BUILDING A SOCIETY: CULTURE AND ECOLOGY OF THE

INDUSTRY IN NORTH , 1902-1937

By

SIKANG SONG

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of History

MAY 2017

© Copyright by SIKANG SONG, 2017 All Rights Reserved

© Copyright by SIKANG SONG, 2017 All Rights Reserved

To the Faculty of Washington State University:

The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of

SIKANG SONG find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted.

______David A. Pietz, Ph.D., Chair

______Jeffrey C. Sanders, Ph.D., Co-Chair

______Heather E. Streets-Salter, Ph.D.

______Noriko Kawamura, Ph.D.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my advisor Dr. David A. Pietz for his continuous support of my research and life, for his patience, motivation, enthusiasm, and invaluable knowledge. Without his guidance and persistent help, this dissertation would not have been possible. I also would like to express my immense gratitude to my committee members, Dr.

Jeffery C. Sanders, Dr. Heather E. Streets-Salter, and Dr. Noriko Kawamura, whose expertise and dedication to Environmental History, World History, and East Asian Studies inspired me greatly.

Their assistance and knowledge accompanied me on my graduate career at Washington State

University.

I am also very grateful for the WSU History Department and Graduate School providing me years of financial assistance for my study and living in Pullman. Especially, the Claudius O. and

Mary W. Johnson Research Fellowship and the Conney Family Graduate Fellowship from the

History Department supported my travels to China and allowed me to gather historical records and sources for my research in various locations there.

Furthermore, I appreciate mentorship and friendship from the History Department faculty and staff. For professors who taught the many courses I took as a graduate student and those who I worked with as a teaching assistant, I thank them for providing me with academically rigorous coursework and giving me the opportunity to learn a variety of teaching techniques. I am fortunate to have their guidance: Dr. Frank Hill, Dr. Ray Sun, Dr. Jess Spohnholz, Dr. Xiuyu Wang, Dr. Joel

Tishken, Dr. Theresa Jordan, Dr. Ken Faunce, and Dr. Karoline Cook. Special thanks to Dr. Roger

Chan, Dr. Lydia Gerber, and Dr. Ai Wang for their years of support of my study, writing, teaching, and personal life. For the staff of the History Department, I thank them for helping me numerous

iii times with their expertise and unending patience: Ken Anderson, Pat Thorsten-Mickelson, Lauri

Sue Torkelson, and Pam Guptill.

Lastly, a special heartfelt thank you to my parents for their endless and unselfish love and support.

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BUILDING A SMOKING SOCIETY: CULTURE AND ECOLOGY OF THE TOBACCO

INDUSTRY IN , 1902-1937

Abstract

by Sikang Song, Ph.D. Washington State University May 2017

Chairs: David A. Pietz and Jeffrey C. Sanders

In 1902, the British- (BAT), an American multinational corporation, began its business expansion in China by mass marketing machine-rolled to Chinese consumers, thereby systematically establishing a modern centered on manufacturing. Throughout the early twentieth century, BAT monopolized China’s cigarette market and consequently transformed Chinese tobacco production and consumption towards cigarettes. In particular, from 1912 to 1937, to fulfill its high demand for cheap local- grown raw materials, BAT introduced American bright tobacco into the agriculture of the North

China Plain. In doing so it established three tobacco growing bases in Eastern , Central

Henan, and Northern . This turn led to the formation of a commodity chain of the cigarette in China that reached from the tobacco fields in North China to its cigarette factories in major cities and ultimately to consumers all over China. The establishment of this commodity chain left significant environmental impacts on Chinese agriculture as the tobacco cultivation and peasants’ livelihood in North China were linked to the globalizing industrial economy. At the same time, the

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Western consumer culture that came with BAT’s mass marketing operations changed millions of

Chinese smokers’ consumption habits.

This dissertation explores the modern transformation of Chinese tobacco from 1902 to 1937, the period when international forces reshaped China’s tobacco production and consumption by introducing bright tobacco cultivation, cigarette manufacturing, and the Western consumer culture of cigarette smoking. Thematically, this research documents the ecological changes to agriculture in North China and the development of the Chinese cigarette industry. It pays equal attention to the cultural aspects involved, as the clash between the modern consumer culture and traditional

Chinese values constructed new meanings for cigarette smoking. By presenting a detailed and comprehensive examination of environmental, economic, and socio-cultural dynamics of Chinese tobacco during the early twentieth century, I conclude that BAT’s efforts in building a modern

“smoking society” before 1937 laid down the foundations for the “massification” of the cigarette in China during the second half of the twentieth century.

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NOTES ON UNITS OF MEASURMENTS

The following conversions from Chinese measurements into the metric values show only approximations. In the Republican period (1912-1949), certain considerable variations occurred in some localities. Refer to citations for the specific variations.

Length units

1 li = 576 m 1 zhang = 3.2m 1 chi = 0.32 m

Weight Units

1 shi (picul) = 50 kg 1 jin (catties) = 0.5 kg

Capacity Units

1 sheng = 1000 ml

Volume Units

1 fang = 1 m³

Area Units

1 mu = 614.4 m² 1 qing = 100 mu = 61440 m²

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT ...... v

NOTES ON UNITS OF MEASURMENTS ...... vii

LIST OF MAPS ...... ix

LIST OF TABLES ...... x

LIST OF FIGURES ...... xi

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

1. GOING CIGARETTES ...... 18

2. MAKING TOBACCO BRIGHT ...... 61

3. CIGARETTE INDUSTRY AND ALTERED LIVELIHOOD ...... 102

4. SHIFTING TOBACCO CULTURE ...... 148

5. “TOBACCO CAPTIAL”: A CASE STUDY OF THE “SMOKING SOCIETY” .. 200

EPILOGUE ...... 238

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 244

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LIST OF MAPS

1. Map 2.1 ...... 79

2. Map 2.2 ...... 80

3. Map 2.3 ...... 81

ix

LIST OF TABLES

1. Table 1.1 ...... 51

2. Table 3.1 ...... 109

x

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Figure 4.1...... 165

2. Figure 4.2...... 165

3. Figure 4.3...... 165

4. Figure 4.4...... 166

5. Figure 4.5...... 166

6. Figure 4.6...... 167

7. Figure 4.7...... 167

8. Figure 4.8...... 167

9. Figure 4.9...... 177

10. Figure 4.10 ...... 177

11. Figure 4.11 ...... 179

12. Figure 4.12 ...... 179

13. Figure 4.13 ...... 179

14. Figure 4.14 ...... 179

15. Figure 4.15 ...... 179

16. Figure 4.16 ...... 179

17. Figure 4.17 ...... 185

18. Figure 4.18 ...... 185

19. Figure 4.19 ...... 185

20. Figure 4.20 ...... 185

21. Figure 4.21 ...... 192

22. Figure 4.22 ...... 192

xi

23. Figure 4.23 ...... 192

24. Figure 4.24 ...... 192

25. Figure 5.1...... 207

26. Figure 5.2...... 210

27. Figure 5.3...... 234

28. Figure 5.4...... 234

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INTRODUCTION

THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN CIGARETTE IN CHINA

On January 6, 2011, the Disease Control and Prevention Center of China issued an official report entitled and the Future of China, revealing that China’s smoking-control policy had completely failed since the state signed the World Health Organization’s “2005

Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC)” in 2006. The report states “China is doing poorly in implementing the FCTC with a performance score of only 37.3 points out of 100 possible points; and saw a large gap from FCTC requirements.”1 This conclusion aroused wide public concern in China about the issues of cigarette smoking and tobacco control.

As the most populous country in the world, China is not only the home to the world’s biggest smoking population, but it is also the world’s largest producer of tobacco and cigarettes. According to The Tobacco Atlas, in 2014, about 45 percent of all cigarettes in the world (5.8 trillion) were smoked in China; than the next top 29 cigarette-consuming countries combined.2 In 2012,

China manufactured over 40 percent of the world’s cigarettes using 43 percent of the global tobacco yield produced on 1.3 percent of its arable land.3 Currently, the state of tobacco in China, namely mass production of tobacco and mass consumption of cigarettes, raises intriguing questions of how tobacco, an alien crop originally from the Americas, developed into a major component of

China’s agriculture and economy? More importantly, how the cigarette, a modern American innovation for tobacco consumption, plays such a significant role in contemporary and society?

1 Yang Gonghuan and Hu An’gang, ed., Kongyan yu zhongguo de weilai (: Jingji ribao chubanshe, 2011), 4. 2 Michael Eriksen, Judith Mackay, Neil Schluger, Farhad Islami Gomeshtape, and Jeffrey Drope, The Tobacco Atlas, 5th ed. (Atlanta: The American Cancer Society, Inc, 2015), 30. 3 Ibid., 46-47.

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The history of the emergence of the cigarette industry and modern tobacco culture in early- twentieth-century China provides possible answers to these questions. Tobacco was first introduced to China in the late sixteenth century as part of the global diffusion of the New World plants following the Colombian Exchange. Throughout the , the Chinese gradually developed a highly commercialized tobacco agriculture and a mature smoking culture that centered on pipe smoking and snuff. Different varieties of tobacco produced in every macro-region of China supplied local, regional, and national markets. However, when the British-American Tobacco

Company (hereafter, BAT), an Anglo-American multinational corporation, engaged in a large- scale business expansion in China from 1902 to 1937, the landscape of Chinese tobacco transformed to mass production and mass consumption of the modern cigarette.

Over the decades, BAT dominated the Chinese cigarette market using advanced manufacturing and marketing systems that were directly imported from the . In terms of production, cigarette factories equipped with the most up-to-date Western machineries were set up in treaty ports. Meanwhile, BAT systematically introduced the cultivation of American bright tobacco into North China. From 1912 to 1937, BAT heavily invested Western capital, technology, and personnel to promote bright tobacco growing in Eastern Shandong, Central , and

Northern Anhui, and eventually turned these three areas into its tobacco growing bases. In doing so, BAT built a complete commodity chain of cigarette production with extensive bright tobacco cultivation in North China supplying cheap local-grown raw materials to its mechanized factories in major cities. Regarding tobacco consumption, cigarette smoking began to take a leading role in

Chinese tobacco culture because of BAT’s efforts to mass market the industrial cigarette and promoting modern consumer culture. Through its nationwide distributing networks and

2 advertising system that reached down to the level, BAT publicized the “modern” cigarette to Chinese customers. In response to BAT’s marketing operations, millions of Chinese smokers abandoned the traditional handcrafted snuff and pipe tobacco and adopted the fashionable machine-rolled cigarette for their daily intake.

Unquestionably, BAT played a critical role in the dramatic transformation of Chinese tobacco production and consumption towards the cigarette during the early twentieth century. As in elsewhere, the powerful multinational was the primary driving force for the global cigarette taking over the local market. However, the significance of Chinese responses in this process should not be overlooked. As Sherman Cochran has pointed out, “the history of the modern cigarette in twentieth-century China is incomplete without attention to the Chinese merchants, entrepreneurs, and industrialist who expanded the domestic market.” 4

Ever since BAT entered China, the ever-growing cigarette market attracted Chinese capital to join the new business. Well financed merchants organized mechanized factories while small business owners invested limited amounts of money to open hand-rolling workshops. In general, these Chinese rivals catered to consumers with less expensive cigarette products in markets relatively not well served by BAT. However, a few Chinese-owned companies, most notably the

Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company (hereafter, Nanyang), rose to directly confront BAT on the national market. In the competition between BAT and all levels of Chinese players, a modern tobacco industry, which consisted of foreign corporations, Chinese-capitalized companies, and numerous handcraft workshops, was well established in China.

4 Sherman Cochran, Big Business in China: Sino-Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 101.

3

In the meantime, the Western consumer culture of the cigarette that was initially introduced by BAT also underwent a process of localization. During the National Products Movement and the anti-foreign goods boycotts that occurred repeatedly from the mid-1900s to the mid-1930s,

BAT and indigenous manufacturers attempted to emphasize and broadcast the Chinese heritage or connections of their products to survive the political turmoil. For Chinese consumers, smoking cigarettes went beyond an act of pursuing Western fashion to a symbol of patriotism. The cigarette consequently became “Chinese” by evolving from a “foreign product” (yanghuo) to a “national product” (guohuo).5

Therefore, multi-dimensional tensions existed in the Chinese cigarette business—the commercial rivalry between the giant multinational and Chinese enterprises, the conflict between

Western imperialism and Chinese nationalism, the cultural clash between tradition and modernity—all this resulted in the birth of the cigarette industry and the modern tobacco culture in China. Even with BAT gradually leaving Chinese market after the outbreak of the Second Sino-

Japanese War in 1937, mass production and mass consumption of cigarettes remained in Chinese agro-economy and consumer culture and continued to thrive after 1949.

In tracing the transformation of Chinese tobacco production and consumption during the early twentieth century, we can find the roots of the tobacco issue in contemporary China. Due to the significance of the tobacco industry in the economy of Republican China, it has long been the center of several studies on Chinese economic history. The groundbreaking work indisputably is

Sherman Cochran’s study on the commercial rivalry between BAT and its primary competitor in

5 In opposed to yanghuo or waiguohuo (foreign products), the term guohuo emerged in the awake of Chinese nationalism during the early twentieth century. It is also often translated “native goods” or “national goods.” In this dissertation, I follow the translation “national products” given by Karl Gerth. See Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7.

4 the Chinese market—the Chinese-owned Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company. In this book, Big

Business in China, Cochran details BAT’s business expansion in China, the development of

Nanyang, and the intertwined business war between the two companies throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Eventually, he concludes that the “Sinification” of both firms during the

Sino-foreign rivalry led to the emergence of a modern cigarette industry in China.6 In a chapter of

Cochran’s other work, Encountering Chinese Networks, he draws a similar conclusion on BAT’s localization by discussing the center role that Chinese employees played in BAT’s China operations. 7 Howard Cox’s comprehensive enterprise history of BAT, The Global Cigarette, shows how the multinational developed a vast array of international operating subsidiaries since the invention of the cigarette-rolling machine in 1880. In China, Cox argues, BAT conducted a successful business because the company ventured large amounts of Western capital and technologies to establish nationwide manufacturing, distributing, and marketing systems.8

In addition to the economic history on BAT and the cigarette business, scholars also have attempted to provide cultural interpretations for the cigarette consumption and its relationship to the origins of the modern consumer culture in China. In extending his earlier researches on BAT,

Cochran conducts a focus study on the commercial culture of the cigarette in his article

“Transnational Origins of Advertising in Early Twentieth-Century China.” Particularly concentrating on BAT’s cigarette advertising operation, Cochran reveals that the company was responsible for importing modern consumer culture to China directly from New York City’s Time

6 Cochran, Big Business in China. 7 Sherman Cochran, “British-American Tobacco Company,” Chap. 3 in Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 44-69. 8 Howard Cox, The Global Cigarette: Origins and Evolution of , 1880-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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Square.9 In China Made, Karl Gerth analyzes the rise of Chinese nationalism by examining the dynamics of consumer culture in nationalist movements that constantly happened throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In these anti-imperialist movements and boycotts, the cigarette, as one of the major mass consumer goods, was at the center of the emerging Chinese consumer culture that defined and spread Chinese nationalism.10 Carol Benedict’s award-winning book,

Golden-Silk Smoke, provides a social and cultural use in China from circa 1550 to the present day, seeking to analyze the historical factors that shaped Chinese tobacco consumption over the longue duree from a cross-cultural perspective. In chapters on the first half of the twentieth century, she provides in-depth discussions on the rising cigarette consumption and the construction of the modern Chinese tobacco culture.11

BAT and the development of the tobacco business in early-twentieth-century China have also drawn the attention of Chinese scholars. Yet, due to the restrictions in political and academic environments, studies conducted by Chinese historians so far are largely limited to the Marxist narratives and modernization theory. For instance, in several regional studies on the growing tobacco industry in North China, the authors all condemned BAT’s activities as an act of imperialist exploitation while admitting the expansion of bright tobacco cultivation indeed contributed to the modernization of local agriculture and economy.12 A similar attitude can also be

9 Sherman Cochran, “Transnational Origins of Advertising in Early Twentieth-Century China,” in Inventing : Commercial Culture in , 1900-1945, ed. Sherman Cochran (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999), 37-58. 10 Gerth, China Made. 11 Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 12 For a few examples, see Zhu Lanlan, “20 shiji chu zhi 30 niandai Ying Mei yan gongsi yu Henan yancao ye” (master’s thesis, University, 2004); Xu Youli and Zhu Lanlan, “‘Wusa’ qianhou Ying Mei yan gongsi zai Henan de huodong ji yingxiang,” shifan xueyuan xuebao 20, no.3 (2004): 83-86; Zhang Hongfeng, “1912- 1937 nian de Henan yancao ye” (master’s thesis, , 2007); Wang Qiang, “Jindai Ying Mei yan gongsi

6 found in many other focused studies. For example, in a couple of works about tobacco advertising in the Republican period, Chinese historians argue that BAT used advertising to enhance its exploitation in China, yet the advertisement nonetheless played a key role in introducing modern marketing techniques to the Chinese market.13

Both American and Chinese scholarships have made major contributions to the field of modern Chinese history and enhanced our understanding of the changing nature of Chinese tobacco in the early twentieth century. However, examining this history through the lens of either economic history, cultural history, or Marxist narratives is not sufficient to reveal the full story as certain important aspects of this issue have been left out. As Philip Huang comments on the lack of academic studies on the expanding commercialized cultivation of American bright tobacco in

North China, noting that “the full story of the effects of the violent market swings in this crop

[bright tobacco] on the local society and economy of the tobacco-growing areas has yet to be told.”14 Environmental history, on the other hand, provides a more comprehensive perspective to conduct an overall analysis of the topic.

Therefore, building upon these past scholarships and borrowing ideas from environmental history, this dissertation chooses a perspective of analysis on agro-ecological, economic, and socio-cultural changes of tobacco in early-twentieth-century China to trace the historical development of the Chinese cigarette industry within a broader and more complicated context. It

zai wanbei yanye shougou huodong shulun,” Anqing shifan xueyuan xuebao, shehui kexue ban 30, no. 3 (2011): 56- 60; Wang Haimei,“Jindai Shandong yancaoye yanjiu” (master’s thesis, Anhui University, 2014). 13 For a few examples, see Liu Ye, “20 shiji chu Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi yu Ying Mei yancao gongsi de guangao jingzheng” (master’s thesis, Northeastern Normal University, 2006); Sun Hui, “Jindai Ying Mei yancao gongsi zaihua guanggao bentuhua zhanlue chutan,” jianzhu keji xueyuan xuebao, sheke ban 23, no. 4 (2006): 62-63. 14 Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 124.

7 seeks to fill critical historiographical gaps in the tobacco history of modern China by concentrating on the changing relationships between humans and nature, namely people and tobacco, in the emerging cigarette production and consumption. In other words, it attempts to provide an environmental interpretation of natural and social changes that came with people engaging new methods to produce tobacco and embracing new perceptions to consume cigarettes in the modern market economy. In doing so, this study moves beyond purely local and regional stories to explain how local, national, and even transnational forces constructed and reconstructed tobacco production in North China over time. It also demonstrates the crucial importance of focusing on appropriate scale of power and influence to understanding Chinese tobacco culture as a story of shifting meanings and practices. To fully explain this complex story, this dissertation proceeds from three dimensions of the relationship between people and tobacco.

The first dimension of the relationship refers to the dynamic interactions between people and tobacco in tobacco and cigarette production. In particular, it examines the transformation of tobacco cultivation and commercialization from the setting of peasant economy to the context of market economy. In the field of environmental history, the material production and its impacts on nature have long been a major theme of study. In 1990, environmental historians published a series of articles to propose a diversity of ideas concerning the changes in the relationship between humans and nature. Donald Worster’s “Transformations of the Earth” explicitly explained the

“capitalist mode of production” theory and emphasized the importance of studying “the capitalist transformation of nature” in environmental history. He argued that discussions on the modern transformation from subsistence-oriented agroecosystems to capitalist agriculture and

8 consequently ecological, economic, and social impacts should be at the center of environmental history.15

The development of the Chinese tobacco industry in the early twentieth century can be analyzed under Worster’s framework. By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the cultivation and commercialization of tobacco had already been integrated into the traditional peasant as one of the major cash crops. However, the promotion of the large-scale cultivation of

American bright tobacco in North China resulted in the capitalist transformation of the pre-existing tobacco economy as tobacco farmers began to plant the American variety for the purpose of supplying a modern cigarette industry. Chinese peasants no longer grew a relatively small amount of tobacco leaves for household or local use. Instead, they contributed towards a much larger industrial operation, producing tobacco for selling to the marketplace in exchange for ready cash.

In the process, the agriculture in North China underwent substantial ecological and socio-economic alterations. The extensive and intensive cultivation of bright tobacco caused specific environmental impacts on local agriculture, such as the disappearance of native tobacco varieties, soil degradation, and heavy input of labor and resources in the fields. More importantly, the linkage of tobacco growing into a broader market economy fundamentally altered peasants’ livelihoods.

As foreign capital and market situation determined the price of tobacco, peasants’ household income and living standard increasingly depended upon outside forces rather than their hard work on the land.

15 Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” The Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1090-1091.

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The second dimension reveals the cultural aspect of the modern cigarette: how the meanings and practices of cigarette smoking reshaped Chinese tobacco culture and shifted people’s perceptions about tobacco. In response to Worster’s model, several participants of the 1990 debate called for the “cultural turn” in environmental history. They argued that because humans have always been part of the natural environment, “culture,” namely the cognition of nature as perceived by humans, needs to be included as an explanation in environmental changes. For example,

William Cronon criticized Worster’s theory as “excessive materialism” and stated that it is equally important for environmental historians to study “the broader cultural systems in which they

[ecosystems] are embedded.”16 Thus, the idea is that attitudes, values, preferences, perceptions, and identities determine the ways in which people use nature. The actions of which people make history and shape their environment are based on what those people think and believe.

In the discussions on the reconstruction of Chinese tobacco culture, I will pay attention to those beliefs: not only the beliefs of the “Chinese” but also the more global and “modernist” belief that came with the widespread consumption of cigarettes. When BAT introduced the global cigarette into China, it also brought the Western consumer culture to market its products. From the beginning, cigarettes were interpreted by foreign manufacturers as “modern,” “Western,” and

“masculine” through omnipresent representations in the media. Chinese customers subsequently perceived this novel tobacco product in such ways. Even though later a considerable portion of cigarettes in the Chinese market were in fact produced domestically in Chinese-owned factories, customers still viewed them as “modern” and “foreign” imports because of the Western

16 William Cronon, “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,” The Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990), 1130.

10 technologies and mass-marketing techniques employed by the cigarette business. In contrast, traditional forms of increasingly came to be “old-fashioned” and “backward” and were growingly overlooked by the society. At the same time, the perception of the cigarette underwent a process of localization. Within the context of rising Chinese nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century, BAT and local companies both engaged large-scale publicity campaigns to emphasize the Chinese elements of their cigarettes. In the cultural representation of

Republican China, the cigarette gradually became “Chinese” by transforming from a “foreign good” to a “national product.”

Lastly, the third dimension of this research explores layers of power struggles between international forces and local communities over the tobacco resource as well as the cultural interpretation of cigarette smoking. Specifically, this work stresses the tension and cooperation between tobacco growers and the powerful companies, the commercial rivalry between the giant multinational and Chinese enterprises, the cultural clash between tradition and modernity regarding the cigarette, and the conflict between Western imperialism and the Chinese nationalism.

These levels of competitions and confrontations reveal the complex history of Chinese resistance and acceptance of the global cigarette. Even though very often this process came with painful experiences, it was an inevitable stage of China encountering modernization. In power struggles, a “smoking society,” in which the production and consumption of tobacco and cigarettes came to be an important aspect of Chinese agriculture, economy, and culture, formed in China—part

Chinese, and part foreign. When BAT entirely retreated from China after 1949, the Chinese carried on the legacy of mass production and mass consumption of the cigarette to the second half of the twentieth century.

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Before sketching the chapter contents, I would like to offer a final remark on the geographic setting of this dissertation. The environmental historical perspective employed by this research directs the examination of Chinese tobacco history within a broader geographical focus, connecting tobacco fields in North China with the national and international markets. In 1999, environmental historians Richard White called for the use of multiple scales, from global to local, to explain environmental changes in historical studies. He observed that historians have too often focused solely on the national scale because the discipline was deeply rooted in the rise of the modern nation-state. Under this framework, even the local and regional become subsumed under the national, as historians have usually portrayed local and regional histories as substitutes for a larger national experience.17

Thus, having examined BAT’s activities in North China, I conclude that a focus study on the region is not adequate to reveal how the multinational corporation (BAT) excised its power

“globally,” and China, as a subaltern actor, responded “locally”. To better grasp the environmental dimensions of the vast tobacco production and consumption in the modern age, this dissertation uses a spatial framework to situate these changing historical developments in North China within various local, national, and international scales. Particularly, in discussions on tobacco and cigarette production, the concept of commodity chains provides a possible analytical agenda.

“Commodity chains can be defined as the linked labor and production processes involved in the making of a commodity from production to finished good.”18 By tracing the ecological and social

17 Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nation,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 976-986. 18 Matthew Evenden, “Aluminum, Commodity Chains, and the Environmental History of the Second World War,” Environmental History 16, no. 1 (2011): 70. The concept of commodity chains has been widely employed by environmental historians in the past. Besides Evenden’s article, a few examples include William Cronon’s commodity chapters in Nature’s Metropolis, Richard Hoffmann’s rejoinder on medieval frontier foods, Richard Tucker’s histories of tropical commodities, Sterling Evans’s analysis of the hennequin-wheat complex, and John Soluri’s study of the

12 impacts of cigarette production along the commodity chain which stretched from farmland in

North China to factories in major cities, we can see how the global cigarette industry reshaped people’s relationship with tobacco. In examinations of cigarette consumption, I discuss the global influence of consumer culture, the differentiated consumption patterns in the urban areas and countryside, and the varied tobacco culture among different social groups. Therefore, the story took place primarily in and around tobacco farms in North China, but the setting periodically shifts to China’s major cities, where cigarettes were manufactured and consumed. This spatial framework plays a key role in linking the places between production and consumption of tobacco and cigarettes as I follow tobacco from farm to market to explore the dynamic relationships between mass production and mass consumption that drove, both directly and indirectly, environmental and social changes in North China.

Chapters are organized thematically according to tobacco production and consumption.

Chapter One is an introduction to the origins of Chinese tobacco in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, as well as the initial emergence of the cigarette in China at the turn of the twentieth century. It includes the developments of the tobacco economy and smoking culture in the late imperial China, the early introduction of the American cigarette in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and

BAT’s attempt to monopolize the Chinese market at the beginning of the twentieth century. By presenting these components, I argue that the imperial China had already established a mature

banana trade. See William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great (New York: Norton, 1992); Richard Hoffmann, “Frontier Foods for Late Medieval Consumers,” Environment and History 7 (2001): 131-67; Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Destruction of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: the History and Ecology of the Henequin-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950 (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2007); John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

13 tobacco agriculture and a sophisticated smoking culture thereby smoothing the way for the rapid spread and acceptance of the machine-rolled cigarette at the turn of the twentieth century. Building on these foundations, BAT quickly laid out the first step of its success in China during the early twentieth century.

Chapter Two examines the agro-ecological transformations of tobacco cultivation in three localities of the North China Plain that took place between 1912 and 1937, during which BAT introduced American bright tobacco to Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and Northern Anhui.

By examining the details of this history, I argue BAT’s operation left far-reaching ecological and economic impacts for the agriculture in North China as the tobacco cultivation went through a process of “capitalist transformation.” The extensive distribution of American tobacco seeds and modern agricultural technologies permanently changed the agricultural structure of these areas.

American bright tobacco became the most widespread and profitable cash crop in local economies and to a great extent accelerated the pre-existing agricultural commercialization. The tobacco production in North China linked to a broader market economy by being incorporated into BAT’s commodity chain of cigarette production.

Chapter Three continues to focus on tobacco and cigarette production, exploring the development of the Chinese cigarette industry in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the consequential environmental changes that thoroughly affected tobacco growers and local communities. During this period, the Chinese cigarette industry was well established with BAT continuing to monopolize the Chinese cigarette market while domestic mechanized companies and handcraft workshops thrived to find their places in the business. The rapid growth of Chinese cigarette industry strengthened the commodity chain of the cigarette and subsequently changed millions of

14 people’s livelihoods. Tobacco cultivators abandoned their ways of agricultural production under the traditional peasant economy and invested much household resources to grow bright tobacco for supplying the cigarette industry. Surplus rural labors, mainly women and children, migrated to towns and cities either operating cigarette-rolling machines in modern factories or working as hand-rollers in local workshops. Meanwhile, many local merchants and gentry began to participate in the tobacco business, serving as middlemen in money loaning. The portrayal of ordinary tobacco peasants, industrial workers, and local businessmen reveals the cross-cutting environmental effects of the shifting tobacco production as they engaged new relationships with tobacco.

