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Jack Blocker
History, Huron College, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6G 1H3 Canada
(519) 438-7224, ext. 249 /Fax (519) 438-3938

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 10:37:12 -0800
From: "Robert W. Cherny" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-Net Gilded Age and Progressive Era List <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: RVW:  Sweeten on Lodwick, _Crusaders Against Opium_

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (July, 1998)

Kathleen L. Lodwick.  _Crusaders Against Opium: Protestant
Missionaries in China, 1874-1917_.  Lexington: The University of
Kentucky Press, 1996. xiii + 218 pp.  Maps, illustrations, appendix,
notes, bibliography, and index.  $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8131-1924-3

Reviewed for H-Asia by Alan Sweeten <[log in to unmask]>, California
State University, Stanislaus

                         "Jesus Opium"

Tea, silk, porcelain, and opium: to many Westerners these items are
virtually synonymous with China.  Many Chinese of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, strongly
associated opium with the West.  Professor Kathleen Lodwick makes
this eminently clear while providing a fine overview of the West's
introduction of opium to China and pioneering efforts by Protestant
missionaries (mostly British) to eliminate trade in the substance.
Missionaries' success came not in getting the Chinese to stop using
the drug but in publicizing opium's addictive and pernicious
effects.  Gradually, missionaries made the British public aware of
the drug's evil side and helped sway the British government to
terminate its participation in the trade.  British's actions came,
coincidentally, at a time of emerging Chinese nationalism, but it
was surprisingly energetic and capable late Qing officials who acted
to curtail the domestic production of opium.  They rather than
nationalists created an opportunity for the Chinese to gain British
agreement to stop growing opium in India for sale in China.  The
author provides thorough coverage through the early twentieth
century although she leaves one wondering if Chinese anti-opium
successes continued. In fact, Chinese efforts at opium suppression
went up in smoke during the fragmented and chaotic warlord period.

Material in this book is well organized and neatly presented.  Early
chapters are devoted to background information about opium, its
introduction to China, amounts shipped (given inconveniently in
piculs instead of in modern measurements), and estimates regarding
the number of people who became addicted to it.  The author writes
that during the late nineteenth century guesses range between one
and forty million addicts. If the latter figure is the more accurate
of the two then about ten percent of the population used opium.  The
great unanswered and unanswerable question, as Professor Lodwick
points out several times, is why so many users and why at this time.
Whatever the answer, some Protestant missionaries early on observed
the sad effects of the drug on individual Chinese lives and thus saw
opium's use in moral terms.  In addition, medical missionaries
compiled data on drug use and shared it via publications like the
_Chinese Recorder_ or at missionary conferences and meetings.
Missionaries eventually formed, in 1896, an Anti-Opium League that
proved effective in promoting its position in Britain and in China.
Relatively few Chinese, however, joined the organization for a
number of reasons, one of which had to do with Chinese association
of missionaries with opium.  Chinese sometimes embarrassed
missionaries by asking them who imported opium and by calling the
drug "Jesus opium" (p. 34).

The role played by missionaries in banning opium in China therefore
had its limits.  Professor Lodwick concludes that "for all the
missionaries' efforts and concern, when the great campaign against
opium began it was led by Chinese nationalists, and the Protestant
missionaries, who had crusaded against the drug for so long, were
largely bystanders (p. 6)."  Chinese efforts against opium proved
surprisingly effective given the dynastic decay typically attributed
to the late Qing.  Through the efforts of capable officials domestic
production of opium decreased and allowed the Chinese to use the
provisions of a 1907 agreement with Britain to terminate the
importation of opium grown in India.  This was a milestone event and
the author thoroughly discusses the agreement to terminate the sale
of opium in China and the myriad difficulties China faced in
implementing it in the chapters entitled "The Anti-Opium Lobby Comes
of Age" and "Successes and Failures of Opium Suppression."  This is
the book's most important and illuminating section.

Although this book is of special interest to scholars of late
imperial and modern China, it could easily be used as supplemental
reading for an upper- division course on China and even one on
colonialism or imperialism.  The author presents stimulating new
material about the various roles played by Protestant missionaries
who took the moral high ground in spite of the difficulties in doing
so.  Their unique, yes, ironic position, together with how the
Chinese perceived them, bring forward many relevant issues for the
discussion of China's plight at this juncture in its modern history.

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