History, for the most part, paints a picture of late 19th-century
China as an
empire in decline. Plagued by the widespread use of opium, the government and
military were weak, the treasury was dwindling and the people were powerless to
turn it around.
But the 1908 photo that Joyce Madancy chose for the cover of her new book tells a different story.
The story is not in the piles of opium and related paraphernalia
waiting to be burned at an opium suppression rally. Rather, it is in the
slightly fuzzy background, where a large and diverse crowd of Chinese stands. The
photo, according to the associate professor of history, shows that political
participation in the opium suppression movement revealed not only a stronger
state than expected but also a new emphasis on popular opinion in Chinese
politics.
Madancy's book, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The
Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s (Harvard
University Press) tells the story of vast official and popular participation in a nationwide campaign to eliminate the sale, smoking, and
importation of opium in China in the early 20th century.
“When the Opium War happened, China
was helpless in the face of western imperialism,” she said. “But, as we
can see in this case, right as the imperial system is supposedly
dying, the Chinese launched this incredibly complex movement in which the whole
country is organized against opium.”
While the campaign was not totally successful, it was very well
organized, Madancy says. Authorities were issuing licenses with photographs, people
were registering as addicts to get treatment, and newspapers devoted solely to
the suppression campaign reported extensively on statistics and investigations.
Madancy's book focuses on the province
of Fujian, where the leader of the
campaign was the great grandson of Commissioner Lin Zexu, who seized and destroyed 20,000 chests of British opium and
provoked the infamous Opium War in 1839. Lin, and later his great grandson, Lin
Bingzhang,
became icons of China's
efforts to rid itself of opium against overwhelming odds. Both men are
memorialized in China;
the elder one even has a statue in New York City's
Chinatown.
In the 1880's, at the peak
of China's opium use, the country
was consuming an estimated 1.1 million pounds of the drug per year, Madancy
said.
“When people talk about opium in China
they generally think about the opium war and they see opium as something that
was foisted on the Chinese. It becomes symbolic of Chinese weakness in a number
of ways, socially, politically, economically,” Madancy said. “What I'm looking
at is a
well-organized and comprehensive
attempt by the Chinese to actually get rid of opium on their
own.”
Madancy, at Union
since 1995, earned her Ph.D. from the University
of Michigan. She specializes in
East Asian history. Her research has been supported by a number of grants
including post-doctoral research fellowship and a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
Fellowship in Chinese Studies from the American Council of Learned Societies, a
Humanities Fund Research Grant from Union
College, and grants from the University
of Michigan.
