Suppressing Opium and “Reforming” Minorities: Antidrug Campaigns in Ethnic Communities in the Early People’s Republic of China

In China, the term minority nationalities is used to refer to all ethnic groups that are not Han Chinese. According to the 2000 census, a total of 55 minority nationalities numbered in total 106 million people, or 8.4 percent of the total population in the mainland (Zhu 2001). However, the size and composition of minority nationality populations in China is extremely heterogeneous. In terms of population, based on the 1990 census, the smallest, the Lhoba, numbered only 2,312, whereas the most populous, the Zhuang, were 15.5 million strong (National Statistics Bureau 2000: 38). Socially and culturally speaking, the differences among the minority nationalities are large: Some are hunter-gatherers or slash-and-burn cultivators, whereas others are highly sinicized Chinese-speaking groups like the Hui and the contemporary Manchu. Minority nationalities are spread all over China, and 90 percent of them live in mountainous areas (Li 1994: 72). Because of this geographic distribution, isolated minority areas became safe havens for poppy planting and opium production, especially after the opium suppression campaign of 1906–1911 by the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). In most cases, opium was introduced into minority communities in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Opium’s effects on minority communities have varied considerably. Generally speaking, there have been three possible types of effects. First, members of some minorities have become addicted to opium but relied on others to obtain the opium supply. Second, members of other minority groups have acted mainly as poppy cultivators and raw opium suppliers but have been less involved in consumption and trafficking. Last, members of yet other minority groups have become involved not only in poppy planting but also in opium trafficking and consumption. Opium has thus come to play an important role in a minority’s social and economic lives in those areas affected by the drug. By exploring how antidrug campaigns were carried out in the Jiayin Erlunchun community in northeast China and the Liangshan Yi and Aba Tibetan areas in southwest China, I will explore all three types of the effects of drugs on minority communities up to the late 1950s. The People’s Republic of China was established in 1949. To Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists, drugs were remnants of capitalist and feudal culture and had no place in the new China to which they looked forward.