Chapter Four examines Chinese cigarette consumption and the new tobacco culture that followed during the early twentieth century. After documenting the dramatic expansion of Chinese cigarette consumption in China from the 1900s to 1930s, I discuss the cultural constructions of the

“modern” cigarette in Chinese society. Under the impact of BAT’s promoting of the cigarette through Western consumer culture, millions of Chinese smokers abandoned the traditional forms of smoking and embraced the cigarette to show that they were urban, fashionable, and socially sophisticated. Meanwhile, foreign and Chinese manufacturers endeavored to put more Chinese cultural elements into their cigarettes to attract different consumer groups and survive the nationalist movements. By the 1930s, even though cigarettes were still statistically less consumed than pipe tobacco, cigarette smoking had gained a leading role in the Chinese tobacco culture.

Chapter Five revisits the tobacco growing area of in Central Henan to examine the building of a “smoking society” in early-twentieth-century China. In the 1910s, BAT enjoyed full control of the tobacco business in the Xuchang region. During the 1920s and 1930s, however,

Nanyang and local tobacco businessmen challenged BAT’s domination in Xuchang’s leaf tobacco

15 market and drove the company out of Henan twice in 1927 and 1937. Struggles over control of tobacco resources between BAT and its Chinese rivals that took place in Xuchang reveal the cross- cutting effects of the localizing tobacco economy in China. In the competition and cooperation between global and local forces, Xuchang grew to be the “tobacco capital” of China with a

“tobacco-centered” economy that consisted of tobacco cultivation, leaf processing and trading, as well as cigarette production and consumption. The case of Xuchang provided an example of the

“smoking society” in early-twentieth-century China, in which agriculture, industry, politics, culture, and, most importantly, people’s lives all moved (or were being moved) around the axis of tobacco.

This dissertation could not be completed without generations of Chinese scholars dedicating their careers to collect and preserve historical records of Chinese tobacco history. By far the most intimate and revealing of these records are contained in massive compilations of Chinese and

English documents that were skillfully and carefully edited by historians at Shanghai Academy of

Social .19 Previous researches, especially Sherman Cochran’s series of studies on BAT, heavily relied on this collection of records. Likewise, these reliable documentary collections laid down the foundation for this dissertation, offering me valuable primary sources on the developments of BAT, the Chinese cigarette industry, tobacco agriculture, and other subjects.

19 These historical records were collected and edited by historians at Shanghai Academy of Social Science during the early stages of the “Four Histories Movement” (sishi yundong) in the 1950s. However, only one volume of Nanyang’s documents was published in 1958 before the Anti-Rightist Movement and the seriously interrupted the publishing process. The publication of four volumes of BAT’s records continued after the Cultural Revolution in 1983, but the larger portion of the collection remained unpublished to this day. The full collection of these documents is currently archived in the Center for Documents of Chinese History of Enterprise at Shanghai Academy of Social Science. Special thanks to Shen Qiusheng and Zhang Wei for explaining the history of these archives to me and helping me to access the documents. For the published records, see Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Shanghai jinji yanjiusuo and Shanghai shehui kexueyuan, Jingji yanjiusuo, ed., Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi shiliao (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1958). Shanghai shehui kexueyuan, Jingji yanjiusuo, ed., Ying Mei yan gongsi zai hua qiye ziliao huibian, 4 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983).

16

Different from past scholarships, my study is also based on recently available archives. For instance, “Selected Archive for the Tobacco Industry in the Republican Period” at the Second

Historical Archives of China provided useful primary sources for the examination of the rising

Chinese mechanized and handicraft cigarette industries in my research. In addition to these archival resources, many published compilations and collections of primary sources are also crucial for this study. For example, The Compilation of Chinese Tobacco History, edited by Yang

Guo’an, the leading scholar in the field of Chinese tobacco history, offered me an overview of the historical records for tobacco in China from the late sixteenth century until the late twentieth century.20 Meanwhile, in the focus analysis of the tobacco agriculture in North China, I utilized large quantities of detailed information from many local gazetteers and compilations of materials.

I have profited not only from the information and data in these compilations and other published sources, but also from the citations which guided me to various forms of primary and secondary sources including valuable books, periodicals, newspapers, and even images—items which I probably would not have discovered otherwise. Utilizing this broad range of old and new sources,

I hope my dissertation contributes an additional level of complexity to the tobacco history of modern China by generating an environmental explanation for the entwined ecological, economic, and social transformations that reshaped Chinese tobacco between 1902 and 1937.

20 Yang Guo’an, ed., Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian (Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe, 2002). Yang’s another compilation of primary sources on Chinese tobacco culture is also very useful for this research. See Yang Guo’an, ed., Zhongguo yancao wenhua (Xi’an: Xibei daxue chubanshe, 1990). Also see bibliography for the complete list of published source compilations and collections.

17

CHAPTER ONE

GOING CIGARETTES21

As one of the greatest entrepreneurs in American business history, tobacco tycoon James B.

Duke, the founder of the British-American Tobacco Company (BAT), started his business with the ambition to conquer the world. When he heard about the invention of the cigarette-rolling machine in 1881—a time when machine-rolled cigarettes were still a novelty in the United States and Europe, not alone in China, he immediately turned to look for the world’s largest population to which he could potentially sell his cigarettes in colossal volume. A famous anecdote says Duke’s first words upon learning of the invention were:

“Bring me the atlas.” When they brought it, he turned over the leaves looking not at the maps but at the bottom, until he came to the legend, “Pop: 430,000,000.” “That,” he said, “is where we are going to sell cigarettes.”22

“That” meant China. When informed that Chinese did not yet smoke cigarettes, Duke said he supposed they could learn. Just like this, China became one of the primary target markets of Duke’s global conquest in the cigarette business.

Duke was informed correctly. Around 1881, most Chinese smokers were still consuming tobacco in traditional fashion—mainly pipe smoking and snuff. Even though Philippine made

The following abbreviations are used in notes. Details and information of these records can be found in bibliography: MGSQYCHYDAXB: Minguo shiqi yancao hangye dang’an xuanbian [A Selection of Documents of the Tobacco Industry during the Republican Era] Ying Mei: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan, Jingji yanjiusuo, ed. Ying Mei yan gongsi zai hua qiye ziliao huibian [Documents on the enterprises of BAT in China]. 4 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983. YMYGSCD: Ying Mei yan gongsi chaodang [Hand-copied Archives of British-America Tobacco Company] 21 The title for this chapter is inspired by the title of Chapter One in Soluri’s Banana Cultures. See Soluri, Banana Cultures, 18. 22 Sherman Cochran, “Commercial Penetration and Economic Imperialism in China: An American Cigarette Company’s Entrance into the Market,” in Chinese Business Enterprise: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management, ed. Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown (London: Routledge, 1996), 3:263. Carol Benedict also tells this anecdote in her book, see Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 1.

18 hand-rolled cigarettes and had been circulating in Southern Chinese coastal areas as early as the 1820s and 1830s, cigarettes were still rarely seen by Chinese smokers at the time.23 Since the initial introduction of tobacco into China during the late sixteenth century as part of the global tobacco diffusion, the Chinese had gradually indiginized the exotic plant and the smoking methods that came with it. When industrially made cigarettes first appeared in Chinese treaty ports toward the close of the nineteenth century, China had already developed a mature agrarian economy of tobacco cultivation, production, and marketing, as well as patterns of consumption.

The dramatic shift of Chinese tobacco away from pipes and snuff to standardized machine- rolled cigarettes did not happen until Western multinational tobacco corporations began to systematically import machine-rolled cigarettes into the Chinese market in the late 1880s and

1890s. Cigarettes first gained popularity in coastal treaty ports, then rapidly made their way to inland areas over the next three decades. By the 1920s and 1930s, cigarettes had replaced traditional smoking methods on a large scale and became omnipresent among Chinese consumers across boundaries of social class, space, and gender. There is little argument that the agent most responsible for introducing cigarettes to China was BAT. Due to Duke’s vision about the vast

Chinese market, his American Tobacco Company (ATC) was one of the first foreign tobacco firms to import and sell its industrially produced cigarettes in China around 1890.24 With its enormous production capacity, well-financed advertising campaign, and marketing structures that facilitated distribution down to the village level in many areas of China, BAT monopolized China’s cigarette

23 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 134. 24 In 1902, American Tobacco Company (ATC) merged with the London-based Imperial Tobacco Company (ITC) to form British-American Tobacco Company (BAT) under the leadership of James B. Duke. It was the result of Duke’s strategies of avoiding powerful competitions and integrating resources for monopolizing the world market. See Cox, The Global Cigarette, 46-80. After 1902, Duke’s operations in China continued under the management of BAT.

19 market as early as 1919, and continued to maintain its supremacy until 1937 when its business was disrupted by the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

This chapter explores the ecological, economic, and cultural background to the emergence of cigarette culture in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It includes a brief history of the introduction of tobacco into China from the late sixteenth century to the early seventeenth century; an examination of tobacco in China’s agrarian economy and consumer culture during the late imperial period; and the expansion of the cigarette production and consumption in China as a result of BAT’s attempts to dominate the Chinese market at the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that in the relatively brief period of three hundred years, China had established an indigious system of tobacco cultivation, production, commercialization, and mass consumption by the time machine-rolled cigarettes began to take hold in Chinese treaty ports in the late nineteenth century. The fact that an agrarian economy of tobacco and a mature tobacco culture was already in place in China made possible the rapid spread and acceptance of the cigarette in China that led to the success of BAT in China. BAT understood the dynamics of tobacco in

China and quickly established a monopoly position in the Chinese market by applying Western business models to the Chinese traditional tobacco market.

The Introduction of Tobacco into China

Tobacco, both rustica, originally from South America, and , indigenous to Central America, were initially brought to other parts of the world by Europeans as an outcome of the massive global ecological and demographic transformation that Alfred W.

20

Crosby called the Columbian Exchange.25 Similar to the patterns of the global diffusion of other

New World plants, such as tomato, potato, chili, peanut, and maize, during the period of European

Expansion. European explorers, sailors, slaves, and merchants carried tobacco across the world and transmitted smoking practices to local people who lived in the ports and coastal areas of the

Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Tobacco’s unique addictive quality impelled people to quickly begin producing tobacco for personal use or sale on local markets. In the age of increasing

European exploration and expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a great number of people around the world had ample opportunities to acquire, consume, and produce tobacco for the first time.

It was within this historical context that tobacco swept into China along with other

Amerindian crops. As Carol Benedict has remarked in her extensive work on the cultural history of Chinese tobacco, “the introduction of New World tobacco into Chinese borderlands was part of a complex and sustained globalized process that followed many paths and involved many different actors.”26 Specifically, tobacco entered China separately and independently from several different directions. In the southeast, it was brought to Province from Luzon Island, Philippines by

Fujianese merchants or smugglers who had been interacting with Portuguese and Spaniards in the harbors of maritime Southeast Asia toward the end of the sixteenth century. A little later, during the early seventeenth century, tobacco reached Province through the same Portuguese source in the south. Roughly at the same time, Manchurian peoples in acquired tobacco through Japan and Korea. Moreover, when the Manchus consolidated their rule over China

25 Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003). 26 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 31.

21 and established the Qing Empire in the mid-seventeenth century, tobacco entered Province in the southwest from Burma and to the - area in the northwest from Russia. Among these different routes, Luzon Island to Fujian Province was the earliest and most important for the introduction and spread of tobacco in China.

We may never know the name of the person who brought smoking practice and tobacco planting to China, or the exact time and location that this happened. However, it is generally understood that smoking and tobacco cultivation were new phenomenon in Fujian Province during the late sixteenth century, that also saw the growth of Portuguese power in the Indian and East

Asian Seas. In his “Tan Yancao” (“Discussing Tobacco”), Chinese historian Wu Han laid the foundation for the field.27 In this 1959 article, Wu Han attempts to provide an accurate timeline, travel routes, and other important aspects of the introduction of tobacco into China. Regarding the questions of when and where tobacco first entered China, Wu Han argues that during the reign of

Emperor Wanli of the Ming Dynasty [reign: 1573-1620] tobacco was first cultivated in the

Zhangzhou and districts of Fujian Province. This argument has since been widely accepted and verified by scholars and experts in the field.28 His assertion is based on records from

Jingyue Quanshu (A Complete Book of Landscapes), a medical text written by a scholar-physician,

Zhang Jiebin, who lived in the late Ming Dynasty. Zhang recorded “nobody has ever heard of this

27 Wu Han, “Tan Yancao,” in Deng xiaji, ed. Wu Han (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1960), 17-23. This article was originally published in Guangming Ribao, October 28, 1959. 28 In 1986, Zheng Chaoxiong challenged Wu Han’s argument according to the new archeological finding of porcelain smoking pipes from the reigns of Emperor Zhengde [reign. 1505-1521] and Emperor Jiajing [reign. 1522-1566] of Ming Dynasty in Hepu, Province. He argued the discovery of these smoking pipes shows tobacco smoking had appeared in China before the Wanli period. See Zheng Chaoxiong, “Guangxi Hepu mingdai yaozhi nei faxian ciyandou tanji yanxue chuanru woguo de shijian wenti,” Nongye kaogu, no. 2 (1986): 383-387, 391. However, his theory was later disproved by scholars who verified these smoking devices as opium pipes. See Kuang Daren, “Dui yancao qiyuan woguo lun de bianxi,” Nongye kaogu, no. 3 (2000): 201-204, and Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 4.

22 thing (tobacco) since ancient times. Lately, during our Wanli period, it was first produced in places between Fujian and Guangdong Provinces. Since then, the cultivation of this thing has become more popular in the region of lower Yangtze River.”29 Many other records from the Ming and

Qing Dynasties confirm this argument. For example, another book from late Ming period Wuli

Xiaoshi (Minor knowledge about things and their principles) by Fang Yizhi stated: “Late in the reign of Emperor Wanli, people brought it to Zhangzhou and Quanzhou. The Ma family processed it, calling it danrouguo [fleshy fruit of the danbagu]. It gradually spread to all our borders, so that everyone now carries a long pipe and swallows the smoke after lighting it with fire; some have become drunken addicts.”30 One of the first Chinese monographs on tobacco Yan Pu (Smoking

Manual), written by Qing literate Lu Yao, recorded “Nowadays tobacco is everywhere, but it originally came from the Kingdom of Luzon [Philippines]. Name was danbagu. It was introduced into the Middle Kingdom [China] in the late Ming.”31 These records offer textual confirmation of time and location for the earliest arrival of tobacco in China. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, tobacco had become a commercial crop in many districts of Fujian Province. Yao Lü, a local scholar who lived in Fujian Province during the late Ming Dynasty, recorded his encounter with a strange new plant called danbagu that came from the Kingdom of Luzon and was cultivated by farmers in Zhangzhou. In his 1611 book, Lu Shu (The Book of Dew), he noted that “now there is more (tobacco) in Zhangzhou than in Luzon, so they export it to that country to sell it.”32 The

29 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 3. 30 Yuan Tingdong, Zhongguo xiyan shihua (Beijing, Shangwu yinshuguan, 1995), 35. Timothy Brook also uses this evidence in his study. See Timothy Brook, “Smoking in Imperial China,” in Smoke: A Global , ed. Sander L. Gilmand and Zhou Xun (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 84. 31 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian.163. 32 Ibid., 165. Carol Benedict and Timothy Brook also use this quotation in their works. See Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 19, and Brook, “Smoking in Imperial China,” 85.

23 fact that tobacco grown in Zhangzhou was exported back to Luzon shows that tobacco cultivation had already developed on a considerable scale in Southern Fujian. As such, tobacco had gained a firm foothold in the Southeast coastal area of China by the early seventeenth century.

Having generally agreed that Luzon to Fujian pathway was the first and foremost pathway of tobacco into China, historians also argue that there were other possible locations where tobacco entered the country. In his article, Wu Han also points out two paths by which tobacco found its way to China during the early seventeenth century: from nanyang (Southeast Asia) to Guangdong

Province in the south, and to the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria from Japan and Korea.33 The

Portuguese, who had been frequenting offshore islands and ports in East and Southeast Asia, as well as commanding the triangle trade between China, Japan, and Portugal since the early sixteenth century, again played the role of intermediary in both cases. 34 It is highly possible that Portuguese traders and sailors passed on the smoking habit and the tobacco plant to the residents of Guangdong

Province as they traded throughout the Sea. As a Ming scholar-official, Yang Shicong

(1597-1648), described: “Cantonese soldiers… began to smoke it during the Tianqi period [reign:

1621-1627].”35 The gazetteer of Gaoyao County of Guandong also says that “tobacco was from

Jiaozhi [Vietnam], today [the 1620s] we have it here.”36 These earliest records of tobacco in

Guangdong indicate that Cantonese people independently acquired the smoking habit and possibly tobacco seeds from localities in Southeast Asia during the 1620s. Much earlier in the 1570s,

Portuguese traders had already taught Japanese how to smoke tobacco.37 During commercial

33 Wu Han, “Tan Yancao,” 19-21. 34 For details of the triangle trade, see Robert B. Marks, “Commercialization without Capitalism: Processes of Environmental Change in South China, 1550-1850,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996), 60. 35 Yang, Zhongguo yanye shi huidian, 165. 36 Wu Han, “Tan Yancao,” 20. 37 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 19.

24 contact between Japan and Korea, Koreans gradually learned to smoke and began to cultivate tobacco around the 1620s. Being involved with the war between the Ming government and

Manchus in the mid-seventeenth century, Korean diplomats, soldiers, traders, and smugglers constantly transported tobacco into Manchuria as gift or merchandise.38 Furthermore, fragmentary evidence suggests, during the same period, tobacco also possibly traveled into Southwestern China from coastal Burma through the ancient “Southwest Silk Road” and Northwestern China, specifically Gansu Province, from Central Asia and Russia through the trading routes along the old Silk Road.39

Although there were many different avenues by which tobacco arrived in China, other travel routes were far less significant than the one from Luzon to Fujian. When people in the inland frontiers started to acquire tobacco from foreign agents in the 1620s, tobacco from Fujian had already reached these places due to the efforts of Fujianese traders who sold tobacco produced in their hometowns. Fujianese farmers and merchants had already established a commercially oriented tobacco economy. Tobacco, as a consumer product and a cash crop, gradually spread to other parts of China from Fujian.

Nonetheless, the fact that tobacco arrived in China separately from a variety of directions through an array of agents confirmed that the introduction of tobacco into China was part of the early modern globalization of tobacco, and more importantly, part of the broader context of the

38 Wu Han, “Tan Yancao,” 20; Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 22-25; Xie Jingfang, “Mingmo yancao chuanru dongbei shishi zouyi,” Beifang wenwu, no. 1 (1995): 86-89; Cong Peiyuan, “Yancao chuanru dongbei de tujing yu niandai,” Beifang wenwu, no.4 (2003): 81-90; Li Qiyun, “Yancao jingyou menggu chuanru nvzhen kao,” Neimenggu daxue xuebao, renwen shehui kexue ban 33, no. 1 (2001): 52-62. 39 For the Southwestern route, see Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 26-28; For the Northwestern route, see Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 28-31, and Chen Songfeng, “Guanyu yancao chuanru woguo de luxian yu shijian,” Wenshi zazhi, no.2 (1988), 42.

25

Colombian Exchange. “As Alfred W. Cosby has remarked in The Columbian Exchange, sweet potatoes, maize (corn), peanuts, tobacco, chili peppers, pineapple, cashew and manioc (cassava) arrived in Fujian via the Spanish and Portuguese galleon trade, in Guangdong via Portuguese ships and in Korea via Japan.”40 That tobacco and other food crops entering China through the same or similar travel routes shows tobacco was no different from the others regarding patterns of New

World plants’ global diffusion. As an entirely new agricultural commodity originally from the

Americas, tobacco, with its complicated itinerary across oceans and continents, finally was brought to the frontiers of China by different nationalities. Taking advantage of unsettled condition during the Ming-Qing transition, combined with China’s mature agricultural and trading systems, tobacco took hold in China by transforming itself from an exotic import to a local Chinese product.

Chinese Tobacco Production and Commercialization, 1600-1900

The diffusion of tobacco into inland China did not take long. Numerous written records and various forms of evidence from the late Ming and the early Qing periods show the rapid spatial diffusion of tobacco across the landscape of late imperial China. The habit of smoking was widely adopted by peoples in nearly every region of China, while cultivation of tobacco quickly followed.

A scholar-official who lived through the Ming-Qing transition, Wang Shizhen, described the spread of tobacco in the mid-seventeenth century: “Nowadays it [tobacco] is everywhere. It no longer only exists in Fujian.”41 By the mid-Qing, tobacco had already been firmly integrated into

China’s diverse agricultural system by becoming the second largest cash crop after cotton in terms of total acreage of cultivation.42 Farmers and merchants distributed tobacco products to smokers

40 Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, A History of Global Consumption: 1500-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 77. 41 Wang Shizhen, Xiangzu biji [1702]. (repr., Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982), 45. 42 Zheng Changgan, Mingqing nongcun shangpin jingji, (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1989), 341- 342.

26 through the sophisticated local, regional, and inter-regional trading networks of Qing China. Over the two and half centuries of Qing history, tobacco certainly was one of the mainstays of the

Chinese agrarian economy.

Tobacco Diffusion within China

The starting point for the tobacco diffusion in China was certainly Fujian. In the first few decades of the seventeenth century, the habit of smoking and tobacco cultivation began to infiltrate the regions surround Fujian following the footprints of Minnan (Southern Fujian) merchants and migrants: northward to the Lower Yangzi region, eastward to and Provinces, and southward to Guangdong Province. When tobacco had taken root in Fujian, the most important markets for Fujian tobacco were the cities and towns of and provinces, commonly known in China as the region of Jiangnan. Qing essayist and tobacco expert Chen Cong wrote in his Yancao pu (Tobacco Manual): “The tobacco produced in Fujian, beyond that sold within the province, is mostly shipped to Jiangsu and Zhejiang…With the southeast monsoon, several 100 ships all set off for Jiangsu to sell it.”43 However, within just a few decades, people of Jiangnan transformed themselves from consumers of Fujian tobacco to commercial tobacco growers. Ye

Mengzhu (1624-ca. 1693), a native of Shanghai who grew up during the decades of the Manchu conquest of China, closely observed the spread of tobacco in the Lower Yangzi region in his essay collection Yueshi bian (A Survey of the Age):

“When I was young, I heard my grandfather say that there was tobacco in Fujian, and you could get drunk smoking it. They called it ‘dry liquor.’ There was none in our region, however. During the Chongzhen era [1628-44], someone in the Yicheng [Shanghai] seat by the surname Peng got some seeds, from where I do not know, and planted them in this soil. He picked the leaves, dried them in the

43 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 54.

27

shade, and then got workmen to cut them into fine shreds, which he consigned to traveling merchants to sell.”44

As early as the last years of the Ming Dynasty, tobacco had become a commodity produced for markets in the Lower Yangzi region. Similar developments happened in the surrounding regions of Fujian during the same period.45

As for many other parts of the country, the spread of tobacco had a rather interesting pattern that I call “large-span diffusion” in which soldiers and long-distance merchants acted as carriers.

Rather than gradually spreading outward to adjacent areas then to further locations, tobacco was brought to China’s peripheries and frontiers by Ming soldiers from the South and Southeast who fought wars against rebels in the Southwest and nomadic peoples in the North. For example, Fang

Yizhi’s Wuli Xiaoshi described “danbagu grass was brought into Zhangzhou and Quanzhou areas during the late Wanli period [ca. 1600] … it gradually spread to jiubian [the nine frontiers].”46

Jiubian was the contemporary Chinese term for nine military towns along the Great Wall to defend against and Manchus in the North. In 1568, Emperor Longqing moved General Qi

Jiguang and his Qi’s Army (Qijia jun), which was well-known in Chinese history for their achievements in the anti-Japanese pirate campaigns along the Southeast coast, to the frontline of the Great Wall. Over the years, General Qi constantly recruited soldiers from his home bases at

Yiwu in Zhejiang Province and Zhangzhou in Fujian Province. Qi’s Army brought tobacco to the

44 Dong Haolin, ed. Shanghai yancaozhi (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1998), 2; Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 20; Brook, “Smoking in Imperial China,” 86. 45 For the early history of tobacco growing in Jiangxi, see Li Xiaofang, “Qingdai gannan yancao shengchan luelun” (master’s thesis, Jiangxi shifan daxue, 2004). For tobacco production in Hunan during the period of late Ming and early Qing, see Tao Weining, “Mingmo Qingchu xiyan zhifeng ji yancao zai guonei de chuanbo fangshi yu tujing yanjiu,” Zhongguo lishi dili luncong 7, no. 2 (2002): 97-106. 46 Yang, Zhongguo yanye shi huidian, 3.

28

Northern frontier.47 Zhang Jiebin also told an interesting tale that residents of the southwestern provinces of , Yunnan, and acquired the use of tobacco from Ming Cantonese soldiers who had the habit of smoking. “During the war in Yunnan, troops went deep into miasma- filled mountainous areas. Everybody was sick except one group of soldiers who had the habit of smoking tobacco. Quickly, all other soldiers and local people began to learn smoking. Now, everybody in the Southwest, elders or young, all smoke tobacco on a daily basis.”48

During the last decades of the Ming Dynasty, besides mobilized soldiers, many long-distance traders who traveled along the inter-regional trading networks of imperial China also carried tobacco from the Southeast to hinterland areas during the last decades of Ming. For instance, as

Benedict detailed in her book, merchants from Jiangnan took advantage of the Grand Canal, imperial China’s most important commercial waterway that linked the economies of South and

North, to transport tobacco products from Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu to the northern provinces of Shandong, Henan, and Zhili. When Manchu troops took over the capital of Beijing in 1644, tobacco was already widespread in most parts of North China. Yang Shicong observed the popularity of tobacco in Beijing right before the Manchu take-over, remarking that “it has gotten to the point that there is no one who does not use it.”49 Rising demand for tobacco and high profits in growing it drove local farmers to switch from food production to tobacco cultivation. Yang

Shicong recorded that “in the past twenty years [1630s and 1640s], it [tobacco cultivation] had been gradually spreading in the North.” By 1640 or so, it was cultivated “everywhere” because

47 Hebeisheng yancaozhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Hebeisheng yancaozhi (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 2008), 34. 48 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huiduan, 165; Tao, “Mingmo Qingchu xiyan zhifeng ji yancao zai guonei de chuanbo fangshi yu tujing yanjiu,” 97-106. 49 Xie Guozhen, ed., Mingdai shehui jingshishi ziliao xuanbian, shang (, Fujian renmin chubanshe, 2004), 52. This quote is translated by Carol Benedict, see Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 21.

29

“the income from growing 1 mu tobacco is equal to growing 10 mu food crops.”50 Knowledge of tobacco cultivation diffused quickly over the provinces of the North China Plain and the Loess

Plateau around the Ming-Qing transition period. Using late Ming local, regional, and inter-regional trading networks, long-distance traders helped tobacco to reach even the most remote places in

China.

Tobacco Production

Through these patterns of diffusion, the habit of smoking, the tobacco plant, and the techniques for its production had spread to almost every region of China by the first half of the seventeenth century. When the Manchus successfully overthrew the Ming in 1644, many Chinese were already habituated to tobacco smoking. Cultivation expanded greatly throughout the seventeenth century. Beginning in the mountainous coast of Southern Fujian, migrants, travelers, merchants, and soldiers, passed on tobacco seeds and knowledge of cultivation to farmers in every corner of China, from the highlands of Southern and Southwestern China, across the rich lands in

Lower Yangzi region and the North China Plain, into the Loess Plateau in the Northwest and nomadic areas in the Northeast. Eventually, tobacco came to be planted in most of China when the

Qing Empire reached its heyday in the eighteenth century. Nearly two hundred Qing-era county- level gazetteers recorded descriptions and statistics of tobacco production in their “Agriculture” or

“Local products” sections.51 The fact that tobacco was cultivated in many places all over China in very different climates and physical environments shows, after over one hundred years of development, Chinese farmers had successfully incorporated tobacco cultivation into China’s

50 Xie, Mingdai shehui jingshi shi ziliao xuanbian, shang, 51-52. 51 Zheng Changgan counts 195 Qing-era County-level gazetteers included descriptions and statistics of tobacco production. See Zheng, Mingqing nongcun shangpin jingji, 341-342. Benedict reaches the same conclusion according to Wang Wenyu’s research. See Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 57.

30 diverse agricultural systems by using their own mode of production, combining old and new technologies for farming and processing tobacco, and developing new varieties of the plant.

Tobacco production followed a different historical trajectory in China than it did in the West.

