I was rather confused when, during my Chinese History class, the teacher mentioned something about two factions' views concerning the "Opium Question". One advocated for the complete prohibition of opium, and that foreign merchants should be banned from selling opium to the country's inhabitants. Another, by contrast, sought to legalize the drug, albeit only limiting its use to peasants, with the stipulation that court officials, army officers and bannermen were strictly forbidden to consume the substance.
The latter's advocacy presented, or at least what I believe, a brilliant solution to the opium crisis which had so long ravaged the Qing - they would tax, regulate and begin their own opium production. Such a plan would, in theory, resolve the trade defict and simultaneously avoid antagonizing the foreign merchants.
So why did the emperor refuse?
The failed opium legalisation initiative of 1836 is a fascinating case study for how Qing policymaking worked – or didn't – in the early nineteenth century. The course of events and their outcome was the product of a vast number of intersecting factors: questions of pragmatism versus idealism in policymaking, the balance of power between autocrat and bureaucrat, rivalries between provincial and metropolitan government, the role of private interests in frontier policy, divergent approaches to foreign relations, rampant political factionalism, entrenched patronage networks, unspoken tensions over ethnic relations, and millennia-old controversies in Confucian textual criticism.
The two sides in 1836 were not homogeneous, established political factions; rather, the initiative drew together people from multiple intersecting interest groups, but which broadly aligned with one side or the other based on certain common factors.
A particular point of difference was the degree to which the officials involved had experience in provincial, and especially frontier administration. The Qing interior was generally a pretty cushy place to be assigned, with officials aware of lucrative gains to be made from corrupt dealings with tax collectors and major businesses, but also where there was a firm impression that Qing power was, at least on the surface, an unquestionable reality. This impression was even more strengthened in the capital, where metropolitan bureaucrats presumed a degree of Qing power that was perhaps not entirely possible to justify on the basis of reality on the ground. On the frontiers, which includes coastal regions with major trade ports, the exercise of Qing power was much more clearly a compromise between the interests of state organs and those of local power-holders, be they tribal chiefs, religious leaders, or merchants; there was also a keen awareness of the potential impact that outside polities, most pertinently Kokand, Russia, and Britain, might seek to capitalise on any slippage of Qing control, either in the form of a failure to enforce policy, or alienation of the local population due to overzealous implementation.
For instance, some of the firmest advocates of legalisation included (with a brief discussion of relevant career postings):
It is probably no coincidence that all three of these men held the post of Viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi at one point or another: being on the ground was evidently more than enough to suggest that an accommodationist stance over opium was the most viable route forward, given awareness of the scale of opium consumption, the mechanisms of the trade (which had as much to do with Chinese importers as British exporters), and the disparity in military power between Britain and the Qing. Of course, what also mattered was that the Cohong, the board of merchants at Canton to whom the Qing granted a monopoly on international trade, were eager to ingratiate themselves with provincial government through contributions to their pet projects or even – albeit more dangerously – directly to their coffers.
Another question involved was the matter of where the balance of power should lie in the imperial state: with the bureaucracy and its preference for long-term routine procedures, or with the imperial court and its preference for decisive and arbitrary interventions? On top of that, which part of the bureaucracy was to be the leading one: provincial administrators on the ground, or metropolitan officials at the capital? What is interesting is that it was not always the case that each group sought to accrue more power for itself: some emperors, like the Jiaqing Emperor, had a strong preference for delegation, and some officials, especially Manchus, preferred that the imperial court retain its power as far as possible; provincial and metropolitan officialdom were not separate branches of government, and so officials with mainly provincial careers might further provincial interests when given a metropolitan post, and vice versa.
In 1836, the advocates of legalisation tended to be those who supported provincial-led, pragmatic policy, with limited regular intervention, whereas its opponents were broadly metropolitan idealists who felt that the Qing state had a moral duty to enforce a particular brand of morality among its subjects, and the means to do so. Particularly prominent in the latter group were members of the censorate, metropolitan officials whose role was to keep tabs on the activities of provincial officials, almost as a 'party whip' to ensure that the implementation of imperial policy was not being compromised by personal or regional interests.
Compounding these issues was the re-emergence of a controversy in Confucian textual criticism between so-called 'Old Text' and 'New Text' schools, which differed on a number of issues that are frankly too tedious to recount here, but the critical thing is that the 'Changzhou school' which came to prominence in the eighteenth century revitalised the 'New Text' version and interpretation of the Confucian canon. In conjunction with this 'New Text' revival was a revival in 'statecraft thought', which posited that officials and scholars ought to educate themselves on specific practical matters as well as the core philosophical canon. The statecraft revival was still small as of 1836, with its most influential advocates generally being at lower levels of the administrative hierarchy, if holding official rank at all, but what united many of them was a comparatively proactive, interventionist approach to state policy (though statecraft scholars would themselves end up divided between more and less interventionist tendencies). A related issue was the differing intellectual bases of the two broad parties: the Xuehaitang academy in Canton, founded by Ruan Yuan in 1820 and funded by the Cohong, functioned as a sort of think tank for the pro-legalisation officials, while rival academies and establishment elites at Canton backed anti-legalisation groups like the Spring Purification clique.
A final set of interests that played only a minimal direct role in the opium legalisation affair, but which nevertheless hung in the background, was that of the Bannermen, dominated by the Manchus. Bannermen were all over the provincial and especially the metropolitan bureaucracies, but despite this metropolitan leaning they were often characterised by a more flexible stance on frontier matters than their Han counterparts, not least thanks to a much more substantial involvement of Bannermen in Inner Asian affairs. By 1836, the status of Manchus in government had noticeably declined following government reforms under the Jiaqing Emperor (r. 1796/9-1820) which had weakened a number of Manchu-dominated agencies to the advantage of Han officialdom. The Daoguang Emperor's response to Jahangir Khoja's revolt, which entailed the settlement of Han colonists in Xinjiang as a loyal population to keep the empire's Turkic subjects in line, showed that this emperor was also relatively unconcerned with the slippage of Manchu primacy. However, for all their sidelining, the Banners might still be called upon to provide a reserve of ardent imperial loyalists who could be relied upon, perhaps not to carry out imperial policy to the letter, but nevertheless to act in what they understood as the best interests of the imperial court to which they were bonded in servitude.
The above has laid out the background for the 1836 legalisation debate, now let's get into the specifics.