+
24
district of Szechuan in January 1912. In May and August 1912 the matter was the subject of questions in the House of Commons, but the Government declared its determination to carry out the British side of the 1911 agreement irrespective of events in China, in the hope that when a settled Government emerged in China it would take up the work of suppression where it had been left by the Manchus.
The hoped for change came towards the end of 1912, when the Republican Government was at last firmly in the saddle, and began to surpass the rigours of the Manchu rulers in the suppression of the opium habit. The movement had, as might have been foreseen, become indiscriminate, a hatred of native opium being accompanied by a hatred of imported, and the conditions of the 1911 agreement were lost sight of in the fervour of the moment,
This movement, holding up the stocks at Shanghai, led to an accumulation of 30,000 chests at that port. The situation became serious, and in April 1913 the Government of India stopped export to China. On the 7th May 1913, Mr. Montagu, at that time Under Secretary for India, stated that "we are
专愿
**
Li
LL
CL
GE
prepared not to send any more opium to China not only this
year, not only while the stocks are being absorbed, but never
again, with the single exception that we desire to be satisfied that China
is steadfast in the pursuit of her
present policy and determined to get rid of her indigenous poppy."
The closure of provinces now, of course, only affected the disposal of stocks at Shanghai and the general situation as far as it was affected by the stocks question, and the remainder of the history of the poppy in China is of academic interest only, so far as the 1911 Agreement is concerned. Throughout 1913 the suppression of cultivation went on, marked by violent methods of intimidation and repression, which were directed as much against the purchases of Indian opinm as against the native cultivators and dealers, and by this time probably nobody except the Anti-Opium Society believed that poppy cultivation could be permanently suppressed in China. In 1917 the Chinese Government closed the whole of China to Indian opium, holding that the 1911 Agreement had automatically expired.
On the 17th October 1918 it was stated in the House of Commons that no official information had been received of any increase in the production of opium in China since 1917, but civil war and the breakdown of the machinery of central control were soon to lead to a change, in which native opium came to be regarded as the chief means of raising money for iroops.
In 1918 considerable recrudescence of growing took place in five provinces, and in Kansu the price of opium had fallen 50 per cent. Large quantities of the drug were also produced
25.
in Russian territory and imported into China, thousands of Chinese themselves crossing the border to grow the crop.
Further reports of planting and harvesting were received in April 1919, together with confirmation of the fact that cultivation in Fukien was connived at by the local officials. Fukien, however, being in the hands of the Southern Govern- ment, Sir J. Jordan considered it useless to protest to the Chinese Foreign Office at Peking. In May information was received of extensive growing, witli official support, in Szechuan and Shensi, cultivation being permitted on payment of a tax, and Sir J. Jordan admitted that his representations would be likely to have little effect. It is worth noting that the Chinese armies were credited with reintroducing the opium smoking habit in all districts they occupied, and that the military governors and commanders were saddled with the responsibility of fostering the cultivation and consumption of the drug.
In June 1919 a remarkable letter was received from Sir J. Jordan, in which he said that Mr. Easte; travelling to take up his duties at Chengtu, reported that 30 to 50 per cent. of the fields in his line of march through Szechuan were full of poppy, and added that there appeared never to have been any real effort at eradication.
In spite of a formal protest to the Chinese Foreign Office, warning them that the continued and growing cultivation constituted a grave infringement of the solemu pledge "entered into by the Chinese Government by the 1911 "Agreement," reports received in July 1919 more than con- firmed all that had gone before, and it was estimated that in 1918 the acreage under poppy in Kirin Province (North Manchuria) alone was 40,500. Affairs were rapidly returning to the position of affairs at the time when Vice-Consul Spence wrote his report in 1882.
The year 1920 continued the tale of flourishing cultivation, on the profits and extortions from which most of the armies in China appeared to be subsisting, while in spite of heavy taxation the price of opium remained generally only half the rates that had obtained in 1918. In Chinese Turkestan it had fallen from 45 taels to 15 taels per lb., and in Yunnan it was stated to be selling at 30 cents an ounce, less than the cost of production in India.
The reports of His Majesty's Consular officers, corroborated and strengthened by missionaries, private firms of standing. shipping companies, and the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, point conclusively to the fact that China is now much the greatest opium-producing country of the world.
The end of the China trade reduced the Indian export trade to extremely small proportions. Smuggling to China was guarded against by the imposition of a voluntary limit on exports, as has been stated above. It was decided in 1911, after a systematic examination of all the available data, to
89
ser
A
3