Unlike early modern Europeans and Americans, who consumed tobacco grown by slaves on colonial plantations, Chinese consumers smoked tobacco grown in China on numerous small family farms spread throughout the country. From the late sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, in accordance with China’s small peasant economy, tobacco was grown on small plots by tenants or small land-owners using primarily household labor. The acreage of tobacco cultivation in each household varied due to social and institutional factors, such as tax rates, farm size, available labor, and government policies. It was also often seen that hired labor cultivated tobacco for rich landlords or merchants on larger pieces of land. Whether a small plot or a larger parcel of land, it usually was a portion of each household’s land while the remaining land was dedicated to growing food crops. Under this pattern of land use, intercropping, double-cropping, or even triple- cropping were very common in tobacco cultivation. A Qing gazetteer described tobacco growing in the Northern province of Rehe during the early Qianlong period (1711-1799):

“tobacco…usually is planted on the extra lands between fields…”52 In the South, farmers grew tobacco alongside rice paddies so both crops could share irrigation and soil fertility while it was also scattered in previously unutilized upland fields along with sweet potatoes and maize.53 When

British Agriculturalist Robert Fortune visited Southern Fujian in the 1850s, he observed, “Rice was the principal crop in the fields, but considerable quantities of tobacco were cultivated on all

52 Qinding siku quanshu, Qinding Rehezhi, juan jiushisi, Wuchan san, 41. 53 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 209.

31 the spots a little higher than the irrigated rice-lands.”54 In places where farmers grew tobacco on a large scale, they utilized double-cropping or triple-cropping. In the North, it was often planted in the late spring or early summer after the winter wheat was harvested. In the South, it was rotated with rice, sweet potatoes, or other cash crops.55 Although regional specialized tobacco farms began to emerge in the mountainous areas of China after the mid-eighteenth century due to the rise of

Qing’s market economy for commercial agricultural products and the consequent increasing demand for high-end tobacco, the main pattern of land use had not changed in the cultivation of tobacco.56 “In some areas of intensive cultivation, such as Zhangzhou Prefecture, tobacco was planted in specific plots only every other year or even every third year.”57

Besides utilizing the basic techniques of producing tobacco, Chinese farmers also applied their own experience in farming and processing agricultural products to tobacco production.

Before the invention of flue-curing method in the mid-nineteenth century, the standard procedures for growing tobacco, in China and elsewhere, included ploughing and spreading manure to the soil, seeding, transplanting, harvesting, and sun-curing or air-curing the leaves. To achieve successful domestication and produce high-quality tobacco leaves, Chinese cultivators often used traditional

Chinese agricultural technologies and knowledge of local climate and soils. As a result, certain procedures were omitted, altered, or improved upon to adapt to local conditions. For instance, besides human and animal waste, traditional Chinese manures such as bean cakes, rape flower cakes, sesame cakes, and tung tree seeds cakes, were widely applied to tobacco fields depending

54 Robert Fortune, Two Visits to the Tea Countries of China and British Tea Plantations in the Himalaya (London: John Murray, 1853), 256. 55 John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China. (New York: Paragon Book, 1982), 167-76. 56 Loren Brandt, Commercialization and Agricultural Development: Central and Eastern China, 1870-1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 91-95. 57 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 53.

32 on availability.58 In the curing process, in addition to simply hanging the leaves on ropes in the open air or by drying them in the sun, Chinese agriculturists invented a unique method called

Zheshai yan (folding sun-cure) to dry tobacco. This method required farmers to put tobacco leaves evenly between a pair of two-meters long and one-meter wide folded bamboo plates. They, then stacked up many folded plates neatly for drying and fermentation. Even though it required more time and labor, Zheshai yan was widely adopted by tobacco farmers across China because it could cure tobacco with better color and taste due to the fermentation process.59 By the late seventeenth century, tobacco growers in different regions of China had found various ways to grow tobacco under different environmental conditions. In China’s first monograph on tobacco production technologies Yanjing (Tobacco Sutra), Yang Wenbo, a senior tobacco merchant who lived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, summarized twenty sets of techniques for cultivating tobacco under different soils, climates, and landforms.60

Social and natural factors affecting land use and cultivation techniques employed often determined the quality and characteristics of the tobacco leaves. Over three centuries of tobacco cultivation, Chinese farmers developed hundreds of local varieties. Chinese farmers grew both species of Nicotiana—Nicotiana tabacum and Nicotiana rustica. The former was much more popular and widespread than the latter because of Nicotiana tabacum’s high yields and strong adaptability to different environments. Only Gansu Province and Western Fujian Province saw extensive cultivation of Nicotiana rustica.61 Nicotiana tabacum was mainly used for pipe smoking

58 Bean cake, rape flower cake, sesame cake, and tung tree seeds cake are manures made of wastes from making bean oil, rape flower oil, sesame oil, and tung tree seeds oil. Yang Wenbo’s Yanjing (Tobacco Sutra) detailed the use of different kinds of manures in tobacco cultivation, see Yang, Zhongguo yanye shi huidian, 134-135. 59 Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, ed., Xiangcheng yancaozhi (Beijing: Zhongguo zhanwang chubanshe, 1990), 52. 60 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 131-134. 61 Yu Xuexi, Yancao (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1955), 5-6.

33 and, in a few cases, for snuff, while Nicotiana rustica was produced solely for use in water pipes.62

Chinese tobacco was further differentiated and graded by brand names which were commonly labeled after the locality where each leaf was produced. One of the best-known tobacco brands during the Qing Dynasty, Pucheng yan (Pucheng tobacco) was named after its place of production—Pucheng of Fujian Province. Hengcheng of Hunan Province was well-known for producing another famous brand Heng yan (Hengcheng tobacco). When an American agriculturalist was sent to and Henan provinces on a mission to investigate local tobacco in the early 1900s, he noticed that “these two provinces are divided into numerous districts which are supposed by the Chinese to produce of different flavors and it is from these different districts or localities that the tobacco gets its different names or so-called grades.”63 Along with the development of a thriving tobacco market in the eighteenth century, people began to engage a new pattern of naming tobacco grown in different areas in order to distinguish certain qualities or characteristics for commercial purposes. The famous Pucheng yan, for example, was renamed to jinsi yan (golden silk smoke) to highlight its golden color and high quality, and the greenish

Lanzhou grown Nicotiana rustica was known as qingtiao yan (green fine shred tobacco) instead of its old name shuiyan (Lanzhou water smoke).

Although Chinese tobacco grown in different areas of the country had distinctive names does not necessarily prove they were qualified as varieties according to modern scientific standards. It does indicate, however, that tobacco had found its place in the Chinese agricultural system by adapting to diverse natural environments. “The different qualities such as color, texture, and aroma

62 Ibid. 63 YMYGSCD, [76]14B3, 51.

34 described by these colloquial names arose at least partially from the varied environmental conditions under which these disparate kinds of tobacco were produced.”64 Tobacco as a cash crop had been permanently added to the biological diversity of China. Moreover, that these varieties and their brand names had national reputations shows tobacco also had been well integrated into imperial China’s trade networks as a commercialized agricultural product.

Commercialization of Tobacco

The tobacco trade in China before the twentieth century also differed from that in the West where tobacco products were manufactured and distributed by royal monopolies or government- chartered joint-stock companies. In China, instead of building a new system for tobacco trade, cultivators, small- to mid-size local businesses, and well-financed long-distance merchants simply added tobacco to the commodities they had through pre-existing local, regional, and inter-regional trade networks that had emerged in China after 1550.65 Chinese conducted tobacco manufacturing and distribution in the same way that they managed many other agricultural products such as tea, herb , liquors, and textiles. As previously discussed, Fujian merchants played a significant role in spreading tobacco to many places in inland China. This fact shows that tobacco had joined the Ming market economy at a very early point. As China’s market economy and trade networks continued to expand, the tobacco trade thrived and became an integral component of the

Qing agrarian economy.

From central market cities down to local periodic markets, tobacco was sold at all levels of the marketing system in late imperial China. In the standard marketing towns and local cities,

64 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 52. 65 Marks, “Commercialization without Capitalism,” 60.

35 smokers mainly consumed locally grown and processed tobacco. As a cash crop grown largely for sale rather than solely for household consumption, once tobacco was harvested and cured, farmers usually passed on the leaves to local dealers who graded them and sent them on either for sale locally as “raw tobacco” or for further processing.66 Deep processing was done in specialized tobacco workshops (zuofang) that ranged in size from small family-run operations with three to five workers to larger manufactories with many more employees. In these workshops, the leaves were first removed from the stalk and then broken into pieces. Tobacco was then blended with honey, sugar, wine, spices, and oil and dried, then blended and dried again and again. The more times this process of oiling and drying was repeated, the higher the quality of the final product.67

This domestically cultivated and processed tobacco was sold to consumers in the local area and nearby towns and cities by tobacco workshop owners, stall keepers, and street peddlers.

Over time, with the growth of the tobacco economy, small to large specialized tobacco shops

(yanhang, yanpu, or yandian) emerged in and cities to dominate tobacco retailing. They either purchased tobacco product from tobacco workshops or bought “raw tobacco” directly from dealers and farmers then processed it for selling to local and regional consumers.68 Although small individual retailers were still very active in selling cheap tobacco in rural periodic markets and urban streets, after the seventeenth century, specialized tobacco shops no doubt became the dominant players in the tobacco retailing business. While most of their businesses still focused on local and regional markets, many of these tobacco shops often attempted to expand their sales to adjacent regions or provinces when the market allowed or when they were financially capable of

66 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 25-28. 67 Ibid., 28-29; Jordan Goodman, ed., Tobacco in History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (New York: Thomson Gale, 2005), 1:131. 68 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 29.

36 conducting such inter-regional trade. Throughout the Qing Dynasty, local dealers, tobacco workshops, small retailers, and specialized tobacco shops came together to form a chain of businesses in processing and distributing tobacco products to customers in local, regional, and inter-regional markets.

“Much of this domestically produced tobacco was traded locally or intra-regionally, but by the eighteenth century a thriving market had also developed for high-end tobacco leaf produced in specialized growing districts situated around the country.” 69 As discussed earlier, during the eighteenth century, tobaccos cultivated in many areas of the country, and their brand names had gained national reputation for the finest in quality. Like many other agricultural commodities, these famous tobaccos were included into the business operations of powerful merchant groups during late imperial China, including huishang (Huizhou merchant house), zheshang (Zhejiang merchant house), jinshang ( merchant house), and a few others. These large merchant houses transported the best-known and most expensive tobaccos across all the macroregions of China’s nation-wide market economy and sold them in major cities.70 To be sure, these merchants did not sell tobacco directly to consumers. Instead, they usually wholesaled the merchandise to the larger

69 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 34. 70 For an overview of historical records on the long-distance trade of tobacco in late imperial China, see Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 30-32. For the mapping of late imperial China’s market macroregions and detailed analysis on Qing’s major merchant houses, refer to G. William Skinner’s studies. In a series of his influential works, Skinner has analyzed China’s marketing structure at all levels of the urban hierarchy, from and standard market towns at the rural base to the largest cities at the urban cores of what he calls macroregions, including North, Northwest, Lower Yangzi (Jiangnan), Middle Yangzi, Upper Yangzi, Southeast, South (Lingnan), and Southwest (Yun-Gui). By forming big and far-flung social networks and entrepreneurial alliances based on same-native-place ties, Skinner has argued, those powerful merchant houses succeeded in traversing these macroregional boundaries within China. See G. William Skinner, “Chinese Cities: The Difference a Century Makes,” in Cosmopolitan Capitalists: and the Diaspora at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Gary G. Hamilton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977); G. William Skinner, “Mobility Strategies in Late Imperial China: A Regional Systems Analysis,” in Regional Analysis, vol.1 of Economic Systems, ed. Carol A. Smith (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 327-64.

37 tobacco shops in large cities. Tobacco was then further passed on to small or mid-size shops down the urban hierarchy and even in peripheral areas of the country.71 High-end tobacco products from specialized tobacco growing districts were widely available in tobacco shops from cities in the wealthiest macro-regions to the smallest and most remote townships. Tobacco shops, big or small, in big cities or small towns, sold a variety of tobacco products, either relatively cheap locally grown or exorbitantly priced imported from afar, to customers from all classes.

By the mid-eighteenth century or so, a two-tiered system of tobacco commercialization was firmly in place. Peasants and urban poor purchased affordable tobacco produced and distributed locally while urban moneyed elites acquired relatively expensive domestic or imported tobacco transported inter-regionally by long-distance merchants through China’s traditional market economy.72 With the collective effort of tobacco growers, large and small local business owners, and big merchant houses to make sure smokers had access to tobacco for daily consumption, tobacco became one of China’s highly commercialized agricultural commodities that traded through various levels of the marketing system in late imperial China. Nonetheless, like many other non-food agricultural products such as tea, coffee, and liquor, in China as elsewhere, an integrated system for producing and trading tobacco, especially for premium tobacco products, in great volume could not exist unless high demand was already in place. The developments in tobacco production and commercialization in Ming-Qing China were accompanied by the evolution of traditional Chinese tobacco culture which started in the late Ming and matured in the high Qing.

71 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 30-32. 72 Brandt, Commercialization and Agricultural Development, 101-103.

38

Qing Tobacco Culture

Tobacco spread extensively in China from its earliest introduction in the late sixteenth century to wide cultivation and commercialization between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In the process, tobacco became an indigenized commercial crop. In the meantime, despite constant influences from the outside, the consumption of tobacco also followed a path of evolution to become “Chinese.” As early as the mid-eighteenth century, China had a well-developed tobacco culture as part of a broader consumer culture of the imperial era. Throughout the Qing Dynasty,

Chinese smokers, from all ranks, classes, and both genders, consumed tobacco in various ways.

Smoking practices reflected the romanticization of tobacco, as well as a reinventing of smoking methods according to Chinese culture, custom, and social norms.

Chinese tobacco formed a dynamic domain of consumption that changed over time, space, and social classes. In about one and a half centuries, tobacco smoking as a new custom “‘trickled in’ and ‘trickled up’ from spatial and social peripheries to the center, from the borderlands to inland cities and then to the rural hinterland.”73 Initially, during the last decades of the seventeenth century, those with relatively low social status, such as sailors, soldiers, private merchants, and minority frontiersmen, formed the smoking population in Chinese borderlands. Up to the turn of the eighteenth century, on the one hand smoking practices “trickled in” to inland China along with the process of tobacco diffusion through these early smokers. At the same time, smoking “trickled up” by moving up the social ladder from traders, soldiers, peasants, and urban poor to government officials, landlords, gentry, and upper class women. In the Ming Dynasty, before Manchus took control of northern China in 1644, tobacco smoking only gradually moved into the higher social

73 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 64.

39 classes. In the cultural world of the Han Chinese elite, smoking was generally considered “filthy” or the habit of a “bandit.” Only people with the lowest social status or with few moral standards would smoke tobacco. Chen Cong recorded a gentry’s harsh comment on smoking in his Yancao pu: “feces and urine are the most stinky things. But when compared to the smoke of tobacco, they do not stink anymore.”74 The fact that the Manchus and Mongolians, both nobility and commoners, became widely hooked on smoking further strengthened the Han elite’s idea of smoking as

“barbaric” and “backward.”75 Ironically, however, this same reason played a crucial role in the gentrification of tobacco smoking after the Qing conquest. The fact that many Manchu bannermen and officials who held office in the early Qing were already smokers made smoking respectable.

Following the Manchu conquest of China, more and more Han Chinese elite began to smoke. By the turn of the eighteenth century, a considerable portion of the Chinese population, regardless of socioeconomic class, spatial location, age, or gender, included tobacco smoking into habits of daily life. As a child in the 1630s, the literati Wang Pu had never heard of the use of tobacco in his home region of Shanghai. As an adult, “customs suddenly changed and all the people, even boys not four feet tall, were smoking.”76 When the Qing reached its peak under the rule of Emperor Qianlong in the mid-eighteenth century, “tobacco smoking had spread to every corner of society.”77

With the increasing popularity of smoking, Chinese tobacco culture gradually came into being.

During the Qing, smoking was perceived differently by different social classes. Commoners, especially the laboring classes, viewed smoking simply as a leisure activity, supplemental to their difficult daily work. From their perspective, smoking tobacco functioned the same as drinking tea

74 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 57. 75 Cong, “Yancao chuanru dongbei de tujing yu niandai,” 83. 76 McCabe, A History of Global Consumption, 77. 77 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 17.

40 or wine. As Qing literate Bao Shichen observed in the early nineteenth century, “Among those who labor, there is not one who does not smoke. They frequently take breaks from tilling the fields and sit on the edges of the plots to light their pipes and chat.”78

In contrast, elite had more complex perspectives on smoking that evolved over time. As

Timothy Brook has remarked, “wherever tobacco arrived, those who noted its arrival cast about for ways of making sense of it.”79 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Chinese literati, essayists, poets, physicians, and scholar-officials, endeavored to “make sense of” their smoking practices through writing in order to distinguish themselves from common smokers. Renowned scholar-physicians (ruyi) first “made sense of” tobacco smoking by treating it as an innovative therapy. It was generally believed smoking tobacco could benefit the pharmacopoeic human body by providing remedies of warming and replenishing (wenbu).80 In a Qing medical book, Shiwu bencao huizuan, for instance, the physician Shen Lilong said: “smoking…cures wind-cold-caused diseases…refreshes your head and eyes.” 81 Many other “publications ranging from material medica (bencao) and miscellaneous jottings (biji) to anthologies of poetry all included references to the exotic new herb that reportedly had the power to heal or prevent disease.”82 The presumed therapeutic benefits of tobacco contributed to its rapid diffusion throughout China as people believed they were ingesting a substance that was good for their health.83

78 Ibid., 19. 79 Brook, “Smoking in Imperial China,” 86. 80 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 17-18. 81 Ibid. 82 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 62. 83 Sherman Cochran, Chinese Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 140-156.

41

In the eighteenth century, specialized tobacco texts also began to appear to “make sense of” smoking by celebrating its joys and pleasures. These handbooks, such as Wang Shihan’s Jinsi lu

(A Record of Golden Shreds), Lu Yao’s Yan pu (The Book of Tobacco), Chen Cong’s Yancao pu

(Tobacco Manual), and many others, chronicled the high-quality tobacco from different regions of the country and recorded poems and literary texts written by yanke (devoted smoker) as testimonies on the pleasures of smoking.84 For gentlemen who wrote these texts, tobacco smoking was a marvelous and distinguished activity that potentially set them apart from their social inferiors because only upper class people could fully appreciate and enjoy the smoking experience. A poem from Yancao pu’s collection romanticized smoking: “Its [smoke] clouds swirl throughout the nine layers of heaven. Through my pipe I draw the fiery vapor. From out of my chest I spew white clouds. The attendants take away the ash, bring some wine to add to the intoxication. I put the flame [to the bowl] to know its taste, letting it burn in the elephant’s tusk.”85 By the eighteenth century, due to the Qing elite’s efforts in “making sense of” smoking, tobacco had entered Chinese consumer culture as an important consumer good. In emphasizing the cultural significance of tobacco smoking, Qing essayist Quan Wangzu (1705-1755) said: “Liquor can dispel your woe; tea can quench your thirst. What is the third point on the triangle? Tobacco would be the best choice.”86

As the essential equipment for consuming tobacco, smoking devices naturally were the most significant carrier of tobacco culture. Until the introduction of cigarette smoking, tobacco was used in China in three different forms: dry pipe, water pipe, and snuff.87 Although all three smoking

84 For a collection of these Chinese classic books on tobacco, see Yang, Zhongguo yanye shi huidian, 1-195. 85 Ibid., 14. This quote is translated by Timothy Brook. See Brook, “Smoking in Imperial China,” 86. 86 Yang, Zhongguo yanye shi huidian, 64. 87 YMYGSCD, [74]14A3, 43.

42 methods were imported, Chinese consumers managed to modify them and add Chinese cultural elements. And, again, the style of consumption became differentiated within the social hierarchy.

For roughly the first century of the Qing Dynasty, dry pipe was used among all smokers across lines of class, gender, and region. Inspired by the American-style pipe which came to China with tobacco’s initial introduction, the pattern of the use of the Chinese pipe evolved to unique characteristics that were rarely seen in other cultures. The ordinary pipe, usually employed by commoners, consisted of a brass bowl and a brass or stone mouthpiece, connected by a long bamboo stem. 88 Meanwhile, luxury pipes became the hallmark of the fashionable, well-off smokers. The pipes used by upper class men and women could be expensive objects of conspicuous display, made of gold, silver, copper, or cast iron, and often embellished with black wood or ivory at both ends. They also carried special silk tobacco purses and smoked extra-long pipes. Some of these pipes were so long and ostentatious that they had to be carried around and served by servants.

This form of “dry” pipe smoking dominated tobacco use until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when new style water pipes and snuff entered China: “snuff was from Europe and water pipe was from the bazaars and coffeehouses of the Islamic and Indian Ocean worlds.”89

While smokers with lower social status continued to smoke coarsely prepared local tobacco in long pipes, elites increasingly switched to domestically produced or imported high-end tobacco in water pipes and snuff.90 Once again, despite their foreign origins, both the water pipe and the snuff container developed distinctive forms in China. The Chinese style water pipe, which was smaller

88 Alfred Dunhill, The Pipe Book (London: A. & C. Black, LTD., 1924), 108. 89 Brook, “Smoking in Imperial China,” 56. 90 Water pipe is also known in some regions as the hookah. It is a type of in which the smoke is filtered through a bowl of water. The smoker inhales through a mouthpiece connected to the pipe by a flexible tube. See Goodman, Tobacco in History and Culture, 1:131. Snuff is a form of powdered tobacco, usually flavored, either sniffed into the nose or “dipped,” packed between cheek and gum. See Ibid., 127.

43 and more transportable than those found elsewhere, was usually made entirely of metal, and had an upright stem curving towards the mouth; the tiny metal bowl was on top of a metal tube, which dropped down into the water vessel.91 As for snuff tobacco, rather than being simply put into wooden or metal boxes as done in the West, it was held in kettle-shaped bottles which usually were made of porcelain or enamel. Since their early introduction, water pipes and snuff quickly joined elite tobacco consumption as smokers found they could further distance themselves from their social inferiors by adopting different kinds of smoking methods. Nobility, gentry, landlords, and rich merchants would spend large amounts of money to purchase water pipes and snuff containers that were custom made from copper, silver, gold, or jade, for smoking expensive tobacco transported from specialized tobacco growing areas or from overseas. In Qing-era writings, water pipe and snuff smoking became a token of elegance in contrast to the “vulgar” dry pipe smoking. As Shu Wei (1765-1816), a noted poet observed, water pipes were offered to entertain guests while large sums of money were spent on pipes made of bronze or silver. “Clean water was poured into the pipe, which was held with one hand, the bubbling sound also being enjoyed by smokers…”92 In addition, a new set of terminology for smoking emerged. By the 1820s the term hanyan (dry pipe smoking) came to be used to differentiate from water pipe smoking, known as shuiyan.93 Exquisite snuff containers were often used as valuable gifts or collectible objects among imperial officials and the wealthy. Even Emperor Yongzheng had a life-long hobby in taking snuff and collecting snuff bottles.94

91 Dunhill, The Pipe Book, 149. 92 This is a verse from Shu Wei’s poem “Song of Water Pipe Smoking,” see Yancao gongzuo xinwen bangongshi, ed., Zhongguo yancao lishi gushi (Beijing: Zhongguo qinggongye chubanshe, 1993), 271. 93 Zhongguo yancaozhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Zhongguo yancaozhi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), 4:173. 94 Zhongguo yancao baike quanshu bianweihui, ed., Zhongguo yancao baike quanshu (Beijing, Guangming ribao chubanshe, 2001), 1:36-37.

44

From the late sixteenth century to the end of nineteenth century, tobacco consumption evolved over time to become an inseparable part of Chinese culture. For about one century since tobacco arrived in China, the habit of smoking as a cultural practice transformed itself from being called a vulgar behavior to being considered a respectable social activity as influential literati justified and praised smoking through their writings. In accordance with the commercialization of high-end tobacco products in the latter half of the mid-eighteenth century, a dual axes of tobacco culture also emerged: while commoners almost exclusively smoked cheap local tobacco in regular bamboo pipes, upper classes from the rural gentry up to the emperor fashionably consumed upscale products using water pipes and snuff. The textual construction of tobacco consumption and the material culture of smoking devices in the Qing Dynasty together constituted the basic layout of indigenized tobacco culture. Over time, smoking became further embedded into Chinese custom and social life by becoming essential to the rituals of hospitality and sociality. As Lu Yao’s Yan pu noted, “When guests come to visit, there can be no food and wine, but tobacco must be offered.”95 Robert Fortune experienced this hospitality when he was travelling in Fujian Province during the mid-nineteenth century. He recorded, “The old priest received us with great politeness, and, according to custom, gave me a piece of tobacco and set a cup of tea before me.”96 Smoking turned into something people shared. Practices also differentiated social status. People consumed tobacco in ways that defined their relationships with the plant, and came to define their relationships with each other.

95 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 18. 96 Fortune, Two Visits, 205.

45

By all accounts, tobacco production and consumption were already economically and culturally present in Chinese agriculture and society long before the cigarette came along to change the nature of China’s tobacco culture. Despite their success in developing indigenous forms of tobacco cultivation, commercialization, and consumer culture, it should not obscure the fact that the Chinese were participating in a globalized phenomenon of tobacco production and consumption. This process of localizing imported tobacco crops and smoking methods was not unique to China, but occurred similarly in other parts of the world at roughly the same time. Under this background, Chinese tobacco culture was again transformed from outside when Western multinational tobacco companies began to sell cigarettes all over the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Entering the Cigarette Age, 1885-1919

China was quickly ushered into the cigarette age when machine-rolled cigarettes first began to appear in coastal cities toward the end of the nineteenth century. Similar to how tobacco initially spread to China in the late sixteenth century, international forces again played a dominant role in the transformation of Chinese tobacco towards cigarette production and consumption. Cigarettes began to replace traditional forms of tobacco during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, in China as elsewhere, which was directly linked to the globalizing industrial economy and modern mass consumer culture. In the tobacco business, technological breakthroughs for mass production of cigarettes, as well as the development of modern marketing techniques in the second half of the nineteenth century, led to the rise of multinational tobacco companies aiming for the international market. “The search for new markets meant that these firms spread the cigarette around the

46 world.”97 As a result of tobacco companies’ global expansion, the cigarette was first introduced to

Chinese smokers in the 1880s. In the next few decades, cigarettes replaced traditional pipe smoking and snuff in treat ports and major cities, while its consumption in inland areas steadily increased. By monopolizing the Chinese market throughout the first half of the twentieth century,

BAT certainly played a dominant role in leading China into the age of the cigarette. While scholars have argued that efficient modern business strategies employed by Westerners contributed to the rise of the cigarette in China, we cannot ignore the fact that BAT, as well as other players in

China’s cigarette business, benefited greatly from the mature and robust tobacco culture which the

Chinese developed in the earlier centuries.

The Introduction of Cigarettes into China, 1885-1902

Smoking tobacco wrapped with certain materials and rolled into a stick shape had been one form of tobacco consumption long before the industrialization of cigarette manufacturing. In pre- colonial South and Central America, the Maya smoked tobacco wrapped in banana skin, tree bark, or maize leaves. The Spanish colonists brought this smoking method, which was called papalettes, back to Europe and replaced the botanic wrappers with fine paper. In the 1830s, the French improved the papalettes by renaming them “cigarettes” and changing the type of tobacco used in cigarettes to a blend of American and Turkish tobaccos. French-style cigarettes became widespread in Europe after the Crimean War and in the United States around the time of the

American Civil War.98 However, until the late nineteenth century, cigarette, as one of many forms of consuming tobacco, had not gained the vast popularity that it soon would. Even in the West,

97 Goodman, Tobacco in History and Culture, 1:145. 98 For the early history of the cigarette, see Goodman, Tobacco in History and Culture, 1:144-145.

47 these hand-rolled cigarettes were considered expensive luxury or novelty items exclusively for the fashionable rich.

This came to an end when two key technological innovations happened in the American

South—flue-cured bright tobacco leaves and the cigarette rolling machine. These innovations made the mass production and marketing of cigarettes possible. In the 1840s, American tobacco growers in the Piedmont region of the Virginia-North Carolina Tobacco Belt began flue-curing their bright tobacco using charcoal heat to produce golden, mild, and smoothly inhalable tobacco.99

Having similar qualities as Turkish tobacco at a much lower price, American tobacco companies began to widely use flue-cured bright tobacco to make cheaper hand-rolled cigarettes. A few decades later, the cigarette was ready for worldwide popularization when James Bonsack invented the cigarette-rolling machine in 1881. This invention tremendously reduced the cost of producing cigarettes by improving productivity to 120,000 cigarettes per machine per day—the same quantity that forty-eight skilled hand rollers could produce in the same amount of time.100 Soon, the British company W.D. and H.O. Wills adopted the Bonsack machine in 1883. In the following year, James

B. Duke invited Bonsack to install one of his machines in American Tobacco Company’s factory at Durham, North Carolina.101 In the 1880s and 1890s, both companies engaged in a strategy of mass-marketing machine-rolled cigarettes with low price and high quality to middle and lower class consumers in England and the United States. At the same time, they and a few other Anglo-

American companies copied these methods of producing and selling cigarettes to markets abroad, including China.

