Book review of Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, Zhou Xun. Narcotic Culture, A History of Drugs in China, Hongkong University Press, 2004, 319 p., Perspectives chinoises, 2005, 91, p. 58-60. - CNRS - Centre national de la recherche scientifique Accéder directement au contenu
Autre Publication Scientifique Année : 2005

Book review of Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, Zhou Xun. Narcotic Culture, A History of Drugs in China, Hongkong University Press, 2004, 319 p., Perspectives chinoises, 2005, 91, p. 58-60.

Florence Bretelle-Establet
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Résumé

This work sets out to be a social and cultural history of drugs in China within a wider general history of mind affecting substances throughout the world. Opium provides a way of approaching this wider perspective. The authors take a closer look at the commonplace image of China as having been transformed in the second half of the 19th century into “a nation of opium addicts at the hands of pernicious imperialist traders”. In the last two decades of that century, this image was created and disseminated in different social contexts and in the service of a diverse range of interests. On the one hand there were the foreign missionaries, and on the other were the reformers from the Chinese elite. Until the 1880s their attitudes were divided, but then the missionaries joined in the condemnation of a substance which, in their view, made the smoker passive and unable to receive the gospels. Doctors also partook in this attack on opium, through the official voice of the China Medical Missionary Association, representing it as a substance which led to compulsive behaviour. In Europe, ever since the laws on professional exclusivity had been passed, doctors had enjoyed the sole rights to practice medicine and to regulate the use of pharmaceutical substances, and so their aim in China was to assert the same medical authority, by restricting the use of opium to personal medication. The theories of addiction which grew up in Europe in the 1870s also played a role in changing the image of the opium smoker. He became an invalid and victim of remorseless chemical dependency, which the medical profession alone was equipped to treat. These pronouncements against opium, coupled with the image of the “sick man of East Asia” built up by the missionaries, were taken up within their own perspectives by reformists from the Chinese elite at the end of the 19th century. From 1895 onwards, they represented opium as a poison spread by the Whites, and as the main cause behind the widespread sapping of individual will and the collective degeneration of the Chinese race. Along with the image of bound feet, it became a symbol of national debility. Only its eradication would allow China to rise again.

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Dates et versions

hal-01505894 , version 1 (11-04-2017)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01505894 , version 1

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Florence Bretelle-Establet. Book review of Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, Zhou Xun. Narcotic Culture, A History of Drugs in China, Hongkong University Press, 2004, 319 p., Perspectives chinoises, 2005, 91, p. 58-60.. 2005. ⟨hal-01505894⟩
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