Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927-1945

By Jonathan Marshall

No political system can be adequately analyzed without
reference to the sources of power which supply the motor
force for political action. Traditional accounts of Republican
Chinese politics, in terms of shifting, competing personalist
cliques within the state bureaucracy, too often emphasize the
form and not the tools of conflict. Without a further
understanding of the sources of power which these cliques
sought to tap, the significance of much of the history of
Republican Chinese politics will be lost.

Opium was a key well-spring of power in the Republican
period. When properly tapped, the opium traffic — so large that
it supplied perhaps 5% of the Chinese population—provided a
vast pool of liquid profits with which to wage war or buy
organization and influence. By manipulating the traffic,
leaders could both penalize enemies (who also depended on its
profits) and extend their own political and economic
influence. Greater centralization of the traffic inevitably
meant greater centralization of national political power.

Opium impinged upon the whole fabric of China's
political economy, including peasant agriculture, provincial
warlordism, "bandit suppression," and intra-Guomindang
(KMT) political and military struggles. The national and local
bureaucracy was so dependent on profits from the traffic that
opium could not be eridicated without a near social
revolution.

Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism
in Nationalist China, 1927-1945 in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 8, (July - September 1976) Page 1