99 See Chapter Two for detailed history of the inventions of the flue-curing technique and American Bright Tobacco. 100 Robert F. Durden, Bold Entrepreneur: A Life of James B. Duke (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2003), 23. 101 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 27.

48

The political situation in China during the late nineteenth century allowed the large tobacco companies to sell their cigarettes on a grand scale. During the second half of the nineteenth century,

China gradually ended its closed-door policy and opened itself to foreign trade by setting up many coastal treaty ports and some inland treaty cities according to a series of “unequal treaties” signed between China and Western powers after the Opium War (1840-1842). Under the “unequal treaty system,” foreign trading firms (yanghang) sprouted up in these treaty ports to sell western industrial products ranging from bulk commodities such as kerosene and chemicals to consumer goods like soap and matches.

Machine-rolled cigarettes soon joined the list of imported products sold in China just as these cigarettes became popular in the United States and Europe in the 1880s. As early as 1885, the systematic importation of machine-rolled cigarettes into China had started with the American

Trading Company shipping a relatively small lot of American cigarettes under the brand name

“Little Sweet Heart” to Shanghai. This was the first time a foreign company attempted to sell industrial-made cigarettes in China. In the next few years, the British company W.D. & H. O. Wills also attempted to sell its “Three Castles” and “Capstan,” as well as the lower grade “Privates” in

Shanghai.102 These early attempts, however, were not successful as very few Chinese consumers smoked cigarettes at the time. The American Trading Company even suspended its cigarette business for a while and eventually handed over the dealership of the “Little Sweet Heart” brand to the local trading firm Mustard & Company (Lao Jinlong) in 1889.103

102 YMYGSCD, [02]2A-1, 12-13. 103 Ibid., 13.

49

It was the American Tobacco Company’s “Pin Head” cigarette that first found a good market in China. Duke’s ATC was one of the first foreign tobacco firms to market its products in China.

In 1890, it began to sell the popular “Pin Head” brand in Shanghai working through its local agent

Mustard & Company.104 Based on his experience in the United States, Duke understood that a vast market for cigarettes had to be created in China in order to increase sales. And the most efficient way was to promote cigarettes through mass advertising. Therefore, in the early 1890s, Duke spent large sums of money to advertise cigarettes in China, specifically in the Shanghai area.

Advertisements with the “Pin Head” brand name appeared everywhere in newspapers and on the walls of buildings. Employees of ATC and Mustard & Company gave away sample cigarettes for free on the busy streets of Shanghai. They encouraged smokers to purchase more cigarettes by offering coupons that were redeemable for prizes such as mirrors, umbrellas, alarm clocks, and even a free trip to or other nearby tourist attractions. They discounted prices and sold their products at a loss in the hopes of gaining new markets.105 Wills and its local agent Rex &

Company as well as other foreign mercantile houses based in Shanghai soon joined the mass advertising campaign.

This method of promoting cigarettes, which Duke had pioneered with great success in the

United States, was proven very effective in China as suggested by the rapid growth in sales. As

Table 1.1 indicates, the volume of cigarettes imported into China was increasing around 30 percent annually during the last few years of the nineteenth century. Centered in Shanghai, the biggest market and the most significant transshipment point for China’s cigarette business, cigarettes also

104 Ibid., 12-13. 105 Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 43.

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spread to other treaty ports and inland cities. Take the year of 1898 as an example, 83.36 percent

of all cigarettes imported into China went through Shanghai Customs, and almost one-fifth of

Shanghai’s cigarette imports were “re-exported” to in the north and treaty port cities along

the middle Yangtze region in the West. Of the cigarettes that stayed in Shanghai, 30 percent of the

imported cigarettes were sold in the local market while cigarette companies and trading firms

transported the remaining 70 percent to cities in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, and Shandong

provinces.106

Table 1.1: China’s Cigarette Imports, 1894-1898 (value in Haiguan taels) 107

National Cigarette Through Shanghai Customs Year Import Total Import % Total Import % Re-export % Pure Import % 1894 - - 125,847 - 5,672 - 120,175 - 1895 279,276 100 165,700 59.33 14,159 5.07 151,541 54.26 1896 400,818 100 277,796 69.31 32,992 8.23 244,804 61.08 1897 514,406 100 407,156 79.15 72,444 14.08 334,712 65.07 1898 687,364 100 572,986 83.36 114,744 16.69 458,342 66.68

The fast-growing sales numbers gave tobacco companies confidence to directly invest in

building cigarette factories in China to cut manufacturing, transportation, and tariff costs. In 1891,

with ATC’s support, Mustard & Company purchased a Bonsack Machine from the United States

and began producing cigarettes in Shanghai.108 The next year, operated by American Trading

Company, a larger factory with two cigarette-rolling machines and eighty employees opened in

106 Ibid., 44. 107 YMYGSCD, [02]2A-1, 31; Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 44. 108 YMYGSCD, [02]2A-1, 20.

51 the of Shanghai. 109 In 1893, still in Shanghai, American-owned Mercantile

Tobacco Company set up an even bigger cigarette-manufacturing facility with 10 machines and over 120 employees.110

Although Anglo-American tobacco companies and those trading firms run by American or

British expatriates in Shanghai undoubtedly were the main players in cigarette manufacturing, the expanding market also attracted capital from non-Anglo-American countries and local ventures joined the game in the late 1890s. For example, in 1897, the Mitsui Trading Company established

Mitsui Tobacco Factory (Cunjing yanchang) in Shanghai on behalf of Japan’s Murai Brothers

Tobacco Company.111 The following year, a few Turkish businessmen opened Taipei Tobacco

Factory (Taipei yanchang) in the District of Shanghai. It not only manufactured cigarettes, but also produced cigarette rolling machines for sale to Chinese startup companies or local tobacco workshops. And Taipei also exported its products to . This was the first time Chinese cigarettes were exported.112 Meanwhile, Chinese entrepreneurs also entered the growing cigarette market. In 1898, three Cantonese merchants opened the first Chinese factory to produce rolled cigarettes in Yichang, Hubei Province.113 In 1899, a merchant, Fan Shanqing, set up a hand-rolled cigarette workshop “Fanqingji” with 10 hand-rollers, each of whom could roll 1,000 cigarettes per day.114

109 Fang Xiantang, ed., Shanghai jindai minzu juanyan gongye (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1989), 10. 110 Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 45. 111 Fang, Shanghai jindai minzu juanyan gongye, 10. 112 Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 45. 113 Zhongguo yancao baikequanshu bianweihui, Zhongguo yancao baikequanshu, 1:72. 114 Fang, Shanghai jindai minzu juanyan gongye, 11-12; Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 10.

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Chinese-owned cigarette businesses had their origins during the period of 1895 to 1902, following the emergence of multinational tobacco corporations and the mass markets for standardized machine-made cigarettes in the United States and England roughly a decade earlier.

Chinese tobacco, again, participated in this global transformation. By the turn of the twentieth century, as a result of Western marketing strategies, many smokers in Shanghai and other major cities switched from pipe smoking or snuff to cigarette consumption. At the same time, the Chinese cigarette industry had taken initial shape with foreign tobacco companies beginning to build cigarette manufacturing facilities in China. Many players of various national origins vied with one another to sell cigarettes, making the Chinese cigarette business a highly competitive market. But after 1902, the giant British-American Tobacco Company changed the situation by monopolizing the Chinese cigarette market.

BAT Monopolizing Chinese Market: 1902-1919

During the first half of the twentieth century, the dominant player in the Chinese cigarette business was unquestionably BAT. Envisioning inland China as a limitless market, BAT was the first foreign tobacco company to extensively invest in producing and selling cigarettes beyond the coastal cities. By 1919, BAT had gained a monopoly over the Chinese tobacco industry and market by completing a vast nation-wide network of cigarette production and distribution facilities, supported by an omnipresent advertising campaign. “With its enormous production capacity and marketing structures that facilitated distribution down to the village level in many areas of China,

BAT was unrivaled in its ability to sell cigarettes to Chinese consumers.”115

115 Cochran, Big Business in China, 10.

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BAT originated from a compromise between two rival tobacco manufacturers: Duke’s

American Tobacco Company and the Imperial Tobacco Company of England. After an intense commercial rivalry between these two companies that lasted for a year, a truce was called in 1902.

The merger created a new company—British-American Tobacco Company—which became the leading multinational corporation in global tobacco business during the first half of the twentieth century.116 Immediately after the founding of BAT, Duke established BAT’s China branch in

Shanghai. From 1902 to 1905, before the company extended its reach into China’s interior, Duke first consolidated BAT’s position in China by bringing Anglo-American cigarette factories and firms, such as Mustard & Company and the American Cigarette Company, together under BAT management.117 Moreover, he devised professional management for BAT’s China branch that consisted of a managing director as the head of the office and an administrative staff that worked within specialized departments concentrating on manufacturing, marketing, purchasing, accounting, legal affairs, and even tobacco growing.118 When the consolidation was completed, in

1905, Duke appointed his trusted subordinate James Thomas the managing director of BAT’s

China branch to take charge of the task of expanding BAT’s business in China using the same methods Duke had used earlier in his campaign to take over the American cigarette market.

In 1905, James Thomas drew up the basic business strategy for BAT’s expansion in China:

“controlling the Shanghai market” while the company obtained “the authority to build affiliates in other parts of China.”119 According to this strategy, from 1905 to 1919, a considerable part of the capital that BAT invested in China was used to enlarge its production capacities. In 1906, the

116 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 46-77. 117 YMYGSCD, [06]2B, 2. 118 Ibid., 3-4. 119 Ying Mei, 1:14.

54 company built an extension to BAT’s factory in Pudong District of Shanghai and a new factory in

Hankou. A few years later, due to the high demand for cigarettes in both locations and surrounding areas, BAT added one additional factory in each city (Hankou in 1911 and Pudong in 1914). It also entered the Manchurian market by building a cigarette manufacturing facility in

(Mukeden) in 1909 and purchasing the A. Lopato & Sons cigarette factory from its original

Russian owner in 1914. 120 By the late 1910s, BAT had already successfully established a nationwide system of cigarette manufacturing with robust production capacity that continued to increase year after year. Sherman Cochran estimates the number of cigarettes that BAT’s factories produced in 1916 was “between one half and two thirds of the 12 billion cigarettes it marketed annually there [China].”121 Output figures surpassed 12 billion in just 3 years.122

In addition to the cigarette manufacturing, a nationwide distribution system also was built to make sure its products reached all parts of the country. Copying what Duke had achieved in the

United States, Thomas created an administrative hierarchy of branch sales offices from center cities in China’s macroregional markets down to county-level townships. Beginning in 1905, he dispatched Western sales representatives, the majority of whom were from the American South, to form twenty to twenty-five divisional offices in all parts of the country.123 These territorial sales

“divisions,” each covering one to several provinces, were further split into many prefecture-level

“sections” (duan) led by Chinese “principal managers” (da jingli). These managers divided their sections into several county-level sub-sections managed by locally recruited “Little Managers”

120 Ibid., 155-162. 121 Cochran, Big Business in China, 16. 122 BAT’s factories produced 12.022 billion cigarettes in 1919 (240,440 cases, 50,000 sticks per case) without counting the production of the Lopato's factory in . See Ying Mei, 4:1635-6; Cox, The Global Cigarette, 158. 123 Ying Mei, 2:730.

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(xiao jingli).124 Once cigarettes were produced in the factories, BAT transported them to the division centers by railroad or steam boat. The devision offices distributed them further down the line to local offices. These offices at different levels were responsible for the company’s warehouses where cigarettes were further distributed to local wholesalers, retailers, and customers.

The British minister to China, Sir John Jordan, observed in 1912 that there was “probably not a city of any size in the eighteen provinces where such warehouses have not been established by the

British-American Tobacco Company.” 125 Through its territorial sales organization, BAT developed the capability to distribute cigarettes on an enormous scale not only in the main cities but also in every inland region.

To promote sales of cigarettes through this vast distribution system, BAT continued to employ mass-marketing techniques such as advertising campaigns that ATC had used in Shanghai during the 1890s. This time, however, it brought the campaigns to a much higher level. Printing factories, affiliated with the cigarette plants, manufactured advertising materials such as flyers, big wall posters, small monthly calendar posters (yuefenpai), collectable cigarette cards, and even neon-lit advertising equipment. The company’s sales representatives and retailers were instructed to utilize these materials to the maximum. Beautifully designed images of BAT’s cigarette brands were ubiquitous from Shanghai and other cities to the most remote towns and .

As Cochran has remarked, “The BAT advertising system left no region of China untouched.”126

In 1905 in Manchuria, for example, BAT put up 2,000 large paper placards and 200 large wooden or iron signboards in the city of Yingkou alone. In , Henan Province, a newspaper

124 Ibid., 731. 125 Cochran, Big Business in China, 17. 126 Ibid., 19.

56 correspondent reported in 1907 that “the whole city has been placarded with thousands of staring

[BAT] advertisements.”127 As a Chinese journalist wrote, “Many rural Chinese villages still don’t know who in the world Sun Yat-sen is, but very few places have not known Ruby Queen cigarettes.”128 The observation was made in 1934, but the BAT advertising system had already attained these outcomes much earlier in the 1910s.

By 1919, BAT had achieved the initial monopolization of the Chinese market by completing its nationwide systems of cigarette manufacturing, distribution, and marketing. In that year, BAT sold almost 15.5 billion cigarettes to Chinese smokers.129 The company’s share in the Chinese cigarette market was steadily above 50 percent in the 1900s and 1910s, and continued to increase to 60 to 80 percent in the 1920s and 1930s.130 Foreseeing a sustained period of growth ahead,

BAT’s headquarters in London made the decision to reorganize and expand its China branch after the First World War. In 1919, 6 BAT board members arrived in Shanghai from London to form a new holding company called “BAT Co. (China) Ltd.” which was granted authorized capital of 225 million Mexican dollars and handed exclusive authority over BAT’s assets and operations in

China.131 Having greater capital and autonomy, the new company was ready to take the Chinese cigarette business to the next level by further strengthening BAT’s monopoly in the 1920s and

1930s.

127 Ying Mei, 2:650. 128 This quote is originally from the article “Huashang juanyanchang 24 jia lianming chengqing xiugai shuize,” that was published in Shen bao (March 20, 1934). Scholars have frequently used this evidence in their studies to show the wide popularity of BAT’s cigarettes in Republican China. See Cochran, “Transnational Origins of Advertising,” in Cochran, Inventing Nanjing Road, 57; Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 139. Here I follow Benedict’s translation. 129 BAT’s sales number was 15,451,400,000 (309,028 cases, 50,000 sticks per case) in 1919, including cigarettes produced in China and those imported from England and the United States. See Ying Mei, 2:512, 733; Cox, The Global Cigarettes, 157; Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 137. 130 Ibid. 131 Ying Mei, 1:31-33; YMYGSCD, [06]2B, 3, 15; Cox, The Global Cigarettes, 162-165.

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The most significant outcome of BAT’s business expansion in China was increased cigarette consumption among Chinese consumers, along with the spread of new products across the country.

BAT’s ability to deliver enormous quantities of its products not only to coastal urban markets but also to cities, towns, and even villages in the interior made industrially produced cigarettes accessible to consumers of all income levels and locations. Rival firms, foreign and domestic, followed the BAT model to promote their cigarette brands outside of major cities. More and more

Chinese became cigarette smokers by abandoning traditional forms of tobacco consumption.

Although the vast majority of urban and rural low-income smokers were still smoking pipes because they simply could not afford even the cheapest cigarette, it is safe to say that a mass market for industrial cigarettes was firmly in place in some areas of the country before 1920s. This market, continued to expand in the next few decades until cigarette eventually replaced all other traditional forms of tobacco consumption after 1949.

Conclusion

The dramatic rise of cigarette consumption in China from 1885 to 1919 raises the question of why it only took three decades for Western tobacco companies, particularly BAT, to change the very foundations of China’s tobacco culture which had been developed in China in the past three centuries. In their focused studies of BAT’s history in China, Sherman Cochran, Howard Cox, and

Carol Benedict have offered a number of explanations to account for BAT’s success and the consequent increase in cigarette consumption. Abundant capital, technological advantages, efficient production techniques, advanced advertising and marketing techniques, vertical integration of production and distribution, privileges on taxes and tariffs, diplomatic support from the United States and Britain—all these factors contributed to the supremacy of BAT in the

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Chinese market. Above all, the three authors also point out that the success of “the global cigarette,” as Cox calls it, in China rested on the foundations of the traditional Chinese tobacco economy and culture.

In marketing their cigarettes, BAT and other foreign companies benefited vastly from the fact that distribution networks for domestic and imported tobacco products already existed in China.

BAT’s success in penetrating interior markets heavily relied on preexisting distribution channels and Chinese merchants who had rich experience in the tobacco business. As Cox remarks, “the

Chinese themselves had already created distribution systems capable of channeling goods to markets throughout China…Thomas’ main achievement on behalf of BAT lay in his ability to utilize these Chinese merchant networks...”132 For example, in the early 1900s, with the joint efforts of BAT and its local agent Mustard & Company, six biggest local tobacco shops (yanhang) in Shanghai formed the Shanghai Cigarette Company under the leadership of Wu Tingsheng.

Through this company, BAT was able to sell cigarettes not only in Shanghai but also in the cities, towns, and villages of the Lower Yangzi River delta by utilizing these tobacco shops’ preexisting sales networks that had been controlling the tobacco business in the region for over a century.

Later, BAT employed similar strategies in every regional market of the country. Countless local small to large size tobacco shops and street peddlers who had been selling shredded tobacco leaves for generations now incorporated cigarettes into their business. As Cochran notes, “Once this

[BAT’s] marketing system delivered the goods to the core of a regional market, Chinese agents and merchants, no Westerners, invariably managed local distribution.”133

132 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 148. 133 Cochran, Big business in China, 32.

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The rapid acceptance of the cigarette by Chinese consumers can also be attributed to the fact that large numbers of Chinese were already addicted to nicotine, and, more importantly, many of them were well acquainted with imported tobacco products such as water pipe tobacco and snuff from Europe. Most of the early adopters were either wealthy merchants and gentry or the relatively well-off urban middle class who had close ties to Western firms. They accepted cigarettes quickly because they considered it an exotic Western import that could make their smoking practices fashionable, just as elite adopted the water pipe and snuff roughly a century before. Once cigarettes were equated with “modern” and “stylish,” traditional forms of smoking soon became “backward” and “feudal,” just as the dry pipe became passé during the late eighteenth century.134 The change of perception about smoking drove people to pursue the fashionable cigarette when it was available and affordable to them. In other words, a very important reason for Chinese accepting cigarettes in a rapid fashion was the existence of a tradition of pursuing fashionable import tobacco.

Building upon the traditional tobacco economy and culture of China, Western multinational firms led the drive of cigarette production and consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by using foreign direct investment, Western industrial technologies, and modern forms of advertising and mass marking. The initial establishment of the Chinese cigarette industry brought great changes to Chinese tobacco, economically, culturally, and ecologically.

Starting from the early 1910s, BAT spent three decades developing tobacco growing regions in

North China that produced American Bright Tobacco for its cigarette manufacturing operation.

134 See Chapter Four for the detailed discussion on this transitional Chinese tobacco culture.

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CHAPTER TWO

MAKING TOBACCO BRIGHT135

In 1904, Flower, an American agriculturalist hired by the Leaf Tobacco Department (yanye bu) of BAT’s China branch, traveled north from the city of Hankou to Northern Hubei Province and Henan Province looking for places where tobacco was grown. With the help of Chinese interpreters and local merchants, Flower eventually learned that “the center of the tobacco district lies about three hundred (300) miles north of Hankow [Hankou], along the line of and to the north of the Yangtze River in Honan [Henan] and Hupeh [Hubei] Provinces.” 136 On a mission of investigating Chinese tobacco that required him to classify local varieties scientifically, Flower found out he had chosen a difficult task because the Chinese defined tobacco varieties and graded tobacco qualities very differently from the American standards. He noted:

“These two provinces are divided into numerous districts which are supposed by the Chinese to produce tobaccos of different flavors, and it is from these different districts or localities that the tobacco gets its different names or so-called grades. The grades, therefore, as numerous as the districts in which tobacco is grown…so far as I could determine, there is nothing in the quality of the different tobaccos to call for a different classification or grade.”137

Although it seemed chaotic and unscientific to the American agriculturalist, there was, in fact, a sophisticated system for the production of pipe and snuff tobacco in China. By the time

Flower visited “the center of the tobacco district” in Henan and Hubei provinces, Chinese farmers had developed many tobacco varieties to cope with the diverse physical environments they had encountered in their three hundred years of tobacco cultivation. Moreover, they used similar sun-

135 This title is from Barbara Hahn’s Making Tobacco Bright. See Barbara Hahn, Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2011). 136 YMYGSCD, [76]14B3, 51. 137 Ibid.

61 curing or air-curing methods to process different leaves to produce the best pipe and snuff tobaccos. As Flower also noted, “All tobacco, heavy and light, are sun-dried for about an equal length of time.”138 The quality of Chinese tobacco could not meet the requirements of machine-rolled cigarettes, at least not for BAT’s high-quality brands, because it was grown selectively and processed particularly for different consumption purposes.

As the demand for cheap raw materials kept rising during the first decade of the twentieth century, BAT began to look for places in China that could potentially grow American bright tobacco. Based on the surveys and studies conducted by American agriculturalists like Flower,

BAT eventually decided to promote bright tobacco in the North China Plain in 1913. Within about two decades, BAT had successfully established three bright tobacco growing areas in Eastern

Shandong Province, Central Henan Province, and Northern Anhui Province. Meanwhile, BAT started a purchasing system in these areas that included several leaf re-curing factories and many tobacco collecting stations to achieve vertical integration of its operations in China, as Duke had for the American tobacco industry in the 1880s. By establishing growing bases for American bright tobacco cultivation and a purchasing network for collecting leaves, BAT completed a commodity chain of cigarette production that reached from the tobacco fields in North China to its cigarette factories in Shanghai and other major cities.

This chapter examines the agro-ecological transformations in three localities of the North

China Plain that took place between 1913 and 1937, a period when BAT introduced the cultivation of American bright tobacco and modernized Chinese tobacco agriculture. By presenting details of this history, I argue that BAT’s agricultural operation left far-reaching ecological and economic

138 Ibid., 52.

62 influences. The establishment of bright tobacco production in Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and Northern Anhui resulted in the transformation of local agro-economies to what Donald

Worster calls “the capitalist mode of production.”139 Incorporated into BAT’s commodity chain of cigarette production, agriculture and society in these regions underwent substantial changes in the transition from a peasant economy to an emerging market economy. Under the theme of “the capitalist transformation of nature,” I discuss several specific ecological impacts that were caused by bright tobacco production. As BAT distributed American seeds and spread modern agricultural technologies, the agricultural structure of three areas was permanently reshaped as American bright tobacco became the most widespread and profitable cash crop in local economies. The extensive cultivation of bright tobacco in North China caused simplification in agricultural diversity and consequent environmental degradation.

American Bright Tobacco

Before launching into a discussion of how BAT spreading American bright tobacco in North

China, it is useful to have a general understanding of this particular flue-cured type of tobacco that the modern cigarette industry heavily depended upon. Compared to air-cured or sun-cured varieties of pipe tobacco leaves that are mostly heavy and dark, bright tobacco is more suitable for cigarettes because of its light and golden color, mild flavor, and smooth inhalability. As a varietal type of

Nicotiana, bright tobacco is genetically distinctive from other kinds of leaves. However, the peculiarities of bright tobacco arise less from the seed than from the impact of cultivation methods on plant processes. As bright tobacco expert Nannie M. Tilley has noted, “the significance of the halting steps which eventually led to the new variety may be demonstrated best by an explanation

139 See Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1087-1106.

63 of the cultural factors which are now known to control the production of Bright Tobacco.”140 “The halting steps” are the semi-starvation processes in cultivating and curing the leaf. Bright tobacco requires a very particular environment—light, infertile, and loose sandy soils full of silicates that starve the leaf of nutrients that could make it dark and bitter. Once harvested, the leaves are cured by heat sent through flues in a further step of starvation, which eventually turns them bright yellow color. The curing facility usually consists of metal pipes connected with furnaces that open to the outside. The heat generated by furnaces circulates through the curing barn at the required temperature while smoke and gas are carried out by return pipes attached to the flues.141 This method, known as flue-curing, allowed for much greater control of the process and fixed the final color of the leaf both more rapidly and with much greater precision.142 Although such techniques also require specific agricultural work, especially the techniques used to harvest the crop, unlike other kinds of tobacco, bright tobacco is usually harvested one leaf a time instead of in whole stalks that are then hung for curing, the production of bright tobacco mainly rests on cultivation in a loose siliceous soil, and flue-curing.

These crucial innovations for making bright tobacco resulted from American tobacco growers’ long-term efforts to meet market demand for a brighter variety to replace the old colonial dark tobacco. In the practice of tobacco growing, American farmers discovered that a semi-starvation process could produce a milder type of tobacco as early as the mid-seventeenth century. In 1650,

Virginian farmer Edward Digges (ca. 1620-75) purchased a tract of land “…on York River…called

140 Nannie May Tilley, The Bright Tobacco Industry, 1860-1929 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 3-4. 141 Ibid., 4. 142 See Maurice Corina, Trust in Tobacco: The Anglo-American Struggle for Power (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), 48. For a summary of the different types of tobacco and the process of cigarette production from farm to factory, see David Tucker, Tobacco, An International Perspective (London: Euromonitor Publications, 1982), chaps. 1 and 2.

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Digges’s Neck, which is poorer than a great deal of other Land in the same Latitude, by a particular

Seed and Management, is made the famous [tobacco] Crop known by the Name of the E Dees, remarkable for its mild Taste and fine smell.”143 The gray soil with a sandy loam about eight inches in depth in Digges’s Neck soon made people realize that soil characteristic was a determining factor for the quality of tobacco.

The changes in processing tobacco leaf that happened almost two hundred years later marked the final stage of the evolution of bright tobacco. Particularly, “after the War of 1812, the foreign trade began to demand a milder and lighter-colored tobacco. The French especially desired a more aromatic leaf.”144 Tobacco growers in Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina all strove to produce a yellow and more aromatic leaf. But only people in the Virginia-Carolina

Tobacco Belt, specifically in the border region of Piedmont between Virginia and North Carolina, succeeded in creating such a variety during the years before the American Civil War, and ushered in a new era for bright tobacco in the Old Belt during antebellum years.

Traditionally, farmers had processed their tobacco crop either by sun-curing and air-curing in which the green tobacco leaves were hung out in large curing barns and simply left to dry, or through fire-curing in which the plant was hung over log fires and dried. The latter method had been used by farmers in the Piedmont region to treat tobacco grown in the sandy soil for quite a long time. In 1839, an eighteen-year-old slave-worker named Stephen who was supervising the curing of tobacco accidently placed hot charcoal on the log fire and, in doing so, unwittingly altered the form of tobacco produced. When he realized his mistake the next day, the transformation of

143 Tilley, The Bright Tobacco Industry, 6. 144 Ibid., 8.

65 the leaf had occurred from the contact with the smoke generated by the combination of woods and embers.145 “The accidental result of Stephen’s drowsiness was six hundred pounds of the brightest yellow tobacco ever seen.”146 Motivated farmers in Virginia and North Carolina later improved this curing process by using flue-pipes that channeled intensive heat from a furnace into a curing barn. With the discovery of growing tobacco in sandy but siliceous soil for a milder flavor and flue-curing tobacco leaf for yellow color, bright tobacco was first successfully produced by farmers in the Piedmont region and quickly became the dominant variety in the American South.

