first half of the twentieth century when peasant-based conflict, ranging from tax and food protests to secret society conflicts, opium struggles, inter-communal conflicts, and tenant protests over rent, was central to nationwide revolutionary processes.
Killer High
In Killer High, Peter Andreas tells the story of war from antiquity to the modern age through the lens of six psychoactive drugs: alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, opium, amphetamines, and cocaine. Armed conflict has become progressively more "drugged" with the global spread of these mind-altering substances. From ancient brews and battles to meth and modern warfare, drugs and war have grown up together and become addicted to each other. By looking back not just years and decades but centuries, Andreas reveals that the drugs-conflict nexus is actually an old story, and that powerful states have been its biggest beneficiaries.
The Compelling Ideal
In this groundbreaking volume, based on extensive research in Chinese archives and libraries, Jan Kiely explores the pre-Communist origins of the process of systematic thought reform or reformation (ganhua) that evolved into a key component of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary restructuring of Chinese society. Focusing on ganhua as it was employed in China’s prison system, Kiely’s thought-provoking work brings the history of this critical phenomenon to life through the stories of individuals who conceptualized, implemented, and experienced it, and he details how these techniques were subsequently adapted for broader social and political use.
Opium Regimes
Opium Regimes draws on a range of research to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation, but involved Chinese merchants and state agents, and Japanese imperial agents as well.
Opium, State, and Society
Surprisingly little has been written about the complicated relationship between opium and China and its people. Opium, State, and Society goes a long way toward illuminating this relationship in the Republican period, when all levels of Chinese society--from peasants to school teachers, merchants, warlords, and ministers of finance--were physically or economically dependent on the drug. The centerpiece of this study is an investigation of the symbiotic relationship that evolved between opium and the Guomindang's rise to power in the years 1924-1937. Despite attempts to find other sources of revenue, the Guomindang became increasingly addicted to the tax monies derived from the drug trade prior to the war with Japan. Based solidly on a previously untapped reservoir of archival sources from the People's Republic and Taiwan, this work critically analyzes the complex realities of a government policy that vacillated between prohibition and legalization, and ultimately sought to curtail the cultivation, sale, and consumption of opium through a government monopoly.
Beyond Suffering
China was afflicted by a brutal succession of conflicts through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet there has never been clear understanding of how wartime suffering has defined the nation and shaped its people. In Beyond Suffering, a distinguished group of historians of modern China look beyond the geopolitical aspects of war to explore its social, institutional, and cultural dimensions. The chapters in Part 1, “Society at War,” reveal how militarization and war can both structure and destabilize society, while those in Part 2, “Institutional Engagement,” show how institutions and the people they represent can become pawns in larger power struggles. Lastly, Part 3, “Memory and Representation,” examines the various media, monuments, and social controls by which war has been memorialized. Based on fragmented accounts of poorly understood incidents, Beyond Suffering pieces together a fuller picture of the multiple fronts on which wars in modern China have been fought, experienced, and remembered.
Education and Modernity in Colonial Punjab
This book explores the localisation of modernity in late colonial India. As a case study, it focuses on the hitherto untold colonial history of Khalsa College, Amritsar, a pioneering and highly influential educational institution founded in the British Indian province of Punjab in 1892 by the religious minority community of the Sikhs. Addressing topics such as politics, religion, rural development, militarism or physical education, the study shows how Sikh educationalists and activists made use of and ‘localised’ communal, imperial, national and transnational discourses and knowledge. Their modernist visions and schemes transcended both imperialist and mainstream nationalist frameworks and networks. In its quest to educate the modern Sikh – scientific, practical, disciplined and physically fit – the college navigated between very local and global claims, opportunities and contingencies, mirroring modernity’s ambivalent simultaneity of universalism and particularism.