By 1877, “‘fancy yellow’ or Bright Tobacco had become a type of exceptional importance” in

American tobacco fields.147

The possibility of using flue-cured bright tobacco for cigarettes first emerged toward the end of the American Civil War. Union soldiers stationed in the Piedmont region, who were already accustomed to French-style cigarettes, adopted the new strain of tobacco to roll their own cigarettes. 148 Affordable cigarettes filled with American grown bright tobacco soon became prevalent in the United States during and after the Civil War. The growth of American cigarette consumption directly led to the emergence of many regional or national tobacco firms that produced hand-rolled cigarettes, including Allen & Ginter, the nation’s leading cigarette manufacturer in the 1880s and, of course, W. Duke, Sons & Co. at Durham in North Carolina which later evolved into the leading tobacco company in the world, British-American Tobacco

Company.149 “Between the Civil War and the New Deal, Bright Tobacco emerged to become the

145 Ibid., 23-26; Hahn, Making Tobacco Bright, 13; Goodman, Tobacco in History, 1:89-90. 146 Tilley, The Bright Tobacco Industry, 24. 147 Ibid., 3. 148 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 22; Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 26. 149 Brandt, The Cigarette Century, 26-27.

66 raw material of the cigarette revolution at the same time that the tobacco industry achieved near- monopoly.”150

Having recognizable and replicable means of cultivation and curing techniques meant that bright tobacco could be grown in many places around the globe. In the early twentieth century, as a result of ’s monopolization of the global cigarette business, bright tobacco spread to new locations on different continents when tobacco consumption began to shift from traditional forms to cigarettes. To save transportation and tariff costs, multinational tobacco companies invested capital and resources in establishing bright tobacco growing bases in target markets.

Farmers in South America, Africa, and Asia acquired bright tobacco seeds and the technologies for growing this particular plant from agricultural specialists hired by the corporations. BAT first brought bright tobacco cultivation into North China to replace the native varieties in the 1910s. As a contemporary Chinese scholar recorded, “tobacco was introduced into China through the

Philippines at the beginning of the seventeenth century and was re-introduced directly from

Virginia around 1913.”151

Inspecting Chinese Tobacco

In the early years, foreign companies imported tobacco leaves from the American South to supply their cigarette factories in China. During the 1890s, the amount of American tobacco exported to China was relatively low due to the small scale of domestic cigarette production. Most cigarettes sold in the Chinese market were transported from factories in England and the United

States. However, when BAT began to expand its business in China after 1902, imports of American

150 Hahn, Making Tobacco Bright, 6. 151 YMYGSCD, [74] 14-A3, 43.

67 tobacco went up sharply in the 1900s and 1910s in accordance with the increasing production and sales of cigarettes. The bulk of American imported tobacco grew about sixty-five times from

217,000 pounds in 1900 to 13,009,000 pounds in 1919.152 Trans-Pacific carriage and tariffs certainly became significant parts of production costs, especially for BAT, since it was the biggest cigarette manufacturer in China. To lower costs and maximize profits, BAT’s management showed an interest in utilizing locally grown leaves for the manufacture of its products and promoted growing bright tobacco among Chinese farmers. As stated in “The Record in China of the British-

America Tobacco Co.,” “this company [BAT] has endeavored to produce in this country a cigarette of the same standard and quality as that made in its factories in England and America, and at the same time it has sought to encourage the Chinese farmer to produce a grade of tobacco as good as that produced in Virginia and Carolina.”153

To find native leaves that could be used in cigarettes as well as places in China where bright tobacco could be potentially grown, BAT sent out agricultural specialists from North Carolina to conduct a nationwide inspection of Chinese tobacco from 1904 to 1914. Over the decade, these specialists traveled to at least fifty areas in fourteen provinces, and they visited most places several times. 154 The investigations that covered every macroregions of China were thorough and comprehensive. Reports submitted to BAT headquarters in Shanghai indicate American experts not only looked into local tobacco varieties and agricultural conditions such as soil, irrigation, and climate, but also surveyed rural populations, transportation, local society, and other crucial elements that could affect tobacco cultivation.

152 YMYGSCD, [72] 14-A1, 23. 153 YMYGSCD, [02]2A-1, 36. 154 Ying Mei 1:240-241.

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In searching for a local substitute for American imported tobacco, BAT’s specialists did find a few high-quality native tobaccos. But the best use of these Chinese leaves was merely blending them with American tobacco for making low-grade cigarettes. In general, compared to bright tobacco, “these so-called native plants are rather small in size with a poor leaf development and are entirely different in growth habit from the most common strains grown in Virginia.”155 As detailed in the previous chapter, traditionally, Chinese farmers employed their own farming knowledge and techniques in tobacco growing to cope with China’s diverse environment and agricultural systems. The different procedures controlling production determined that Chinese varieties had distinct features from bright tobacco.156

The poor quality of native leaves and growing demands for bright tobacco in China necessitated the introduction of new varieties directly from the United States. Considering the situation, “…as early as 1906 Duke sent American agricultural specialists from North Carolina to conduct experiments with American tobacco seed in China.”157 During their investigations all over the country, BAT’s specialists had encouraged local farmers to grow bright tobacco by giving away free seeds. In Northern Hubei around 1909, for example, they “distributed seeds at different villages, and left with the Magistrate a lot of seed and books, and told him to give them out when the people came in to pay their taxes.”158 Meanwhile, from 1910 to 1912, BAT set up experimental farms in Guanghua and Laohekou in Hubei Province, and in the port city of Weihaiwei in

Shandong Province. 159 Experiments in these locations failed because of the heavy rainfall in

155 YMYGSCD, [74] 14-A3, 43. 156 More evidence about native tobaccos were not suitable for cigarettes can be found in Chen Zhen, ed., Zhongguo jindai gongyeshi ziliao, ’er ji (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1958), 140. 157 Cochran, Big Business in China, 22. 158 YMYGSCD, [76]14B3, 82. 159 Wang, “Jindai Shandong yancaoye yanjiu,” 20-21.

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Hubei and excessive moisture from the sea in Weihaiwei. Roughly around the same time, BAT also conducted experiments with limited success in Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Jilin provinces.160

Eventually, BAT realized the North China Plain, including the Huai River Valley, had the most suitable soil and climate conditions for growing bright tobacco. As one of China’s largest agricultural alluvial plains, the North China Plain was created by the Yellow River. In the middle course, the Yellow River flows through the Loess Plateau in North and then enters a flat land mass in the east, carrying immense amounts of silt. For millennia, “repeated inundation and silt deposition” by the Yellow River shaped the soils of the North China Plain.161 The “loess” that has been redistributed downstream by the Yellow River makes the surface soil of the North

China Plain almost perfect for the cultivation of bright tobacco: loose, sandy, and full of silt. In

1921, BAT asked Brunner, Mond, and Company to analyze soil samples from the North China

Plain. The report noted that “the chief fractions [of Chinese soils] being ‘Fine Sand’ and ‘Silt’.

The proportions of the finest fractions ‘Fine Silt’ and ‘Clay’ are together greater than in the case of the American [North Carolina] soils.” Therefore, for cultivating bright tobacco, “the texture of these soils…will probably be more satisfactory than that of the American soils, and they will suffer less in times of drought by reason of their greater receptivity for water.”162

Thus, in the early 1910s, BAT’s management decided to promote bright tobacco cultivation in three locations on the North China Plain: the region of Eastern Shandong centered in Weixian

(modern day Weifang), the region of Central Henan centered in Xuchang, and the region of

160 Chen Zhen, ed., Zhongguo jindai gongyeshi ziliao, di yi ji (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1957), 731; Zhang Youyi, ed., Zhongguo jindai nongye shi ziliao, di’er ji (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1957), 152-153,503,508. 161 David A. Pietz, The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 12-14. 162 YMYGSCD, [76] 14B3, 116.

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Northern Anhui centered in Fengyang. After inspecting the Weixian area, American specialists concluded that “judging from the soil and general conditions, we are of the opinion that good tobacco can be raised here of the same type as is raised in Virginia and North Carolina.”163 In addition, German coal mines located in the region could provide cheap and sufficient fuel for flue- curing the leaves.164 Environmental conditions in Xuchang and surrounding areas were even better than in Weixian. Similarly, the British-owned coal mines in the western part of Central Henan

“ensure[d] the fuel supply for the flue-curing process.”165 As for Northern Anhui, the soil was not as good as the other two locations because it contained a relatively larger portion of clay. The quality of leaves could be affected when encountering heavy rainfalls. In general, however, the area was still a good location for growing bright tobacco.

Most importantly, transportation played a key role in BAT choosing these sites. In the 1900s, the Qing imperial government launched a series of reforms () to accommodate at least some limited forms of economic modernization, including construction of a railway network linking the major cities of China. All three areas were located along railways. The tobacco growing area in Eastern Shandong lay along the Qingdao-Jinan Railway (or Jiaozhou-Jinan Railway, commonly known in Chinese as jiaoji lu). Tobacco produced there could be shipped to Qingdao by rail, then transported to Shanghai by ship. 166 Xuchang was one of the major stations on the

Beijing-Hankou Railway (jinghan lu). Central Henan’s tobacco could be easily transported from

Xuchang station to BAT’s factories in Hankou within one day or further shipped to Shanghai through the Yangzi River waterway. The Tianjin-Nanjing Railway (or Tianjin-Pukou Railway,

163 Ibid., 103 164 Ibid., 109. 165 Ying Mei, 1:272. 166 YMYGSCD, [76] 14B3, 109.

71 commonly known in Chinese as jinpu lu) went through Fengyang before it reached Nanjing in the south. Tobacco grown in Northern Anhui could be shipped to Nanjing and Shanghai directly by cargo trains. As a BAT executive recalled in the 1930s, “we took Shantung [Shandong] and Honan

[Henan] because they were the most convenient. Both were served by railways and the soil and climatic conditions appeared suitable.”167

Introducing the “American Seed Tobacco”: 1913-1919

Throughout the 1910s, flue-cured varieties like those grown in the American South such as

“Virginia” and “Orinaco” were brought to North China by BAT for extensive cultivation. These new plants were popularly known as “American seed tobacco” (meizhong yan) in contrast to

Chinese varieties which were universally called “native seed tobacco” (tuzhong yan). By 1913,

BAT had successfully produced the first Chinese-grown harvest of bright tobacco on its experimental farms at Fangzi in Weixian and Xiangcheng near Xuchang.168 While conducting trial planting on these farms, American agricultural specialists invited local farmers to observe “exactly what we did. We then gave them seedling plants, and our experts supervised their operations, and subsequently we gave them seed.”169 The successful experiments on these farms encouraged BAT to promote bright tobacco among local peasants more vigorously in the following year.

To induce Chinese peasants to plant bright tobacco, BAT offered a number of incentives, including giving away free tobacco seeds imported from the American South, sending out

American experts to provide training for growing and curing the new leaf, helping to build curing barns and lending curing equipment, loaning fertilizers to farmers at very low interest, promising

167 YMYGSCD, [75] 14B1-2, 83. 168 Ibid., 52-54. 169 Ibid., 83.

72 to pay cash for the entire first harvest regardless of its quality, and even assuring peasants that the company would compensate them for any damages or losses that they might suffer from the change-over to bright tobacco. 170 Among these terms, the greatest stimulus to peasants was offering immediate cash payments for the leaves. Since the completion of the Qingdao-Jinan

Railway in 1904, the Beijing-Hankou Railway in 1906, and the Tianjin-Nanjing Railway in 1912, the traditional peasant economy began to rapidly transform toward a market economy in North

China, especially in the areas along the railroads. The peasants more and more often found themselves in urgent need of cash to buy industrial-made consumer goods and to pay taxes.171

However, under the traditional market system, it was difficult for peasants to obtain ready cash from selling their tobacco leaves. Before BAT entered North China, tobacco was generally collected by local tobacco brokers or freelance tobacco collectors who visited peasant families door to door to weigh and record the leaves during the harvest. But they only paid a small portion of the price to peasants at the time of purchase. The larger part usually was not paid until six months later and only after peasants made repeated demands.172 Therefore, when BAT offered an attractive price for bright tobacco leaves and immediately paid cash at the time of sale, destitute peasants quickly turned to the cultivation of bright tobacco and abandoned the native seed as well as other crops that had been grown on their lands for centuries.

In 1914, while the majority of local farmers remained wary, a small number in both locations opted to grow American seeds under the company’s training and supervision. In Xiangcheng

County, for example, a local gentry, Ma Wenjie, used thirty mu of his land to grow bright tobacco.

170 Ibid., 29. 171 Ibid., 32-33. 172 Chen Han-Seng, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants: A Study of the Livelihood of Chinese Tobacco Cultivators (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, Limited, 1939), 8.

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After the harvest, he received ten times more cash for the leaves than he would have earned if he had grown wheat. Within just a few years, Ma quickly became one of the richest landlords in

Xiangcheng by growing bright tobacco for BAT.173 His success and that of a few others in both

Henan and Shandong stimulated local peasants to follow in their steps. Even though BAT’s promotional efforts lasted only a few years, the number of peasants engaging in bright tobacco cultivation significantly increased in two areas in the late 1910s. More and more peasants, whether they had experience in growing tobacco or not, converted their fields from native tobacco, wheat, sweet potato, and other crops to bright tobacco. A saying popularized in rural central Henan during the late 1910s: “If you have ten mu land, use eight to grow tobacco, and the other two for sweet potatoes. Then you can hold the sky.”174

Masses getting into the business led to a tremendous increase in tobacco cultivation and yield.

In Weixian region, the land used for tobacco expanded from about 80 mu in 1913 to 95,000 mu in

1915, then to 110,000 mu in 1919.175 The yield of bright tobacco skyrocketed to eight million pounds in 1917, and BAT “alone bought nearly twenty-nine million pounds of tobacco in Shantung

[Shandong]” in the next year.176 Meanwhile, Central Henan also experienced an astonishingly rapid expansion of bright tobacco. In 1917, peasants in this region utilized about seven million mu of land to produce around two million pounds of bright tobacco.177

173 Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, Xiangcheng yancaozhi, 250. 174 Li Gengwu, ed., Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua (Xuchang: Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua bianji weiyuanhui, 1992), 29; Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, ed., Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di qi ji (Xuchang: Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, 1993), 241. 175 Wang, “Jindai Shandong yancaoye yanjiu,” 22; Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks, 65. 176 YMYGSCD, [75] 14B1-2, 49. 177 Zhang, “1912-1937 nian de Henan yancaoye,” 12; Henansheng defang shizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Henan shengzhi, nongye juan (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1993), 172. Henan mu was about one fifth of Shandong mu.

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With the success in Shandong and Henan, BAT confidently further expanded its promotional operations to Fengyang region in Northern Anhui Province a few years after the completion of the

Tianjin-Nanjing Railway.178 “During the year 1916 investigations were made of the Feng Yang district and some farmers were induced to plant experimental plots of Virginia bright leaf tobacco.”

179 Results came quickly. Although the scale of bright tobacco cultivation in Fengyang was much smaller than that in Shandong and Henan, peasants in this region still produced approximately

200,000 pounds of tobacco in 1917 and around 625,000 pounds in the following year.180

Besides distribution of American seeds, BAT’s agriculturists were also dedicated to educating local peasants with modern agricultural technologies to ensure the quality of the leaves they produced. The Chinese had indeed developed their own agricultural expertise in centuries of tobacco growing, but for production purposes, quantity was the aim rather than quality in the peasant economy, so tobacco was often grown with only a minimum of effort and in the fastest way possible. In the 1900s, BAT’s employees had noticed in many places that “the Chinese grow their tobacco closer than in America.”181 When visiting of Henan in 1905, they were surprised that “the tobacco is gathered regardless of being ripe. Most of the farmers commence drying as soon as the tobacco has finished growing…as [they] wanted to use [their] land for some other crop.”182 And it was also commonly seen that tobacco was handled with attention and care that varied among individuals, households, or regions. Apparently, “Chinese- style” growing techniques and habits could not be used to produce high quality bright tobacco,

178 Ying Mei, 1:266-267. 179 YMYGSCD, [80] 14D4, 21. Also see Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi hudian, 1173. 180 YMYGSCD, [80] 14D4, 21. 181 YMYGSCD, [76]14B3, 83. 182 Ibid., 54.

75 which required close attention and precise procedures. Therefore, BAT invested substantial manpower and resources in teaching local peasants the most advanced modern farming technologies specifically designed for production of bright tobacco.

As soon as the distribution of American seeds began, “in 1914, the Company…at Ershilipu

[of Weixian]…helped local farmers to produce the leaf with the most modern methods.” 183 Later on, BAT’s Leaf Tobacco Department recruited over fifty American tobacco experts between 1916 and 1920 to provide training for the tobacco growers in three regions under the supervision of R.

H. Gregory.184 In addition, to spread the new agricultural technologies more effectively, BAT compiled a pamphlet titled Meizhong yanye zhinan (“Guidelines for Growing American Seed

Tobacco”) and distributed copies among peasants along with bright tobacco seeds. This little illustrated book contained specific instructions for every step of bright tobacco production from planting seeds, fertilization, seedlings, weeding, spacing between rows, pest control, plucking, construction of curing barns, flue-curing techniques, and grading.185

American agriculturalists passed on their knowledge without reservation. The techniques peasants had learned from BAT were no different from those used by their American peers. It is difficult to draw a conclusion as to what extent BAT’s efforts to spread agricultural technologies contributed to the modernization of Chinese agriculture in general, but there is no doubt BAT’s operation modernized the Chinese tobacco agriculture by promoting not only the technologies but also the idea of “scientific farming.” As Sherman Cochran noted, the Chinese praised BAT for initiating the “scientific cultivation of tobacco [which] has been one of the greatest blessings that

183 Ying Mei, 1:270. 184 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 165-166. 185 YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 44-53.

76 ever happened to Shantung [Shandong].”186 Meizhong yanye zhinan, “for the first ,” advocated “farmers should use scientific methods to grow tobacco.”187 It thereby had a long-term influence on China’s tobacco agriculture. “Many basic techniques demonstrated in this pamphlet are still used in China today.” 188

As a result of BAT’s agricultural operation, American leaves produced in North China were good enough to be used in the highest quality cigarettes made by BAT in China. A study by the

United States government showed that, among bright tobacco planted in many locations around the world, Chinese produced leaves “came closest of all to duplicating the color and texture if not the aroma of the American original.”189 Although over 80 percent of the bright tobacco used in

BAT’s factories was still imported from the United States by 1919, BAT’s executives were more than satisfied with the transportation and taxation costs they had saved by using Chinese grown leaves. The positive outcome encouraged BAT to further expand production of bright tobacco in the 1920s and 1930s.

Expansion of Bright Tobacco Cultivation: 1919-1937

From 1913 to 1919, BAT’s operation of continuous and ever-widening distribution of

American seeds resulted in the great popularity of bright tobacco cultivation in Eastern Shandong,

Central Henan, and Northern Anhui. After BAT reorganized its business in China in 1919, the newly established company invested more capital and resources to induce peasants to convert land to plant American seeds with even more astonishing speed during the years between the two world wars. “The number of m[u] in American seed tobacco increased 66.5 percent within the period

186 Cochran, Big Business in China, 24. 187 YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 44. 188 Zhu Hanchuan, ed., Zhongguo yancao zhishi daquan, (: Hubei kexue jishu chubanshe, 1999), 819. 189 Cochran, Big Business in China, 23.

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1921 to 1934.”190 Unquestionably, BAT had successfully turned the three regions into its tobacco growing bases in the 1920s and 1930s.

During the 1920s, in Eastern Shandong, bright tobacco cultivation spread from Weixian to nine counties along the Qingdao-Jinan Railway: Linju, Linzi, Yidu, Anqiu, Changyi, Changle,

Shouguang, Guangrao, and Hengtai (see Map 2.1). In these districts, the total amount of land devoted to bright tobacco increased from 460,500 mu (153,500 local mu) in 1920 to 600,000 mu

(200,000 local mu) by 1923.191 A journalist from Shanghai described his first encounter with the prosperous tobacco cultivation along the railway at the time: “on the train, I saw leafy plants everywhere. Like flowers or vegetables. Asked around, thus knew they were tobacco.” 192

Although in the mid-1920s, the amount of tobacco land dropped to about 150,000 mu (50,000 local mu) due to severe interruptions caused by local warfare, it quickly recovered to 431,400 mu

(143,800 local mu) in 1930, and continued to rise in the following years.193 By the early 1930s, bright tobacco produced in Eastern Shandong was widely used in cigarette products manufactured in China, and Qingzhou Tobacco (Qingzhou yan) had gained a national reputation as the finest domestic cigarette tobacco.194

190 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 17. 191 Ramon Myers, The Chinese Peasant Economy: Agricultural Development in Hopei and Shantung, 1890-1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 349, citation 11. During the Republican period, one mu was normally about one-sixth of an acre. However, considerable variations occurred in some localities. One mu in Eastern Shandong was about half an acre. Therefore, Shandong mu was three times bigger than the standard mu, which was used in Henan and Anhui. See Ying Mei, 1:399. 192 Shiyebu guoji maoyiju, ed., Zhongguo shiyezhi, Shandongsheng (Nanjing: Shiyebu guoji maoyiju, 1934), 5:108. 193 Ibid., 8:457. 194 Weixian area was called “Qingzhou” in ancient times.

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Map 2.1: The Tobacco Growing Area in Eastern Shandong.195

In the meantime, production of bright tobacco in Central Henan was expanding to an even greater scale, from Xuchang and Xiangcheng to about a dozen counties in the region: Yuxian,

Jiaxian, and Linru in the northwest, Baofeng and Lushan directly west, Yexian to the southwest,

Linying and Yangcheng in the south, and across the Beijing-Hankou Railway to in the northeast (see Map 2.2). In the 1910s, the Qing government determined that only 75,928 mu of

Henan’s cultivated land were used to produce tobacco.196 By 1934, the total figure of tobacco land in the province had risen thirteen-fold to 993,000 mu, of which over eighty percent was concentrated in Central Henan growing American leaves.197 Undoubtedly, Central Henan had become the largest bright tobacco growing area not only in the region of North China Plain but also in the whole country. As the center of the tobacco area where the leaves were gathered,

195 Wang, “Jindai Shandong yancaoye yanjiu,” 50. 196 Zhang Hongfeng, “1912-1937 nian de Henan yancao ye,” 12. 197 Liu Shixue and Xie Xuedong, ed., Henan jindai jingji (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 1988), 93.

79 processed, and exported, the rail town of Xuchang had developed from a standard market town in the 1910s into one of the largest and richest city in Henan province by the early 1930s. The Chinese had given the city a new name—tobacco capital (Yan du)—to recognize its important place in

China’s tobacco industry.198 For smokers and people in the tobacco business, Xuchang Leaf (Xuye) was equally considered the best cigarette tobacco alongside Qingzhou Tobacco. The leaves produced in Central Henan was also well known in the market as the “Golden Leaf” (huangjin ye) for their bright yellow color and fine texture.199

Map 2.2: The Tobacco Growing Area in Central Henan.

198 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 323; Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 25; Li Gengwu, “Ying Mei yan gongsi he Xuhang yanqushi,” Zhongguo yancao kexue no. 2 (1989), 35. 199 “Henan yancao chanliang diaocha tongji,” Yancao yuekan 1, no.10 (1947), 155.

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BAT introduced bright tobacco into Northern Anhui later than Shandong and Henan, and the scale of cultivation in this area was also the smallest during the 1920s and 1930s. The clay soil in many places around Fengyang restricted the spread of bright tobacco cultivation while the rainy climate and occasional floods of the Hui River often resulted in inferior tobacco leaves. By the mid-1930s, bright tobacco cultivation only extended from Fengyang to three other counties:

Huaiyuan and Lingbi to the north and Dingyuan directly south. Peasants in Shouxian, Suxian, and

Sixian also grew bright tobacco on a small scale (see Map 3).200 Yet, BAT’s agricultural operation in Northern Anhui still can be considered successful as the amount of land for planting bright tobacco increased to approximately 330,000 mu by 1937.201

Map 2.3: The Tobacco Growing Area in Northern Anhui

200 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 1174. 201 In 1947, the total acreage of tobacco land in Northern Anhui was roughly 110,000 to 120,000 mu, one third of the total right before the Japanese invasion. Therefore, in 1937, the total amount of land dedicated to bright tobacco in the region was approximately 330,000 mu. See Ibid.

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Needless to say, large-scale production of bright tobacco was firmly in place in these three areas during the 1920s and 1930s. At harvest time, the landscape around Weixian in Shandong,

Xuchang in Henan, and Fengyang in Anhui was dominated by thousands of small curing barns

(kang fang) interspersed with endless fields of tall, large-leaf plants. The total yield of flue-cured bright tobacco in these three regions rose by millions of pounds annually between 1919 and 1937.

In 1934, Anhui yielded a little more than 20 million pounds of bright tobacco, while total production in Shandong amounted to at least 70 million pounds. In the same year, production in

Henan was undoubtedly the greatest. Not including local consumption, the railway alone carried about 80 million pounds of bright tobacco leaves from Xuchang to cigarette factories in the major cities.202

Due to the accelerated growth of bright tobacco cultivation in North China, there had been a continuous drop in imports. Especially after 1931, imports of American grown tobacco fell off rapidly. Total imports in 1935 (1.8 million pounds) shrank to about eleven percent of those in 1931

(165 million pounds).203 Although the Japanese military occupation of Manchuria in 1931 also contributed to the sudden decrease in imports that year, Chinese-grown leaves were able to satisfy most of the demand by that time. Since 1930, “the use of American seed tobacco grown in China increased from 70 percent to 90 percent in the cigarette industry.”204 High quality raw materials produced in specialized tobacco growing regions of Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and

Northern Anhui were adequate to supply the cigarette industry in China.

202 YMYGSCD, [80] 14D4, 21; YMYGSCD, [02] 2A-1, 22. 203 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 18. 204 Ibid., 17.

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The Network of Leaf Purchasing

Immediately after BAT began to promote bright tobacco cultivation in the three regions, a purchasing network was established to collect leaves. Even though BAT distributed most of the

American seeds to farmers free of charge, the company did not build plantations or use any means to force tobacco growers to sell their harvest exclusively to them. BAT therefore aimed to form a purchasing system backed up by its strong capital to ensure the collection of leaves and its monopoly over the leaf tobacco market in North China.

From 1916 to 1917, BAT opened purchasing centers at Ershilipu in Weixian, Xiguan in

Xuchang, and Mentaizi in Fengyang. In these locations, BAT built large factories to re-cure the collected tobacco leaves. Tobacco growers always flue-cured their harvest before selling it, but an additional standard curing process by modern machinery was needed to further compress the bulk and prepare the leaves for final packing and storage. This factory process readies leaves for long- distance transportation and long-term preservation of flavor and color.205 BAT’s re-curing factory

(fukao chang) at Ershilipu, which was constructed in 1916 and 1917, consisted of north and south wings along the two sides of the Qingdao-Jinan Railway. The entire premises, which covered 600 mu (200 local mu) of land, had four state-of-art Philadelphia Drying Machines capable of curing a total of 400,000 pounds of tobacco leaves per day.206 The re-curing facilities at Xiguan in Xuchang and Mentaizi in Fengyang were both similar to the Ershilipu factory in structure, size, and production capacity. Managed by executives of BAT’s Leaf Tobacco Department, each factory was staffed with about sixty foreign and Chinese employees and more than five hundred locally

205 Chen, Zhongguo jindai gongyeshi ziliao, di’er ji, 114. 206 YMYGSCD, [80] 14D4, 2; Ying Mei, 1:384.

83 recruited workers.207 Based in these factories, BAT either directly collected tobacco from peasants or through local merchants and middle men.

BAT’s goal had always been to collect tobacco leaves directly from tobacco growers. As the

Leaf Tobacco Department once instructed its employees: “Even though you may need to buy some leaves through these men [local tobacco merchants], you must know it is always better to buy tobacco directly from farmers.”208 The biggest obstacle to achieve direct purchase was the existing system of tobacco collection in which numerous independent dealers procured leaves from each peasant household and then passed them on to the tobacco shops (yanhang) in the city. Achieving a monopoly on the tobacco market by obsoleting local tobacco merchants largely depended on the help and support of Chinese collaborators rather than the determination of the company. In fact, the entire purchasing system had to be operated under the names of Chinese dummy fronts.

According to the “unequal treaties system,” foreign individuals and companies were only granted the rights of land ownership and license to establish businesses in the treaty ports or ports opened by international agreement. The inland rural areas of Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and

Northern Anhui were not treaty ports or even ports opened by the Chinese. Therefore, all land used by BAT to build re-curing factories and collecting stations was bought under the name of a Chinese, and buildings were constructed in a similar way. In Weixian, this was done in the name of comprador Tian Junchuan and his private company, Tongyihe General Store. In Xuchang, the land for the factory was secured by comprador Ren Bozhong in the name of a Chinese family estate

Yong’an Tang. Similarly, the Fengyang factory was constructed by comprador Fan Yutian on

207 Chen, Industrial Captial and Chinese Peasants, 25. 208 Ying Mei, 1:374.

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BAT’s behalf.209 In further executing its plan of creating a direct purchasing network, BAT heavily relied on Chinese compradors’ abilities to coordinate all parties in the business and their influence on local societies, as well as local bureaucrats’ and elites’ willingness to cooperate.

Since the late 1910s, BAT had been able to purchase tobacco leaves directly from peasants in Shandong and Anhui through its leaf collection network that included multiple collecting points around each re-curing factory. In Eastern Shandong, comprador Tian Junchan played a crucial role in organizing the direct purchasing system. Formerly having worked for the railway administration,

Tian was a wealthy and connected merchant in Weixian when he began to collaborate with BAT in 1913. Through his local contacts, Tian helped BAT build its purchasing network by purchasing land for BAT’s leaf processing plant at Ershilipu and seven collecting establishments at six railway stations along the Qingdao-Jinan Railway.210 Tian also coordinated relationships between BAT and local authorities to help the company maintain its direct purchasing business. For example, he arranged for BAT to hire the local militia at a rate of 600 yuan a month during the harvest and 400 yuan a month during the rest of year. In return, the militia agreed to crack down on tobacco growers’ violent protests that often happened when the tobacco price was low.211 In addition, BAT built close ties with the provincial government through Tian’s personal connections with high-ranking officials. In 1935, the chairman of Shandong Province, General Han Fuju, even paid a special visit to BAT’s managers at Ershilipu during his tour of inspection in Eastern Shandong.212

In Northern Anhui, comprador Wang Yangzi achieved similar results. Like Tian, Wang was an influential figure in the Fengyang region. With the help of Wang and his associate Fan Yutian,

209 YMYGSCD, [80] 14D4, 23; Ying Mei, 1:271. 210 Chen, Industrial Captial and Chinese Peasants, 25-26. 211 Ibid., 27; YMYGSCD, [77] 14C1-2, 5; Ying Mei, 3:997-8. 212 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 27.

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BAT built the re-curing factory at Mentaizi in 1919 and opened many leaf collection stations in surrounding districts shortly after.213 Due to Wang’s efforts, BAT gained cooperation from the local authorities and gentry. For example, in 1921, through Wang’s arrangement, BAT loaned

25,000 yuan to the Merchant Association in exchange for their support of the leaf purchasing business.214 A few years later, Wang invited many local gentry and merchants to found the Fengyang Tobacco Farmers Association. In the name of the association, they acquired capital from the and Shanghai Commercial Savings Bank to corner fertilizer and coal supplies in great volume, then lend to tobacco growers on credit.215 Through this organization,

Wang attracted local elites to join BAT’s tobacco growing operation.

Tian’s and Wang’s assistance made it possible for BAT’s employees to buy tobacco directly and effectively from Chinese growers at the lowest price possible through its collecting network.

As Yip Hon-ming has shown in her study of tobacco growing in Weixian, the traditional indirect purchasing system involved “numerous and various intermediary dealers [who] tended to clog and thus complicate the circulating channels.” BAT’s “direct purchasing system…was…more simplified and rationalized [and] free from layer-upon-layer of encumbrances and unnecessary divergences.” 216 With this advantage, BAT squeezed out small local tobacco merchants and monopolized tobacco leaf markets in Shandong and Anhui.

The situation in Xuchang, however, was more complicated. Until the 1930s, BAT had to collect tobacco leaves from “numerous and various intermediary dealers” because its comprador

213 Ying Mei, 1:358, 393. 214 YMYGSCD, [81] 14D5, 12. 215 Ibid. 216 Yip Hon-ming, “Merchant Capital, the Small Peasant Economy, and Foreign Capitalism: The Case of Weixian, 1900s-1937” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1988), 228. Quoted in Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks, 66.

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Ren Bozhong failed to accomplish what Tian and Wang had in Shandong and Anhui. Ren had neither the ability nor the influence to gain the support of local authorities and elites. On the contrary, local tobacco merchants often united to strongly oppose BAT’s intention of direct purchasing. In BAT’s only big purchasing center at Xuchang, its employees received tobacco brought in by hundreds of independent local merchants and tobacco shops who collected it the old- fashioned way. Between 1917 and 1927, BAT on average procured ten million pounds of tobacco per year through this indirect purchasing system at prices that included the value of the leaves plus middle men’s profit.217 The tension between BAT and local merchants continued to worsen over the years. In 1927, at the height of the Northern Expedition and the Anti-Imperialists Movement,

General Feng Yuxiang’s troops torched BAT’s purchasing center and the leaf processing facility in Xuchang at the request of local people.218 Ren fled to Hong Kong after the local court charged him with illegally selling land to foreigners. Almost at the same time, over one thousand local tobacco merchants formed the Xuchang Tobacco Guild to control the tobacco market in central

Henan.

In 1932, BAT set out to regain its former prominence by replacing the indirect purchasing system in Henan by turning to its former comprador, Wu Tingsheng, who had held official positions in the ’s Ministry of Finance in the 1920s. After rejoining BAT,

Wu took full advantage of his connections with the central government. In 1932, he formed a new firm called the Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company, and began to align local officials and elite against the Xuchang Tobacco Guild.219 In 1934, Wu linked his campaign in Xuchang with the Nanjing

217 Ming Jie, “Ying Mei yan gongsi he yuzhong nongmin,” Zhongguo nongcun 2, no. 7, (1936), 70; Zhang, Zhongguo jindai nongye shi ziliao, di’er ji, 1912-1927, 201; Liu and Xie, Henan jindai jingji, 23. 218 Ying Mei, 1:282-283. 219 Ibid., 293.

87 government by forming the Committee for the Improvement of American Seed Tobacco

(meizhong yanye gailiang weiyuanhui).220 In 1935, with this official support, he rebuilt BAT’s old purchasing center in Xuchang and helped it obtain the exclusive privilege of transporting tobacco on cargo trains operated by the Nationalist government’s Ministry of Railways, leaving the

Xuchang Tobacco Guild with no comparably priced means of transporting goods to Shanghai.221

The competitive threat soon diminished with the collapse of the Guild and the withdrawal of hundreds of tobacco merchants from the tobacco business. In that year, BAT finally engaged in direct purchasing of tobacco at Xuchang. Tobacco growers in Central Henan were left with very few options other than selling their crops to BAT’s Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company.

By the mid-1930s, BAT had achieved a monopoly on bright tobacco leaves produced in North

China. In 1934, BAT formed the Tobacco Development Company to “handle all matters relating to the purchase of leaf tobacco required in the production of cigarettes by the Company, including the promotion of cultivation of flue-cured leaf.”222 At the time, about 70 to 80 percent of all the

American leaves in Shandong were collected by BAT’s purchasing network.223 In Anhui and

Henan, the percentage was much higher because there was no competition from Chinese and

Japanese companies in Anhui, while Henan’s tobacco was under the absolute control of the newly established Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company.

Commercialization of Tobacco in the Emerging Market Economy

By all means, from 1912 to 1937, BAT successfully established the large scale cultivation of bright tobacco in North China. This action brought fundamental and far-reaching ecological,

220 Ibid., 298. 221 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 30. 222 YMYGSCD, [75] 14B1-2, 56. 223 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 26.

88 economic, and social impacts to the region as the agro-economy of Eastern Shandong, Central

Henan, and Northern Anhui predominately switched to commercialized tobacco production. This commercialization served as a powerful force remaking the natural landscape, economy, and society in three areas. Farmers converted large amounts of their farmland to grow bright tobacco.

As a result, the American variety widely replaced not only the native tobaccos but also many food crops. And local economies came to be heavily rely on the tobacco business. Meanwhile, tobacco growers and local business practitioners rebuilt their relationships with tobacco, with the market, and with each other within the new agriculture.

In searching for a theoretical framework to explain these complex and intertwined environmental changes, Donald Wroster’s notion of a “capitalist transformation of nature” provides a possible analytical model. According to his idea, agriculture or an “agroecosystem” created by human-nature interaction underwent a reorganization in the modern era. In traditional agroecosystems under the peasant economy, people engaged a “subsistence strategy” of producing crops to meet their survival needs. Within the contexts of capitalist industrialization and the rising world economy, beginning in the fifteenth century and accelerating in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, farmers began to grow crops for the marketplace. The most significant feature of the modern agroecosystem is the “capitalistic mode of production,” in which people grow crops and produce agricultural products to participate in the modern market economy. Therefore, the

“capitalist transformation of nature” refers to a transition from subsistence-oriented agriculture to a “capitalist agroecosystem.” 224

224 See Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1087-1106.

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Of course, Worster’s theory is based on the Western experience. When discussing the modernization of agriculture, historians always look at England’s transition to capitalism. As

Worster and others have concluded, English agriculture modernized alongside capitalist industrial development. In the process, the agricultural sector of England saw a concentration of landholdings.

Capitalized managerial farming gradually replaced traditional small family farming. English peasants, as a social class, diminished as the economy became completely transformed. The peasantry came to be differentiated into either capitalist farmers or wage workers. To be sure, striking contrasts exist in different national or regional experiences in the .225 But the general pattern is fundamentally in accordance with the transformation of traditional agriculture in England: the emergence of modernizing and capitalizing managerial farms coupled with a social differentiation process. Environmental studies on agricultural modernization, according to Worster, should focus on this transition and the consequent environmental changes.

All this said, the key question arises in applying this “Western” model to this research: Did the “capitalistic transformation of nature” occur in North China when BAT intensively and extensively promoted bright tobacco cultivation? This question raises the issue of the nature and direction of agrarian changes both before North China’s contact with BAT and as a result of that contact. First, was commercialized tobacco production in the Qing Dynasty part of the traditional peasant economy? There is no question that the small peasant economy of China underwent dynamic change long before China’s contact with the modern world economy. The Qing Dynasty experienced profound agricultural commercialization as Chinese farmers began to cultivate many

225 The United States, for example, saw the emergence of capitalized family farm as the major social form of the modernizing agriculture.

90 cash crops for the purpose of selling them on domestic and international markets, including tea, cotton, silk, sugar, and, of course, tobacco.226 As detailed in the previous chapter, Chinese tobacco had already gone through a process of commercialization from the mid-eighteenth century on.

While farmers in most parts of China mainly grew tobacco to meet their personal demand and to supply local markets, peasants in some specialized areas produced and transported high-end tobacco leaves to faraway markets by long distance trade. However, this commercialization of tobacco was still within the framework of the traditional Chinese peasant economy. The history suggests that, despite of the high level of commercialization, the agro-economy of late imperial

China was neither capitalist, nor even becoming capitalist. Driven by a combination of forces such as population dynamics, state policy, and economic change, it developed into what Robert Marks characterized as “commercialization without capitalism.”227

Under this historical background, Chinese peasants mainly produced tobacco in the context of the peasant economy as the major portion of their harvest was still for immediate and local consumption. This was even more the case in North China. Growing tobacco solely for the market mostly existed in the southern highlands where those specialized tobacco areas were located. In the populated lowland areas, including the North China Plain, farmers largely grew tobacco for their “subsistence” needs. In the 1900s, the American agriculturalists noticed in many places they visited in North China that, unlike tobacco plantations in the United States, “tobacco is grown in small quantities for local use.”228 Tobacco was usually grown for household consumption to supplying the local market in which “each farmer plants enough for his own use, and if there are a

226 Examples can be found in Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change, and Marks, “Commercializaiton without Capitalism,” 56-82. 227 Marks, “Commercialization without Capitalism,” 56-82. 228 YMYGSCD, [76] 14-B3, 92.

91 few pounds left over, he sells them to the merchants.”229 These historical records reveal that even though it was incorporated into the national tobacco market, tobacco agriculture in the North China

Plain before the introduction of American seeds corresponds to Worster’s characterization of traditional agroecosystems in which “most people raised what they themselves consumed, though now and then they may have sent some of their surplus off to cities for the sake of trade or tribute.”230 Therefore, to answer the question, while commercialization did start as early as the mid-eighteenth century, the nature of Chinese tobacco agriculture before the arrival of BAT, including that of North China, was still consistent with the traditional peasant economy.

Secondly, how was North China affected in the early twentieth century by contact with expanding bright tobacco cultivation? Or, more specifically, did BAT’s tobacco expanding operations in North China shift local tobacco agriculture from the setting of the peasant economy to the context of the modern market economy? The tobacco story tells a tale of both continuity and change in rural North China. Even though BAT was almost the sole driving force behind the expansion of bright tobacco cultivation in North China, in many ways, the history of tobacco in the early twentieth century suggests a continuity with the commercialization process that started much earlier in the eighteenth century. Taking advantage of the fact that the residents on the North

China Plain were already accustomed to producing and marketing indigenous tobacco as a commercial crop before 1913, BAT successfully introduced and commercialized tobacco growing in Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and Northern Anhui. In particular, BAT benefited from agricultural labor in rural North China that was not only highly skilled at growing tobacco but also

229 Ibid., 103. 230 Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1097.

92 well-organized for the purpose of tobacco production. Soon after BAT distributed bright tobacco seeds and spread new technologies, Chinese peasants were able to make adjustments very quickly to supply BAT’s needs because of their rich experience in producing tobacco. Gregory, the director of BAT’s operation in Shandong, once expressed his amazement at the speed with which Chinese peasants became proficient at the American techniques: “[They learned] even quicker than the average farmer at home [North Carolina].”231 Once peasants mastered these new technologies, they planted bright tobacco seeds without departing much from established patterns of intensive farming on small family farms. Moreover, tobacco growers sold their harvest to BAT’s agents in a similar manner that they sold native tobacco to Chinese merchants in earlier eras. Thus, BAT was heir to existing commercialized tobacco agriculture. This foundation effectively allowed large-scale bright tobacco cultivation in North China.

Meanwhile, a crucial change also happened in the tobacco fields. In this instance, the change can be characterized as truly “commercialization with capitalism,” since BAT capitalized the production of bright tobacco for a single market purpose—to supply the cigarette industry. In doing so, the tobacco agriculture of North China came to be connected to a much broader market economy by joining BAT’s industrial commodity chain. With the establishment of tobacco growing bases in North China, BAT achieved vertical integration of its operations in China. That is, by integrating tobacco production and purchasing with cigarette manufacturing, distributing, and advertising, BAT formed a commodity chain reaching from the tobacco fields in Eastern

Shandong, Central Henan, and Northern Anhui to factories in Shanghai and Hankou and ultimately

231 Gregory made this comment in his private correspondence to James Thomas on April 3, 1922. Quoted in Cochran, Big Business in China, 26.

93 to customers all over China. In Shandong, Henan, and Anhui, bright tobacco was cultivated and flue-cured by peasants, then local middlemen and BAT’s agents collected leaves and transported them to the company’s cigarette factories in the major cities by railroads and waterways. In the factories, industrial workers operating machinery to roll and pack cigarettes. Eventually, BAT’s

Western representatives and numerous Chinese salesmen distributed cigarette products through the company’s nation-wide distribution network and to millions of customers who were lured into cigarette smoking by BAT’s ubiquitous advertisements. Included in this commodity chain, and as the beginning stage of it, tobacco growing in the three areas switched to the “capitalistic mode of production” by the linkage with the cigarette industry that was financed by international industrial capital.

From a broader perspective, the capitalization of tobacco production in the North China Plain was part of the wider historical context of agricultural commercialization and modernization that occurred in early-twentieth-century China. Chinese agriculture came to be integrally linked to a world commodities market in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of external economic intrusion. International demand significantly stimulated cultivation of a number of cash crops, such as tea, silk, and sugar in Central and South China and cotton, peanuts, and soybeans in the North China Plain. Railroads played a crucial role in connecting the agricultural economy of the North China Plain to the world commodity market, in which the demand for agricultural products encouraged many peasants to raise these cash crops for quick profit.232 The often-cited

232 Chinese scholars have conducted extensive studies about the impact of railroad on the economic development of North China in the early twentieth century. A few examples of these works include Zhang Ruide, “Ping-Han tielu yu Huabei de jingji fazhan” (master’s thesis, Normal University, 1979); Zhang Xuejian, “Qingdao gang, Jiaoji tielu yu yanxian jingji bianqian (1898-1937)—xiandai jiaotong tixi shiyu xia de yanjiu” (PhD diss., Nankai University, 2012); Zhang Jian, “Tielu yu jindai Anhui jingji shehui bianqian yanjiu (1912-1937)” (PhD diss., Suzhou University,

94 example is the cotton industry. As Philip Huang’s detailed study on this subject reveals, the peasants formerly used to spin and weave their cloth with their own hands from cotton they grew by themselves. Since the 1910s, they had begun to sell their cotton to the world market, and in return, they wove with yarn imported from abroad, and even imported cloth had come into fashion.233 BAT benefited greatly from agricultural commercialization in China during the early twentieth century. At the same time, BAT’s agricultural operation in North China directly participated in and accelerated the rise of the market economy. Similar to the cotton industry, peasants in the specialized tobacco regions ceased to grow tobacco for their own consumption and for selling the surplus to subsidize their income. Instead, growers heavily invested energy and capital into tobacco production, hoping for a higher cash return. Meanwhile, they began to buy cigarettes made in the factories or hand-rolled cigarette workshops that were made of tobacco grown themselves. As such, tobacco production in North China became integrated with the market economy. In this sense, it fits into Worster’s framework of “capitalistic mode of production.”

The expansion of bright tobacco in Shandong, Henan, and Anhui during the early twentieth century is consistent with the commercialization of tobacco that occurred in the Qing Dynasty.

Meanwhile, BAT’s aggressive promotion of bright tobacco in North China pushed China’s tobacco agriculture toward the “capitalistic mode of production”. To be sure, however, this capitalist transformation was a matter of degree, for the agricultural commercialization of tobacco in North

China did not result in the complete transformation of the agrarian economy and society, as happened in the West. Instead, tobacco agriculture remained within the framework of the existing

2013); Liu Huaming, Jiang Ye, and Zhang Hongji, “Zhongyuan tielu de xingjian, jingying yu yingxiang,” Jiangsu keji daxue xuebao, shehui kexue ban no. 2 (2013), 36-43. 233 Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change, 132-133.

95 system centered on the small peasant economy. It led not to an entirely new capitalist industrial economy, but to a rising market economy with many traditional characteristics. As the following pages and next chapter will show, Chinese tobacco agriculture and the cigarette industry in the early twentieth century retained both old and new features.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the integration of China into the world system that begin in the mid-nineteenth century extended into the twentieth century, and to a great degree, continues to this day. Within this context, by 1937, Chinese tobacco industry developed into a hybrid entity placed somewhere between tradition and modernity, and between the peasant economy and the market economy. Only from this can we fully understand what and how the new tobacco industry brought changes to China’s agriculture, economy, society, and the environment.

Transformed Agriculture and its Environmental Consequences

The “capitalistic transformation” of North China’s tobacco agriculture from 1913 to 1937 had significant ecological impacts on the agriculture of North China. The company’s operation successfully turned Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and Northern Anhui into specialized tobacco growing areas. This systemic reconstruction of agriculture led to significant changes in the environment of these regions. First, the extensive cultivation of bright tobacco altered the structure of agriculture. Even though the scale of tobacco growing in the North China Plain did not generate a thoroughgoing monoculture, as wheat remained the major cultivated crop, a simplification of agricultural diversity indeed occurred with bright tobacco expansively replacing a number of cultivars. Second, because the production of bright tobacco required more labor and resources than native leaves and grains, a portion of human and natural energy was re-distributed

96 to growing and processing the American plant. Third, large-scale and exhaustive bright tobacco cultivation caused soil degradation in many areas.

The influence of BAT’s operation on Chinese agriculture extended far beyond replacing native tobacco with American varieties. As Worster summarized similar processes elsewhere, specialization and a market system lead to “the radical simplification of the nature ecological order in the number of species found in an area and the intricacy of their interconnections.”234 Between

1913 and 1937, agriculture in the three regions experienced a “radical simplification” of ecological diversity as bright tobacco took over more farmland while production of other crops continued to decline. Based on a field investigation of six sample villages, Chen Han-Seng concluded that 13.5 percent of the cultivated land in the specialized areas was used for bright tobacco.235 Because Chen drew his conclusion based on very few samples, the actual percentage may have been higher. For example, by the mid-1930s, the amount of land given over to bright tobacco surpassed that of wheat in Xiangcheng.236 At roughly the same time, “Tobacco, introduced by the British-American

Tobacco Company, covered roughly twenty to forty percent of the cultivated acreage and became a highly profitable cash crop for farmers around the rail town of Xuchang.”237 More importantly, bright tobacco was the most valuable plant. In 1933, of the total value of cultivated crops in the three localities, tobacco amounted to 30.9 percent, higher than wheat at 29.2 percent.238 Bright tobacco had become the principal cash crop and the center of gravity for the local agricultural economy.

234 Worster, “Transformations of the Earth,” 1101. 235 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 23. 236 Henan tongji xuehui, ed., Henan gexian diaocha: 1934-1935 (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1987), 384. 237 Odoric Y. K. Wou, Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 17. 238 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 22-23.

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Over the same period, farmers progressively converted their land from grains to tobacco. On average, more than 60 percent of the peasant families in the three areas were tobacco cultivators by the mid-1930s. 239 Wheat still dominated cultivated land during the winters when cold weather did not allow tobacco to grow, but the landscape turned into a world of bright tobacco from spring to fall. Consequently, production of other crops such as soybeans, millet, and sweet potato dropped off considerably; in Xiangcheng, they were in short supply during the late 1920s.240 In the years between the two world wars, BAT’s Chinese competitors repeatedly complained that the rapid spread of bright tobacco cultivation negatively impacted local agriculture because it displaced needed food crops. Officials in the American government agreed. Even James Thomas admitted that the abandonment of food crops in favor of bright tobacco on such a large scale was deleterious to China’s economy.241

The intensive cultivation of bright tobacco generated a much greater energy flow in the local agriculture that involved massive inputs of labor, water, fertilizer, and even fossil fuel—coal.

Unlike native tobacco and food crops, flue-cured bright tobacco was extremely labor-intensive and capital-consuming. From the care of the seedlings and work of transplanting up to the process of packing the leaves, growers needed to pay constant attention to the sixteen steps of the production.

In the Fengyang region, the intensity of farm labor on bright tobacco was eleven times that of wheat. Such a comparison is even more striking in Central Henan, where the amount of labor required for tobacco was twenty times that for wheat.242 In addition to labor, bright tobacco also needed considerable volumes of water and fertilizer. During the seedling process, the tobacco

239 Ibid., 22. 240 Henan tongji xuehui, Henan gexian diaocha, 384. 241 Cochran, Big Business in China, 126. 242 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 57.

98 seeds needed to be watered carefully once a day using a watering can. Once plants were transferred to the fields, growers had to water the land every day for three or four days. Afterwards, watering could be reduced to every three days.243 The quantity of fertilizer bright tobacco needed was significantly higher than other crops as well. In 1935, tobacco growers in Shandong spent an average of 23.32 yuan worth of bean-cake on each mu of bright tobacco while the same fertilizer for each mu of wheat only cost 8.13 yuan. 244 The unique curing process of bright tobacco production required energy from fossil fuel. After harvest, farmers used a relatively large bulk of coal to flue-cure the leaves. During an interview in 1934, Tian Junchuan calculated: “[In

Shandong], each mu [bright tobacco] requires…600 catties of coal costing 9 Chinese dollars.”245

If this was correct, Shandong growers in that year consumed 246,562,800 catties (123,281 metric tons) of coal to flue-cure the leaves grown on 410,938 mu of land.246 The production of bright tobacco absorbed much greater human labor and natural resources and brought significant changes in local agriculture. A large part of the energy for the cultivation of grain crops was re-distributed to tobacco production. As a writer observed in 1937, “during the busiest time [of tobacco production] …elders, children, and women all must help; grain fields are left unattended while all the energy (gongfu) is concentrated on tobacco.”247 Tobacco had certainly become the center of local agriculture.

243 Ying Mei, 1:397. 244 Ibid., 399. 245 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 57. One catty is formalized as 0.5 kg in China. 246 Shanghai shangye chuxu yinhang diaochabu, ed., Yan yu yanye, (Shanghai: Shanghai shangye chuxu yinhang diaochabu, 1934), 247. 247 Ying Mei, 1:398.

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William Cronon said about the environmental changes in colonial America, “capitalism and environmental degradation went hand in hand.”248 Consistent with his conclusion, large-scale cultivation of bright tobacco consequently caused soil degradation in the North China Plain.

Compared to food crops such as wheat and millet, bright tobacco requires sandy soil relatively rich in a few nutrients such as scilicet and nitrogen. Without repeated crop rotation and heavy application of fertilizers, tobacco quickly exhausts the nutrients in the soil, resulting not only in environmental degradation but also in inferior tobacco. As early as 1914, local people noticed the decline in soil quality. A journalist wrote, “Peasants told me, land is no longer suitable for growing grains after cultivating tobacco.”249 BAT’s Chinese competitors contended that the new crop exhausted the fertility of the soil.250 In coping with this issue, peasants had no better options other than continuously applying fertilizer to the land. Since traditional manure, which had been used on grain crops for centuries in North China, was ineffective on bright tobacco, peasants had to utilize the stronger and more expensive bean cakes in tobacco fields. In the late 1910s, BAT even collaborated with Brunner, Mond & Company to improve soil conditions by promoting chemical fertilizers in tobacco growing areas.251 But they never became popular due to high price. Despite the heavy application of bean-cakes, land was still very often farmed out with continuous cultivation of tobacco. A local official of Shandong said, “Tobacco can only be grown three years in a row maximally, then the land is completely exhausted.”252

248 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 161. 249 YMYGSCD, [75]14B1-2, 57. 250 Cochran, Big Business in China, 126. 251 Ying Mei, 1:275. 252 YMYGSCD, [80] 14D4, 25.

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Conclusion

For the agriculture of Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and North Anhui, 1913 was a point of no return. BAT’s capitalization of bright tobacco production altered the local agro-ecosystem by linking it to a broader market. Consequently, the agroecosystem changed as BAT initiated the transition of Chinese tobacco agriculture from the peasant economy toward the market economy.

From that date on, bright tobacco became the most dominate cash crop in local agriculture as it replaced indigenous tobacco as well as a number of food crops.

For the farmers in the tobacco growing areas, 1913 also was a turning point in their social and economic lives. Under the new agro-economic setting, peasants no longer produced tobacco for their own consumption but for sale to the market. By planting American bright tobacco, they created new economic relationships with the market, and new social relationships with each other.

As the next chapter will discuss, while peasants work hard to grow tobacco for making the cigarette, the development and cycles in cigarette industry in return affected the livelihood of Chinese peasants engaged in capitalized tobacco agriculture.

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CHAPTER THREE

CIGARETTE INDUSTRY AND ALTERED LIVELIHOOD

Born and raised in a remote village in southeastern Anhui Province, Chinese novelist Wu

Zuxiang (1908-1994) devoted his career to writing stories about the changing nature of rural China over the course of the Twentieth Century. In his 1932 short story “Guangguan de bupin” (“Young

Master Gets His Tonic”), Wu particularly stresses the devastating outcomes of rural China’s becoming linked to the world economy during the global depression.253 In the context of a family discussion about the roots of China’s economic problems, Young Master’s cousin attributes rural poverty and the impoverished state of the countryside to the economic intrusions of foreign capital and Western consumer goods. To make his argument, the cousin lists a wide range of agricultural products, including hand-woven cloth, bean oil, and pipe tobacco, that used to be produced by

Chinese peasants “for our own use” such that “the money went back and forth from one hand to the next among ourselves.” Nowadays (1920s and 1930s), they have to use cash to purchase these readymade goods manufactured by foreign companies. He then goes on to elaborate on the matter of cigarettes, says, “in the olden days, you lit your pipe with a flint and a twist of paper, when did you ever see anybody strike a match and light up a cigarette, a Ruby Queen or a Pirate brand?”254

Through this character’s criticism of BAT’s cigarettes, machine-woven textiles, and refined kerosene, the author expresses his worries about the decline of China’s traditional peasant economy caused by the country’s integration into global trade networks.

253 Wu Zuxiang, Xiliuji (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1996), 58-74. 254 Ibid., 70. This quote is translated by Carol Benedict. She also cited this evidence in her study. See Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 191.

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Wu Zuxiang’s observation was timely and sharp. From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, increasing international trade and the penetration of foreign capital into China accelerated the commercialization of agriculture. The globalizing market economy constantly reshaped the landscape of Chinese agriculture. Production of commodities such as sugar, flax, and indigo decreased because of foreign imports. Meanwhile, cultivation of cotton, soybeans, and tobacco kept expanding due to growing domestic and international demand. These provide examples of how market forces transformed China’s traditional agriculture. “Where once commercialized Chinese agriculture had been influenced only by the domestic market, it now responded to market forces worldwide.” 255 Consequently, the incorporation of agricultural production into a wider market environment undermined the subsistence peasant economy and led to disturbances in traditional rural life. By the 1930s, Chinese peasants actively participated in the commercialized economy—as much as 40 to 45 percent of farm produce ended up on the domestic and international markets—and they themselves had to use ready-cash to buy agricultural products, handicrafts, and industrial commodities from local marketplaces.256 Peasants’ livelihoods and the fortune of each rural household increasingly depended upon market conditions.

This chapter explores the development of the Chinese cigarette industry and the effects of the environmental changes associated with expanding tobacco production from the perspective of tobacco growers and local communities in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, the Chinese cigarette industry was well-established, with BAT continuing to monopolize the cigarette market while Chinese entrepreneurs and small-time merchants entered the business. Commodity chains

255 Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change, 122. 256 Niv Horesh, Shanghai’s Bund and Beyond: British Banks, Banknote Issuance, and Monetary Policy in China, 1842-1937 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 64.

103 of cigarette production were formed, reaching from tobacco fields in Shandong, Henan, and Anhui to factories in coastal cities and to countless hand-rolled cigarette workshops spread throughout northern China and the lower Yangzi Valley. Within the frameworks of the market economy and the “capitalistic mode of production,” the livelihoods of millions of Chinese along the commodity chain were changed in unprecedented ways. Tobacco cultivators abandoned their traditional ways of agricultural production and invested significant resources and labor into growing tobacco hoping for good cash returns. Surplus rural laborers began to work at tobacco farms, cigarette factories, or hand-rolling workshops. Market conditions manipulated by the giant multinational industry determined peasants’ and workers’ incomes and living standards. Meanwhile, many local merchants and gentry participated in the tobacco business as middle men, working in leaf collecting, transportation, or money lending. The portraits of ordinary tobacco growers and participants in the cigarette industry reveal the cross-cutting environmental effects of shifting local agriculture as they built new relationships with tobacco.

The Cigarette Industry and the Commodity Chain

During the years between the two world wars, China’s cigarette industry exploded. The cigarette in China experienced, as Sherman Cochran calls it, a “post-war golden age.”257 By building and expanding tobacco-growing bases, cigarette production facilities, and marketing systems, BAT strengthened its supremacy in the Chinese market. At the same time, BAT’s success caused many mechanized Chinese firms and numerous small handcraft workshops to spring up and join the cigarette business. In the competition between BAT and Chinese players at all levels,

257 Cochran, Big Business in China, 123.

104 the Chinese cigarette industry, which included tobacco growing and processing, as well as cigarette production and distribution, emerged due to the efforts from both.

Continued Expansion of BAT: 1919-1937

Until 1937, when the Sino-Japanese War began to interrupt BAT’s business and eventually forced the company to close down its factories, BAT maintained its dominant positon in the

Chinese market. BAT’s sustainable development during this period certainly was built upon the foundation it had laid earlier. Yet, BAT’s aggressive investment policies in the 1920s sharply accelerated its rate of growth. More importantly, the adoption of the “independent seller” system was crucial to BAT’s consolidating its monopoly in China.

Envisioning a more promising Chinese market, BAT assigned large amounts of new Western capital, personnel, and technology to China in the post-war years. As noted in Chapter One, BAT re-organized its Chinese operations in 1919 into a new company, BAT (China), Ltd. At its establishment, the new company had a total capital of $231 million—590 times more than the paid-up capital of BAT’s China branch in 1902, and 3.7 times more than the total capital of BAT’s

London headquarters in 1919.258 The well-capitalized BAT (China), Ltd. spent large sums of money to expand preexisting purchasing, manufacturing, distributing, and advertising systems. To raise production capacity, the company’s operations extended across bright tobacco cultivation, leaf processing, and cigarette production facilities. Besides extensively promoting bright tobacco in North China, BAT also heavily invested in cigarette manufacturing and printing facilities in

Tianjin and Qingdao between 1919 and 1924.259 The plants in both locations were designed to take

258 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 48; Cochran, Big Business in China, 129. 259 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 49.

105 advantage of the growing supply of locally grown flue-cured tobacco from Shandong and Henan.

By the mid-1920s, BAT had built eleven cigarette factories, six leaf re-curing facilities, a packing material factory, a machinery plant, and even a movie studio for marketing purposes throughout major treaty cities such as Shanghai, Hankou, Tianjin, and Harbin. Not including thousands of

Chinese independent distributors and sales merchants that facilitated with the company, BAT reached 25,000 employees.260

In addition to the enhanced production capacity, a major change in marketing also contributed to BAT’s post-war monopoly. In the 1920s and 1930s, BAT adopted the “independent seller” system led by comprador Zheng Bozhao. It shifted responsibility for cigarette sales overwhelmingly into the hands of Chinese merchants from its administrative hierarchy of salaried

Western and Chinese representatives. This decision greatly increased BAT’s sales by mobilizing thousands of independent Chinese dealers to sell its cigarettes.

Zheng Bozhao’s “independent seller” system was gradually formed in the 1910s, after

Zheng’s trading company Yongtaizhan began distributing BAT’s cigarettes in 1912. Unlike modern business organizations, this company was more akin to the traditional Chinese merchant house which consisted of shareholders and partners who were bound together by native-place ties.

In the case of Yongtaizhan, all the members were from Xiangshan County of Guangdong Province, whose regional and local distribution operations resembled Zheng’s national network.261 When

Zheng received exclusive rights to distribute BAT’s Ruby Queen brand in 1912, he immediately started to use the preexisting socio-commercial networks under Yongtaizhan to establish the

260 Ying Mei, 1:371. Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 49. 261 Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Shanghaishi weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao gongzou weiyuanhui, ed., Shanghai wenshi ziliao xuanji, di wushiliu ji (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1987), 130.

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“independent seller” system. Zheng recruited his fellow Cantonese merchants to organize his own informal hierarchical management and distribution system. Based on his understanding of the national market, Zheng selected forty entry points (zhudian)—some large (da zhudian) and others small (xiao zhudian)—throughout China. Each large entry point was assigned to a relatively well- financed big dealer (da jingli) who supplied goods to lower-level small dealers (xiao jingli) at small entry points in his territory. At both levels, these merchants served simultaneously as retailers and wholesalers, selling cigarettes directly to customers while distributing larger bulk amounts to local retail merchants (lingshou shang). Big dealers, small dealers, and local retailers all received a commission of 1 to 3 percent on sales.262 In a few years, Zheng successfully built a nation-wide marketing network to distribute BAT’s products.

Zheng’s ability to rapidly develop his distribution system lay in his willingness to offer more flexible terms to his dealers. To safeguard itself, BAT set up several minimal requirements for recruiting sales merchants: owning tens of thousands of yuan in capital, possessing a shop or warehouse for handling BAT’s merchandise, and two guarantors promising to cover all debts, to name a few.263 Zheng, however, was able to accept much less restrictive conditions. Because he trusted his fellow Cantonese merchants, Zheng required very little capital of his distributors. He even allowed some merchants who had no capital at all to handle BAT’s goods on consignment

(she xiao) without putting up any security deposits.264 As a result, Yongtaizhan recruited many more distributors than BAT and pushed a greater volume of sales through its network. By

September 1920, sales of “Ruby Queen,” the BAT brand that Zheng had held exclusive rights to

262 Ibid., 137-38, 140; Ying Mei, 2:622-626. 263 Ying Mei, 2:514, 524-31, 566-67, 580-81. 264 Ibid., 2:629.

107 distribute since 1912, set a new monthly record for the company in China of 11,462 cases of 50,000 cigarettes, making it the second most popular cigarette in the world. 265

Zheng’s excellent performance in the past gave the newly re-organized BAT the confidence to take their cooperation to a higher level. In 1921, BAT formed a joint venture, the Yongtaihe

Tobacco Company, with Zheng to support the further expansion of the “independent seller” system.

In doing so, BAT had two distinct distribution networks operating across China: first, the company’s own integrated system that consisted of well-capitalized Chinese agents working on commission and directly managed by BAT’s salaried Western and Chinese representatives; second, the “independent seller” system operated by Yongtaihe but under BAT’s financial control. Zheng and his independent sellers certainly played an important role in marketing BAT’s cigarettes in the

1920s and 1930s. In 1937, Yongtaihe was responsible for 28 percent of BAT’s sales in China—

315,109 cases of 50,000 sticks.266

By extending its manufacturing system and relying heavily on Chinese independent sellers,

BAT continued to thrive from 1919 to 1937. Although the anti-British boycott following the May

Thritieth Movement of 1925 hit BAT’s business in China hard, its cigarettes sales still soared in

1920s, jumping from seventeen billion sticks in 1920 to forty-two billion in 1929 (See Table 3.1).

The growth of the company continued in the 1930s, when it accounted for more than half of nation- wide cigarette sales per year. In 1937, the “high water mark of the company’s sales operations” in

China, BAT sold fifty-five billion cigarettes throughout the entire country. 267 Even though

Chinese-owned rivals prevented it from establishing a complete monopoly, compared to any past

265 Ying Mei, 2:447; Cochran, Big Business in China, 132. 266 Ying Mei, 1:18. 267 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 149, 195.

108 enterprise in China, BAT no doubt achieved unprecedented dominance of the national tobacco market.

Table 3.1 Cigarette Sales in China, 1902-1941 (BAT vs. rival firms, various years)268

BAT sales BAT sales Rival firms Rival firms (cases Total (cases Total (sticks Year (cases of (percent (percent of 50,000) of 50,000) in billions) 50,000) share) share) 1902 12,682 n.a. 1909 80,353 n.a. 1910 105,548 n.a. 1911 129,933 n.a. 1912 142,933 n.a. 1914 187,969 n.a. 1915 179,127 n.a. 1916 192,975 n.a. 1918 267,202 n.a. 1919 309,028 n.a. 1920 340,419 n.a. 1921 355,610 n.a. 1922 405,707 n.a. 1923 509,478 79.3 132,643 20.7 642,121 32.1 1924 634,624 82.1 138,704 17.9 773,328 38.7 1925 587,950 77.1 174,886 22.9 762,836 38.1 1926 580,413 70.4 244,032 29.6 824,445 41.2 1927 562,690 67.7 268,497 32.3 831,187 41.6 1928 516,419 61.1 328,439 38.9 844,858 42.2 1929 820,431 68.4 379,027 31.6 1,199,458 60.0 1930 877,905 65.3 466,813 34.7 1,344,718 67.2 1931 823,764 60.1 545,962 39.9 1,369,726 68.5 1932 797,146 62.3 482,811 37.7 1,279,957 64.0 1933 791,953 59.9 529,844 40.1 1,321,797 66.1 1934 708,162 54.9 581,212 45.1 1,289,374 64.5 1935 752,777 56.9 569,464 43.1 1,322,241 66.1 1936 877,376 63.3 509,558 36.7 1,386,934 69.3 1937 1,118,616 67.2 546,471 32.8 1,665,087 83.3 1938 901,939 73.0 333,819 27.0 1,235,758 61.8 1939 871,943 64.1 487,943 35.9 1,359,886 68.0 1940 885,518 58.5 627,005 41.5 1,512,523 75.6 1941 894,909 59.8 602,725 40.2 1,497,634 74.9 Note: Sales for BAT include Yongtaihe sales; rival firms’ sales include only mechanically rolled not hand- rolled cigarettes.

268 Ying Mei: 2:512, 733; Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 57-58; Cox, The Global Cigarette, 157; Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 137.

109

“National” Cigarette Companies

Throughout the early twentieth century, BAT’s supremacy was challenged from several quarters. At various times it had to contend with rival Western firms. Though it successfully crushed or absorbed these competitors by the late 1910s, BAT still faced increasing pressure from

Japanese cigarette companies during the 1930s after Japan took over Manchuria in 1931. However, the primary threat for the company had always been Chinese-owned cigarette manufacturers.

Within the context of growing Chinese nationalism and the anti-foreign commodities boycotts that took place repeatedly from 1905 to 1925, China’s “national cigarette industry” (minzu juanyan gongye) emerged to compete with the giant multinational. Even though they had disadvantages such as a lack of capital and technology, Chinese cigarette companies “managed to carve out a niche market beyond the competitive reach of BAT.” 269 In particular, the Nanyang Brothers

Tobacco Company was able to compete with BAT on the national level.

From 1905 to 1937, Chinese cigarette manufacturing experienced explosive growth. The number of cigarette-rolling machines and industrial workers in Chinese-owned factories increased at an annual rate of 26 to 30 percent between 1912 and 1936, and production grew 20 percent annually over the same time period.270 However, this development was not constant, but had ups and downs following a pattern: the rise and fall of Chinese cigarette companies depended on the political environment in China. When diplomatic incidents or political events triggered nationalist movements or anti-foreign goods boycotts, many Chinese cigarette firms were established. As soon as the patriotic fever went away, BAT came back to drive most companies out of business.

269 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 140. 270 Thomas G. Rawski, Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 355.

110

In 1905 and 1906, the anti-American boycott stimulated many Chinese entrepreneurs to join the cigarette business because of the temporary void in the market. The first Chinese-capitalized cigarette manufacturers were established in 1905: the Sanxing Tobacco Company in Shanghai, the

Fuji Tobacco Company in Yingkou, the Elephant Tobacco Company in Beiping, the Beiyang

Tobacco Company in Tianjin, and the Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company in Hong Kong.271

More than twenty Chinese-owned mechanized cigarette firms or factories sprang up until the end of the anti-Japanese boycott of 1908.272 These companies were able to expand while boycotts were underway, but most of them closed their factories when BAT regained its dominance a few years later. Even Nanyang, which eventually developed into the largest Chinese cigarette firm, was forced to cease operating temporarily from 1908 to 1909.273 Similar booms occurred in the next two decades during the revolution of 1911 and the May Fourth Movement of 1919. The anti-British protests and boycotts that followed the May Thrieth movement of 1925 especially disrupted the market and ushered a new wave of Chinese capital into the cigarette business. Shanghai in 1924 had fourteen Chinese-owned cigarette manufacturers. The number jumped to 51 in 1925 and kept increasing to 105 in 1926. In the following year, the city had a total of 182 cigarette factories with

15,781 workers operating 344 cigarette-rolling machines.274 Cigarettes produced in these factories occupied 90 percent of Shanghai’s market at the time.275 Regions outside of major cities saw the same rush. In the tobacco growing area of Henan, for example, mechanized cigarette

271 Chen Zhen, ed., Zhongguo jindai gongyeshi ziliao, di si ji (Beijing: Sanlian chubanshe, 1961), 435. 272 Fang, Shanghai jindai minzu juanyan gongye, 15; Cochran, Big Business in China, 50, citation 146. 273 Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi shiliao, 3. 274 Ibid., 254-255; Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 69, 858; Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 46; “Shanghai huashang juanyan gongye zhi xianzhuang,” Gongshang banyuekan 5, no.1 (1933), 80; “Shanghai de zhongguo juanyan chang,” Zhonggguo jingji zazhi 9, no.6 (1932), 426. 275 Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 46.

111 manufacturers boomed between 1925 and 1930. Jiaxian, a small county in central Henan, alone opened forty-four cigarette factories during these years.276 Again, similar to what happened in the late 1910s, when BAT reasserted its position after the boycott movements, many Chinese companies quickly faded away.277 In Shanghai, eighty-eight Chinese cigarette factories closed down in 1928.278 As for Henan, the whole province only had 34 factories with 109 cigarette-rolling machines left in 1936.279

It is true that most Chinese-owned cigarette firms formed during the nationalist movements up to the 1930s did not last longer than a few years. These poorly capitalized companies were all tiny in comparison to BAT, and most had only one to four rolling machines and a starting capital of less than 100,000 yuan.280 Factors such as heavy debt, a lack of skilled workers, and operating with obsolete machinery meant that they could not withstand the fierce competition from BAT.

However, some firms managed to survive under the shadow of BAT. Low costs on coarse raw materials, second-hand equipment, and cheap labor, as well as savings on marketing and transportation, allowed them to produce much more affordable cigarettes and occupy market share among the urban poor and rural populations. Delong Cigarette Factory, for example, set its prices very low, selling a pack of its “Farmer” cigarettes for about 10 or 20 percent of the price of BAT’s cheapest brand. This compelling price enabled the firm to carve out a place in the competitive

276 Jiaxian defang shizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Jiaxian xianzhi (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1996), 295. 277 YMYGSCD, [07] 2C-1, 21. 278 Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 46. 279 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 1199. 280 Fang, Shanghai jindai minzu juanyan gongye, 1989, 26-31. According to a 1932 survey of Shanghai’s sixty Chinese-owned cigarette companies, 16 firms (26.66%) had 5,000-10,000 yuan of capital, 25 firms (41.66%) had 1,001-50,000 yuan of capital, and 7 firms (11.67%) had 50,001-10,000 yuan of capital. See “Shanghai huashang juanyan gongye zhi xianzhuang,” 421.

112

Shanghai market while extending its sales in great volume to rural Shandong.281 Fuxin Tobacco

Company manufactured even cheaper cigarettes by mixing shredded tobacco stalks with regular cut leaves. Its products were very popular among customers in rural areas of suburban Shanghai and southern Jiangsu.282

While small Chinese manufacturers tried to operate under BAT’s radar by producing and selling inferior cigarettes to low-income groups, a few larger firms rose up to directly challenge the multinational. For instance, Huacheng Tobacco Company, which grew to be the second largest

Chinese firm, won over several regional markets during the 1920s and 1930s. By focusing on high- end cigarettes, it built customer loyalty for its “The Rat” and “My Dear” brands in the large cities.283

Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company was certainly the most notable among all Chinese firms. Established in 1905 by Cantonese entrepreneur Jian Zhaonan, Nanyang was first deeply rooted in South China and Southeast Asia in the 1910s. Later it moved its headquarters to Shanghai with the intention of expanding northward.284 As Sherman Cochran’s study of the commercial rivalry between BAT and Nanyang indicates, Nanyang served as the primary competitor for BAT in the Chinese market throughout the Republican era.285 A combination of factors contributed to

Nanyang’s success, but the fundamental reason was that it succeeded in building a modern enterprise following the lead given by BAT. Started as a family business, Nanyang registered in

1918 with China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce as a limited company with capital of

281 Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 112. 282 Ibid., 111. 283 For an overview of Huangcheng’s history, see Ibid., 107-110. 284 “Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi fazhan ji,” Yancao yuekan 2, no. 7 (1948), 296-297. 285 Cochran, Big Business in China.

113 five million yuan.286 Like BAT, a large amount of its capital was put into building a national distribution network with an extensive advertising system and cigarette factories in center cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and . Whereas other Chinese firms made no attempt to participate in the leaf-growing business, Nanyang had arrangements similar to those BAT had made for distributing bright tobacco seeds, collecting harvests, and building tobacco re-curing plants in Shandong, Henan, and Anhui. 287 Meanwhile, to make high-end products, Nanyang formed the China-US Tobacco Leaf Company (Zhongmei yanye gongsi) in 1918 to import flue- cured tobacco directly from the American South.288 In every aspect, Nanyang built itself according to the business model set by BAT and developed into a modern corporation. It therefore became the largest Chinese cigarette company and BAT’s major competitor in China.

Even though the development of “national” companies was impressive, competition from the

Chinese did not preclude an enormous expansion in the sales of BAT’s products. From 1927 onward there was an absolute fall in the sales of Chinese-made cigarettes; many producers went out of business, and Nanyang suffered greatly from fierce commercial rivalry with BAT.

Nevertheless, by the 1930s, these Chinese companies had again become a significant component of China’s cigarette industry, taking half of the Chinese market in 1934.289 In the short term, while both big and small Chinese manufacturers remained in existence, they served as purveyors of cigarettes to social groups and local markets not yet covered by BAT. As such, they were important agents for the downward social and inward spatial diffusion of cigarettes from the urban elite in

286 YMYGSCD, [02]2A-1, 37; Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi shiliao, 9-16. 287 YMYGSCD, [07]2C-1, 21; Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi shiliao, 190-204. 288 Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi shiliao, 204-211. 289 The percentage varied each year during the 1930s. In 1934, 52.65 percent of all cigarettes sold in China was made by Chinese factories. See Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 38, Table 9.

114 treaty-port cities to ordinary consumers living in small towns and rural areas in the interior. More significantly, under the inspiration of the Western model represented by BAT, Chinese entrepreneurs built modern enterprises to manufacture and market cigarettes while taking into account specific Chinese conditions. The development of indigenous companies reflected the localization of the global cigarette in China. In the long run, communist China carried on the industrial foundation that had been laid down by Nanyang and other Chinese firms in the early twentieth century and brought it to a higher level after 1949.

The Hand-Rolled Cigarette Industry

In the 1920s and 1930s, BAT, Nanyang, and other mechanized cigarette companies all faced aggravating competition from hundreds of thousands of independent hand-rolled cigarette producers. The growing popularity of the cigarette induced traditional local tobacco-processing workshops to begin producing hand-rolled cigarettes to survive. In the meantime, peasants in the tobacco growing areas of North China and urban poor in the Lower Yangzi region also rolled cigarettes to sell on the market. By 1934, the hand-rolling industry occupied about 25 percent of the Chinese market.290 It certainly turned into a unique and significant aspect of the Chinese cigarette industry.

The hand-rolled cigarette was by no means a Chinese invention. Before Bonsack first assembled his groundbreaking machine in 1885, European and American hand-rollers had been producing commercial cigarettes for over a century. When industrial cigarettes first became popular in Shanghai towards the end of the nineteenth century, some far-sighted local tobacco merchants quickly turned their traditional business into manufacturing hand-rolled cigarettes using

290 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 187.

115 technologies they acquired from Westerners.291 To be sure, the hand-rolling industry did not thrive until the mid-1920s, when the cigarette became growingly popular among low-income urban and rural populations. Moreover, the global depression that hit China around 1930 reinforced the development of the hand-rolled cigarette business by creating a huge market demand for cheaper cigarettes. Therefore, the hand-rolling industry boomed around 1925 and grew rapidly over the next decade.292 Countless tiny manufacturers arose, more like family-run workshops rather than modern factories. Statistics of the industrial distribution and the total number of these workshops are not readily available, but from the fact that the Nanjing government attempted to regulate the hand-rolling cigarette business by organizing six “cigarette inspection districts” (juanyan jichaqu) in Shanghai, Northern Zhejiang, Southern Jiangsu, Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and

Northern Anhui, we can see that those workshops were mainly concentrated in the tobacco- cultivating areas in North China and the major markets for cigarettes in the Jiangnan sub-region

(including Shanghai).293 Meanwhile, various records can give us an idea of the enormous number of hand-rolling workshops. The 1935 survey of Shanghai’s cigarette industry indicates that, only in the foreign concessions, there were more than 500 cigarette workshops.294 In 1937, officials from the Ministry of Finance observed that there were more than one hundred officially registered hand-rollers in Zhengxian of Henan. They believed the number of un-licensed workshops was

291 Dong, Shanghai yancaozhi, 45. 292 See Barnard J. Gibbs, Tobacco Production and Consumption in China (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1938). 293 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 795, 804. 294 “Hushi juanyanye jinkuang diaocha: shoujuan yanhang tuqi jingxiao, yanchang yingye beishou daji, huafei yan gongsi chengli, shengchan zuixin jiqi,” Shenshi jingji qingbao 1426, (1935), 1.

116 much greater. 295 A Report issued by the same agency counted more than 3,900 licensed workshops in Shandong, Henan, Anhui, and Xuzhou of Jiangsu Province.296

The hand-rolling industry grew rapidly because hand-rollers could produce cigarettes that were not only the cheapest on the market but also highly standardized with quality factory production. The first explanation for this phenomenon is the low capital requirement. Hand-made cigarettes are not manufactured in factories but in private homes or small workplaces. A simple and movable wooden appliance, about the size of a typewriter, was used for cutting and rolling the tobacco. In North China, opening a hand-rolling business only required three to five yuan.297 In major cities, it required more capital, but still very little compared to opening a cigarette factory; for example, in Shanghai in 1935, opening a cigarette rolling business only required 100 to 200 yuan.298 The low capital cost enabled numerous unemployed urban poor and disabled ex-military men to choose this career path, either as independent workshop owners or self-employed rollers.299

In rural areas of North China, landless peasants also were heavily involved in the rolling business.

Even tobacco cultivators very often rolled cigarettes using household labor to earn extra income for their families. 300 Second, the development of bright tobacco cultivation in North China provided cheap, locally grown raw materials for the business. Low-grade flue-cured tobacco that was not favored by mechanized manufacturers supplied the hand-rolling industry. In Henan, for

295 MGSQYCHYDAXB, 4-369. 296 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 802. 297 MGSQYCHYDAXB, 4-369; Wu Tingsheng, “Kaocha Jing Wan Yu yidai shouzhi juanyuan zhuangkuang baogaoshu,” Juanyan jikan 1, no. 2 (1932), 2. 298 “Hushi juanyanye jinkuang diaocha,” 1. 299 MGSQYCHYDAXB, 96-192-112. In Zhengxian, two-thrids of the hand-rolling business was ran by ex-military, most of whom were disabled. See MGSQYCHYDAXB, 4-369. 300 MGSQYCHYDAXB, 4-369.

117 instance, rural rollers used what they called suiyanpian (tobacco scraps) to roll cigarettes.301

Among urban rollers, it was very common to mix low-grade leaves with small quantities of native sun-cured tobacco to make marketable products. In the cities and towns of Jiangnan, left-over tobacco from discarded cigarette butts were usually collected and recycled to making new cigarettes. These cigarettes were called “bend-over brand” (wanyao pai) or “nodding brand” (ketou pai) cigarettes, indicating the gesture of picking up cigarette ends on the street.302 The paper for rolling was often very coarse, sometimes recycled newspapers, but even the imported paper was not expensive. The government sold authorized and unmarked “official paper” (guanzhi) at eleven yuan per roll, which could make 6,000 cigarettes.303 Smuggled Japanese-made paper (sizhi) was even cheaper, selling at 3.5 to 7 yuan per roll on the black market.304 Third, because of the mobility and operating privacy of small appliances, the cigarettes turned out by them proved to be almost untaxable. Hand-rolled cigarettes were not subject to the same rates of taxation as manufactured ones because the Nanjing government categorized them as “native tobacco.” Starting in 1932, the

Nanjing government imposed 10 yuan of tax for each case of 50,000 hand-rolled cigarettes while the cheapest machine-made cigarette brand was taxed at 80 yuan per case.305 Last, the hand-rollers did not have to spend money on marketing. Many hand-rollers were quite skilled, making cigarettes virtually identical to factory-made machine-rolled ones.306 These firms often imitated the brand names of large companies, labeling or packaging their products in a similar manner,

301 Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di qi ji, 214-217. 302 See “Hushi juanyanye jinkuang diaocha,” 1; Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 132; “Shi yanwei,” Wenzhai 1, no. 4 (1937), 115; “ketou yan,” Yancao yuekan 2, no. 2-6 (1948), 265. 303 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 818. 304 Wu Tingsheng, “Kaocha Jing Wan Yu yidai shouzhi juanyuan zhuangkuang baogaoshu,” 1. 305 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 802; MGSQYCHYDAXB, 96-192-112. 306 Gibbs, Tobacco Production and Consumption in China, 35.

118 thereby saving on advertising as well. Even for those who did not pirate, their products were usually sold locally, mostly by peddlers, and some even sold cigarettes as they rolled on the street.307 Government regulation did not allow hand-rolled cigarettes to be transported and sold outside its production place. As such, peddlers saved transportation and distribution costs. For these reasons, hand-rolling manufacturers could produce cigarettes at much lower costs than could industrial plants. The finished product was then sold at much lower prices than even the cheapest factory-produced cigarette, selling at thirty to forty yuan per case.

The Nationalist Government, facing not only the pressure from BAT and British diplomats but also a significant loss of tax revenues due to cigarette counterfeiting, eventually implemented policies designed to control and reduce the number of hand-rolling businesses.308 In 1934, all hand- rollers were required to be licensed. After 1936 the government also tried to reduce the output of hand-rollers by revoking licenses in quarterly blocks, using a quota system based on the drawing of lots. 309 While such measures may have slowed hand-rolling production to some extent, many local producers simply ignored the new regulations. “Thousands did not register and many continued to use contraband paper.” 310 Even though some were forced to close under the regulations, they could easily re-start the business at another location with a new name.311 Failure to comply with government regulations meant that hand-rolled cigarettes continued to flourish.

While hand-rolling workshops continued to threaten BAT and the other major firms, illegally produced hand-rolled cigarettes were no doubt welcomed by many consumers because they

307 MGSQYCHYDAXB, 94-3(8)-7817. 308 For Ministry of Finance regulations applied to hand-rolling business, see Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 792- 821. 309 MGSQYCHYDAXB, 96-192-112. 310 Gibbs, Tobacco Production and Consumption in China, 35. 311 MGSQYCHYDAXB,4-369.

119 brought a “standardized” and “modern” hand-rolled product within reach of those who could not afford even the cheapest factory-made brand.

These independent businesses, using handicraft production techniques and native-place marketing networks more akin to those previously used to process and sell regional pipe tobacco, produced a “modern” and highly standardized product that rivaled and, in some cases, outsold the machine-rolled “global” cigarette manufactured in factories. Similar to Chinese-owned mechanized companies, hand-rolling workshops served as spreaders to pass down the cigarette to lower social class. Cheap hand-made cigarettes enabled people at the bottom of society to abandon pipe smoking and follow the modern fashion. More importantly, the hand-rolling industry reflected the nature of the localization and modernization of the cigarette in China during the early

Twentieth Century. Handcraft cigarettes, produced in small towns or countryside in a “traditional” fashion, replicated a “modern” commodity. The hand-rolling workshops hence represented what

Chinese scholar Peng Nansheng calls “the middle economy.”312 As Benedict has commented,

“Older time-honored techniques were also utilized in the production of standardized ‘brand name’ cigarettes as proprietors of small hand-rolling workshops and their female workers created factory- quality cigarettes that were both ‘modern’ and ‘traditional,’ ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ at the same time.”313 The hand-rolling business thus embodied the complexities and paradoxes of Chinese cigarette industry at the time: neither totally new nor completely old, neither purely a foreign industrial import nor an indigenous invention. In other words, the unique feature of the hand-

312 See Peng Nansheng, Zhongjian jingji: chuantong yu xiandai zhijian de jindai shougongye, 1840-1936 (Beijing: Gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002). 313 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 147.

120 rolling manufacturing demonstrated that Chinese cigarette industry was the product of the dynamic interactions between global and local processes and continuing traditions and emerging modernity.

Altered Livelihoods along the Commodity Chain

In the 1920s and 1930s, driven by mounting market demand, the Chinese cigarette industry that consisted of BAT, Chinese-owned cigarette firms, and numerous hand-rolling workshops was well-established. Although this industry was not entirely “modern” given the wide presence of handcraft workshops, the developments of commercialized bright tobacco cultivation and industrialized cigarette manufacturing formed a complete, modernized commodity chain of cigarette production in China. Matthew Evenden defines commodity chains “as the linked labor and production processes involved in the making of a commodity from production to finished good.”314 According to this definition, the commodity chain of the cigarette in early-twentieth- century China started from tobacco fields in Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and Northern

Anhui, and ended in cigarette factories in major cities and hand-rolled cigarette workshops spread throughout North China and the Lower Yangzi region. In Shandong, Henan, and Anhui, peasants cultivated and flue-cured bright tobacco leaves to provide sufficient raw material for the industry.

At harvest time, agents from a few tobacco companies and independent local dealers collected leaves for further processing and transported them to cigarette factories in the major cities by railroads and waterways. In the factories, organized industrial workers operated machinery to roll and pack branded cigarettes. Meanwhile, small hand-rolling businesses took low grade leaves undesired by mechanized manufacturers to make inexpensive cigarettes for the lower end of the market.

314 Evenden, “Aluminum, Commodity Chains, and the Environmental History of the Second World War,” 70.

121

This seamlessly integrated commodity chain permanently altered the livelihoods and practices of people who were employed along the way. By 1937, more than two million peasants in North China grew bright tobacco for a living, while over 100,000 industrial workers produced cigarettes in factories. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people worked for the industry as hand-rollers, middle men, independent dealers, and moneylenders. 315 Needless to say, many

Chinese of various occupations came to work for the new commodity chain. Different groups of people who were involved with the cigarette industry established new social, economic, and environmental relationships with tobacco under the theme of the “capitalistic mode of production.”

For peasants in North China, through capitalized tobacco growing, their agricultural activities became intimately integrated into a boarder market system. Their incomes and living standards became heavily dependent on the market conditions and industrial capital. The expanding commercialization of tobacco agriculture also resulted in social differentiation in local societies.

While poor and middle peasants struggled to make ends meet by working hard in tobacco fields, rich farmers, landlords, local gentry, and traditional merchants made great profits from the new tobacco economy through capital lending businesses. Industrial workers, most of whom had rural origins, they transitioned from farmers to urban workers by migrating to cities and becoming part of the emerging Chinese working class.

Tobacco Growers

At the beginning of the commodity chain, Chinese peasants substantially adjusted their livelihoods to cope with commercialized bright tobacco production. As shown in the previous chapter, tobacco agriculture in Eastern Shandong, Central Henan, and Northern Anhui was

315 YMYGSCD, [02] 2A-1, 23.

122 transformed from a substance to a capitalistic mode of production as a result of the introduction of bright tobacco. Consequently, in this newly constructed agro-economy centered on bright tobacco production, local peasants established a different relationship with tobacco in accordance with capitalistic transformation. Large-scale tobacco cultivation for commercial purposes required peasants to spend large amounts of labor and capital on the production process. In doing so, the economic basis of a Chinese peasant swiftly changed from a subsistence producer-consumer to something of an entrepreneur who participated in the greater market economy. However, high investments did not necessarily bring high returns as often expected, as powerful multinational controlled and manipulated the leaf tobacco market. In the short run, rural households experienced temporary prosperity. In the long run, they were trapped in long-term poverty due to the exploitation from industrial capital.

The most apparent and direct impact of the capitalized production of bright tobacco on local farms was the change of labor distribution in agricultural practice. Compared to most traditional crops in China, including native tobacco, American bright tobacco needed much more intensive inputs of labor. According to a study conducted in the 1930s, the amount of labor required for each mu of bright tobacco in Fengyang was six times that needed for millet and eleven times that of wheat. The labor intensity ratio between growing bright tobacco and other crops was even more striking in Xiangcheng as peasants had to spend nearly twelve times and nineteen times more labor to cultivate one mu bright tobacco in comparison with growing millet and wheat, respectively.316

From the care of the seedlings and work of transplanting, up to the process of packing the leaves, growers had to pay constant attention to sixteen steps of production. First planted in seedbeds, the

316 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 57.

123 tiny sprouts must be watered at least once a day and kept shaded from the sun, then transplanted gently by hand. The plant beds required continual hoeing to keep the field clear of weeds. Proper fertilization with relatively expensive bean-cake was essential because night soil imparted an unpleasant flavor to the leaves. After about two months, the lower leaves and the topmost shoots were removed to prevent flowering, thereby stimulating leaf growth and increasing the uptake of nutrients. Finally, the leaves were picked in stages, with those lowest on the plant being cut first, the middle layers second, and so on.317 During harvest time, more needed to be done to make leaves marketable. During flue-curing, the temperature was gradually raised over a period of three to five days. Great judgment and constant care was exercised during this process to ensure that leaves would turn the desired bright yellow color.318 When leaves were ready, peasants categorized them by grades, and bound them accordingly.319 All of these delicate operations required much time and effort. A contemporary writer recorded the scene of a Shandong peasant family working during harvest time:

“Ah! So busy! As long as there is moon, you have to do work under the moonlight. From hoeing the field to checking on tobacco leaves, so many things to do! When leaves are ready, cut them down and put them into the curing barn. After lighting up the fire, young man yawns and tries to take a nap because he is too tired from the long hard day. ‘Don’t fall asleep! If leaves are not roasted properly, we cannot exchange them for any money.’ Old man [father] yells at him.320

As such, the cultivation of American bright tobacco fundamentally altered the labor situation in rural households. Rich peasant and landlord families could to a large extent shift the extra work

317 YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 48; Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, Xiangcheng yancaozhi, 39-46. 318 For an overview of the flue-curing process, see YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 54-55. 319 Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, Xiangcheng yancaozhi, 58-59, 61. 320 YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 49-50.

124 needed to grow tobacco to hired permanent and seasonal workers. In middle and poor peasant families, such a shift usually happened within the household due to the lack of means to hire outside help, resulting in the over-exploitation of domestic labor. First and foremost, as the chief source of labor in the family, the adult male took on much more work in tobacco fields. In

Xiangcheng, tobacco growers had to spend 15 percent more regular working days and 50 percent more intensive working days each year than other peasants. Similarly, in Fengyang and Weixian, the regular working days in the tobacco region were 14 percent and 16 percent more than that in the non-tobacco region, while the number of intensive working days was 67 percent and 82 percent greater than that in the non-tobacco region respectively. 321 The burden of the exhaustive production process also rested on the shoulders of other members of the family, mainly in the form of female and child labor. Traditionally, Chinese women in these tobacco regions, most of whom had bound feet, rarely participated in agricultural production unless there was a serious shortage of labor in the family. After adopting bright tobacco cultivation, however, these women had to help their husbands and sons regularly do relatively light tasks such as picking off bad leaves, nipping off shoots, and grading and binding cured tobacco. Also, women were very often assisted by elders and the older children in the family.322 As Chen Han-Seng commented upon in his study,

“In every piece of the beautifully finished tobacco leaf we can see the images of those frail and foot-bound women, those thin and grey-haired elders, and those pale and somewhat dwarfed children, all of them incessantly at work. We can easily imagine the care these people have taken of the leaves, whether in the suffocating atmosphere of the heated baking-house, or in the dark dungeon-like moldy cellar.”323

321 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 64, Table 19. 322 Ibid., 63; Ying Mei, 1:398. 323 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 65.

125

The more significant impact on tobacco growers’ livelihoods was the capitalization of agricultural production. While it is true that bright tobacco could sell at a higher price than native tobacco and food crops, it is equally true that bright tobacco cultivation was much more capital- consuming. In the 1930s, an experienced Shandong tobacco peasant estimated the cost of production for bright tobacco was on average 75.9 yuan per local mu. In comparison, the expenses for growing 1 mu wheat, millet, and soy beans were 28.9 yuan, 14.9 yuan, and 2.9 yuan, respectively.324 Even though his figure did not include the expenditures for flue-curing, it clearly shows that bright tobacco production in Shandong costed three to twenty-six times as much as it costed to grow other crops.325 First of all, the growing of high quality bright tobacco required heavy application of rich fertilizer. In Xiangcheng, peasants usually used 4 to 5 cattle-pulled wagons, roughly 2,500 kilograms (5,500 pounds), animal manure on a one-mu tobacco filed to produce 60 to 100 kilograms (130 to 220 pounds) leaves.326 Due to the large necessary quantity and unreliable quality of animal manure, most tobacco growers chose to apply expensive bean- cake fertilizer, and, in some cases, chemical fertilizer. Whichever kind of fertilizer they used would cost them on average twenty yuan to successfully grow one mu tobacco.327 Not only was more fertilizer required for cultivation, but there was also the added expenses of equipment and fuel for flue-curing. In earlier years, BAT helped many tobacco farmers in North China build curing facilities by lending them money with a low annual interest rate of 0.6 percent.328 However, each year, there were still expenses for maintenance, equipment rental, and purchase coal for flue-curing.

324 Ibid., 9. 325 For specific data, see Ying Mei, 1:398-400. 326 Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, Xiangcheng yancaozhi, 45. 327 Ibid.; YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 48; Ying Mei, 1:399. 328 YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 21

126

The total cost of growing one mu tobacco, including fertilizer, fuel, and other production costs, was forty to fifty yuan.329

The high capital requirements of producing tobacco had significant social and economic impacts on tobacco growing areas. To acquire fertilizer, coal, and equipment for tobacco production, tobacco growers needed to gather sufficient funds at the time of purchase or renting.

Most peasants, who were used to living in the traditional peasant economy, rarely had ready cash on hand. Thus, without outside financial assistance, the poor peasants could not proceed to produce marketable leaves by themselves. The only practical option they had was to seek help from usury capital in the community, which was controlled by landlords, local gentry, independent merchants, and BAT’s compradors. With the exception of rich farmer families, all the middle and poor peasants had to borrow money or production materials from local usury capital at high interest rates.330 As a Shandong peasant said in frustration: “Don’t borrow money [from moneylenders]?

Then I can’t grow tobacco…there is no other way.”331 In this respect, bright tobacco agriculture and peasants’ livelihoods were capitalized through the rural financial system that existed in North

China during the early twentieth century.

The labor-intensive and capital-intensive nature of bright tobacco production forced peasants to engage deeply with the market economy. Tobacco cultivators could only work on tobacco, without spending extra time on other crops, because of the large amount of labor necessitated for bright tobacco production. Meanwhile, the high capital input determined that peasants must grow as much tobacco as possible to make a profit. Due to these reasons, peasants usually utilized most,

329 Ibid., 48; YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 37; Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 57-58; Ying Mei, 1:398. The figure was higher in Shandong because a local mu was larger than a standard mu. See note 191. 330 Zhang Hancai, “Xuchang fujin yanye diaocha,” Zhonghang yuekan 12, no. 5 (1936), 31. 331 YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 49.

127 if not all, of their lands to grow tobacco. In many cases, they even rented additional land from rich farmers and landlords. A Shandong peasant named Qiao Kecheng, for example, cultivated fifteen mu tobacco in 1936, twelve of which were rented.332 Subsequently, bright tobacco became the major source of household income in three tobacco growing areas. On average, approximately one-third of rich peasants’ cash income from crops was derived from bright tobacco. In the case of poor peasant families, this percentage was as high as 87 percent.333 This situation put peasants in a position where they needed to use cash returns from selling the tobacco yield to buy food and necessities for their families.334 When scholar Zhang Hancai visited Xuchang area in the mid-

1930s, he noticed: “planting tobacco required [peasants] to buy food.”335 In this sense, by adopting bright tobacco cultivation, a Chinese tobacco peasant moved from being a traditional subsistence producer-consumer, who produced directly for household consumption, to a farmer with the characteristics of a capitalist entrepreneur, who based production decisions on considerations of prices, supply and demand, and costs and returns. In unprecedented ways, their livelihoods became increasingly reliant on the market economy, in which they could exchange products for cash to support their families.

Peasants invested much time, labor, and money in the production of bright tobacco hoping to make a good profit, but their incomes were totally dependent upon the mercy of a powerful multinational that controlled the leaf market and set prices for their products. Chinese peasants thus suffered from BAT’s exploitation to a great degree. During the 1910s, while the company was willing to subsidize production and offer peasants special inducements to plant bright tobacco,

332 Ibid., 48. 333 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 23. 334 YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 39. 335 Zhang, “Xuchang fujin yanye diaocha,” 30.

128 such as providing seeds and guarantees of purchase at high prices, this crop was more profitable for peasants than the crops that it displaced. Many tobacco growers made good money because of

BAT’s advantageous policies. At the time, inspiring stories about people quickly accumulating wealth from growing “American seed tobacco” were circulated widely in North China. In Fangzi near Weixian, for instance, a farmer named Wang Er, who was very poor when BAT first came to

Shandong, bought over twenty mu land using the fortune he made from planting bright tobacco, becoming a rich landlord in just a few years.336 However, bright tobacco later ceased to be the most profitable crop when BAT withdraw those subsidies in the 1920s and 1930s. The company’s overall strategy of leaf collection was to reduce the price of tobacco year by year. A BAT representative once bluntly said in his business report: “[The company’s] practice had been to pay a big price for the tobacco the first year, a lower price the second year.”337 From 1915 to 1918, the highest grade tobacco was 1.2 yuan per kilogram (2.2 pounds). The collection price dropped by two third in 10 years, reaching 0.39 yuan per kilogram from 1926 to 1928.338 In the meantime,

BAT maintained a good statistical survey of the production and collection of bright tobacco in

China. Whenever a sudden and considerable drop in production happened, the company would raise the collection price to prevent production decrease.339 In 1933, for example, many tobacco peasants in North China went bankrupt and some committed suicide because of the low collection price that BAT offered. Throughout that year, Shandong’s provincial newspaper, Shandong

Minguo Ribao, frequently reported suicides among the desperate tobacco peasants.340 A similar

336 YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 47. 337 YMYGSCD, [75] 14B1-2, 66. 338 Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan, Nanyang yancao gongsi shiliao, 537. 339 Ying Mei, 1:416. 340 Ibid., 1:417; Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 58-59.

129 suicide wave also happened in Henan.341 Worried there would be a sudden decrease in tobacco acreage next year, BAT therefore increased its leaf collection price in 1934 by nearly eighty percent.342 After the production went up significantly in the next few years, the price dropped over eighty percent in 1936 and went back to what it was in 1933.343

This pricing strategy was carried out by BAT’s American representatives, who came face-to- face with Chinese peasants in tobacco-growing areas at harvest time every year. In the company’s purchasing centers, they not only decided the prices on-site but also set the standard for other independent collectors to follow. Specifically, BAT’s agents adopted a variety of methods to purchase leaves at the lowest price possible. First, they set barriers to make it difficult for peasants to enter the collection establishment. By doing so, BAT created an intense environment in the market as supply was much more than demand, so that peasants would be anxious to sell their leaves and lower their expectations on price. BAT issued a limited number of kangpiao, a certificate or a ticket, to peasants who owned a leaf-curing barn, and they must show kangpiao when delivering leaves to the purchasing center. This was a means of ensuring leaf quality, but it did cause considerable difficulty for many peasants when bringing their leaves for sale. Those who did not have a kangpiao would have to rent one from BAT’s compradors or wealthy landlords who obtained many through connections. Even with a kangpiao, peasants still had to wait in line for days to gain access, because only 400 to 800 sellers were allowed to enter the purchasing center

341 A few examples can be found in following sources: YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 39-40; YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 21- 22; Ying Mei, 1:418; Tan Jia, “Ban fengjian ban zhimindi shiqi de shangye diguo zhiyi dui zhongguo nongmin de xuexing lueduo,” Dagong bao, September 14, 1961, Shanghai edition; Zhang Jiezhong, “Xuchang yanye de lishi,” Renmin ribao January 24, 1951. 342 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 59. 343 Ming Jie, “Ying Mei yan gongsi he yuzhong nongmin,” 75.

130 each day.344 The collecting season was usually in mid-winter. Tobacco peasants, who were eager to sell their leaves, often slept in the open during cold winter nights to keep their spots in the line of growers, which was commonly as two-thirds of a mile long.345

Secondly, BAT’s American leaf experts intentionally lowered the grade of peasants’ tobacco.

Once the peasants entered the purchasing center, they waited their turn and put their leaves in piles on a low wooden counter. The American expert had total authority on the classification of tobacco grades and the fixing of prices. By slowly walking along the counter and merely uttering one or two syllables, he could make or break a peasant family for the whole year.346 Tobacco leaves were usually classified into four grades, but the American expert invariably called the first grade the second and the second the third.347 None of BAT’s employees bargained with the growers about the grading and pricing of tobacco leaves. Whenever a tobacco peasant raised some question or argument, he would receive the harshest treatment from the company’s staff who not only refused his entire lot but also chased him out of the collection yard. “This a matter of daily occurrence; yet the peasant only questions the grading and does not ask for an exact price.”348

Third, after a grade had been given, BAT’s staff used a method called yabang (pressing the weight) to lower the weight of peasants’ tobacco. Normally, by claiming the pile contained too much dirt or moisture, appraisers could deduct 15 to 20 percent of the actual weight. Such deductions were much heavier on rainy days. 349 They even took advantage of the fact that Chinese

344 Chen, Industrial Captial and Chinese Peasants, 47. 345 YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 19, 21; Ying Mei, 1:403. 346 Ying Mei, 1:403-405. 347 Ibid., 406; YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 58; Ming, “Ying Mei yan gongsi he yuzhong nongmin,” 75 348 Ming, “Ying Mei yan gongsi he yuzhong nongmin,” 72-4; Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 46. 349 Ying Mei, 1:406-407; Pingdingshanshi yancao zhuanmaiju, ed., yancaozhi (Beijing: Fangzhi chubanshe, 1999), 262.

131 peasants were not familiar with the British system, using the pound unit to confuse sellers.

Sometimes, the weighing staff would tell peasants 1 pound equaled 1.2 jin when the actual ratio they were using was 1 to 1.5.350 From the company’s records, we can see the severity of the yabang phenomenon in BAT’s leaf purchasing. From mid-1923 to mid-1924, the Xuchang purchasing center collected 5,273,354 pounds of tobacco, but its factories received 5,840,912 pounds Xuchang leaf in total. It means BAT collected 567,558 pounds of tobacco without paying peasants, which was 10.8 percent of the total collection. The percentage rose to 16.3 percent in the next year. From

1920 to 1931, on average 12.3 percent of BAT’s leaf collection in Xuchang was obtained through yabang. Similarly, during the 1930s, about 10 percent of BAT’s annual leaf collection in Shandong was a result of yabang.351

Despite the harsh treatment and low price that they received from BAT, tobacco peasants continued to sell to BAT because they found other collectors no more accommodating. Chinese and Japanese collecting agencies in three tobacco regions closely followed the example of BAT in manipulating prices and arbitrarily reducing the given weight of leaves. Facing the great competitive pressure from BAT, they could only collect leaves at even lower prices. BAT’s exploitation inevitably caused protests from local peasants, which often led to violent conflicts. In a personal correspondence, BAT representative T. J. Wittaker mentioned a journalist’s report of an incident in Shandong: “we paid such small prices for tobacco that farmers kicked, which made the American running the company here very angry and they beat up several farmers. That the farmers became angry at this and… say they ought to burn our company up to get rid of us.”352 A

350 YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 23, 58, 75. 351 Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Nanyang yancao gongsi shiliao, 203-204. 352 YMYGSCD, [77] 14C1-2, 5.

132

Chinese BAT employee recalled that in 1929 or 1930, tobacco peasants in Mentaizi of Anhui beat up an American agent in the purchasing center because they were so angry about the low price.353

Yet, nothing changed after these protests.

BAT undoubtedly gained great advantage from commercialized tobacco agriculture in North

China. By exploiting Chinese peasants, the company was able to cut costs on raw materials from collecting large amounts of cheap local tobacco that was very closely comparable to American tobacco in quality. For tobacco growers, cultivating bright tobacco was not necessarily profitable.

Peasants surely calculated profit and loss very carefully, but throughout the 1920s and 1930s, they kept growing bright tobacco even though they knew it was not always more gainful than growing other crops. An important question is raised here: why did Chinese peasants continued to grow bright tobacco? The answer is threefold. First, peasants generally were willing to discount or disregard all or part of their labor costs. In rich peasant and landlord families, the burden of the added labor for producing tobacco was shifted to the shoulders of hired tenant-laborers who worked for fixed annual or seasonal salaries regardless of the actual amount of work they did. In middle and poor peasant families, labor supplied by family members was completely ignored. The returns from growing tobacco were attractive as long as the extra work required could be furnished by domestic surplus labor without hiring outside help. In either case, without taking labor costs into account, peasants perceived bright tobacco as the crop that could bring them the highest possible income. In fact, the bright tobacco production provided more opportunities for farm work and thus absorbed many surplus rural laborers, which eased the “involution” process that had been

353 YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 61.

133 occurring in North China since the mid-Qing.354 Second, once involved, peasant growers tended to be locked into the new economic relationship with tobacco farming because of their investments in equipment and their debts to BAT compradors, landlords, and other creditors. In years when the return was not enough to cover the debt, they were unable to extract themselves from lending arrangements that they had made with usury capital, and were forced to continue growing tobacco for the next year. In this respect, the capitalistic production trapped peasants into tobacco farming.

Third, the complete infrastructure of the cigarette commodity chain and the mature tobacco leaf market provided peasants opportunities to make an entrepreneurial venture to future market demand. While planting other crops could not offer a significant improvement for their livelihoods, peasants were willing to gamble on tobacco cultivation and continued to anticipate year after year that the ideal soil and climate, easy access to production materials, the nearness of purchasing centers and railroads, and a good leaf price in the future would make bright tobacco more profitable than other crops. This was more the case in poorer peasant families. Many of them placed large proportions of their cultivated lands under tobacco at greater risk because it offered the possibility in any given year for good returns.

At any rate, growing tobacco commercially as part of the commodity chain of the cigarette business fundamentally changed the livelihoods of tobacco peasants in North China. Traditional

Chinese peasants, who used to live a stable life by mainly producing household needs, were transformed into entrepreneurs, who risked most of their resources and credit to grow tobacco in response to market demand, hoping returns would be at least high enough for their families’ survival. Their expectations were frequently unfulfilled because the process of agricultural

354 Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change, Chap. 16.

134 commercialization made peasants much more vulnerable to economic crisis or sudden downturns in the market, especially when the leaf price was manipulated by BAT, whose sole aim was to maximize its own profit. In good years, families of Chinese peasants made relatively good cash returns to improve their lives. In bad years, they struggled to survive, and many went bankrupt because they could not make enough money to pay off debts or to support their families. As

Chinese historian Shen Songqiao writes in his study of agricultural commercialization in early- twentieth-century Henan: “Since the spread of cash crops, the risks associated with large price fluctuations was an issue that Henan peasants had to face.”355 In the short run, tobacco growers enjoyed temporary prosperity. In the long run, they suffered from long-term poverty due to the precarious and uncertain nature of the tobacco leaf market, as well as the fact that they could not receive the proper payments due to them.

Capital Lenders

The new tobacco agriculture obviously did not always give peasants the better living that they hoped for, but it was also apparent that the adoption of bright tobacco cultivation brought economic prosperity to tobacco-growing areas. In 1936, a peasant from Central Shandong was amazed by the growth of wealth in Eastern Shandong. “This winter I travelled to a few villages in Fangzi.

They are so rich! I heard they made their money by growing tobacco.”356 In the same year, a

Chinese scholar observed in Xuchang area, “in recent years, there have been more and more tile- roofed houses [to replace hay-roofed houses] in tobacco villages.”357 On the streets in Xuchang

355 Shen Songqiao, “Jingji zuowu yu Henan nongcun jingji (1906-1937)—yi mianhua yu yancao wei zhongxin,” in Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo, Jindai zhongguo nongcun jingjishi lunwen ji (Taibei: Zhongyan yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo, 1989), 367. 356 YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 47. 357 Zhang Xichang, “Yancao quyu de nongmin shenghuo” in Yu Qingtang, Nongmin shenghuo congtan (Shanghai: Shen bao guan, 1937), 77.

135 city, “[I] frequently see people wearing cloth made by import textiles,” and riding in “fancy rickshaws which are even rarely seen in big cities such as Shanghai and Tianjin.”358

These two seemingly contradictory phenomena in fact reflected two very different outcomes of capitalized agriculture: that is, laborers earn minimal return for their work whereas capital holders gain maximum profit for their investments. While peasants received little for their hard work in cultivating tobacco, a group of people that included local gentry, powerful landlords, wealthy merchants and BAT’s compradors amassed fortunes through the capital lending business.

Worried about the risk inherent in uncertain market conditions, most of these people, who were more capable of providing the means of production, had little motivation to grow tobacco.359 The landlords and rich farmers, for example, only cultivated twenty percent of the tobacco land across

North China in 1934.360 Instead, they preferred to allocate their resources to loaning money and production materials to tobacco cultivators. By providing financial services for capitalized tobacco agriculture, they filled an important intermediary role in the commodity chain of cigarette production. In turn, their engagement with the tobacco business fundamentally altered their livelihoods from traditional farming and land-renting to capitalistic usury.

When bright tobacco started to spread across North China, Chinese compradors employed by

BAT, who were also influential local landlords, were the first people to realize that peasants needed financial assistance to produce bright tobacco, and the first to arrange loans to the tobacco growers.

These loans were sometimes in cash, but more commonly in forms of seed, bean-cakes, coal, iron pipes, and other items needed to grow and cure tobacco. In Eastern Shandong, as an example, the

358 Ibid., 76-77; Zheng Peigang, “Pinghan yanxian nongcun jianwen zashu” in Jiaotong daxue yuanjiusuo, Pinghan tielu yanxian nongcun jingji diaocha, fujian yi (Shanghai: Jiaotong daxue yanjiusuo, 1936), 32. 359 YMYGSCD, [86] 14H1, 48. 360 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 73-74.

136 biggest and most notorious landlord and moneylender was the BAT comprador Tian Junchuan.

During the 1920s and 1930s, he repeatedly took advantage of his position as a BAT agent to gain control over the local usury market and made a fortune by requiring peasants to pay high interest rates. When the price of bean-cakes was usually at its lowest in January, he purchased them in great bulk from Manchuria and cornered the market. When the price was at its highest in June and

July, he loaned these bean-cakes to peasants. In the curing season a few months later, he then made similar loans in coal which he bought wholesale from a nearby coal mine at much lower prices.

During the harvest in November and December, he collected both the principal and the interest of the bean-cake and coal loans from debtors. His annual loan in bean-cakes alone exceeded 50,000 yuan. 361 By making high profits from both loan interest and the price difference of the production materials, Tian became one of the most powerful and wealthy people in the tobacco area of Eastern

Shandong.

Even though BAT’s compradors had the ability and resources to monopolize local usury markets, they did not exclude others from lending capital. In fact, they closely cooperated with local gentry and wealthy merchants to conduct business. In Anhui, BAT’s comprador Wang

Yangzhi adopted a business model similar to Tian’s, issuing bean-cake and coal loans to tobacco growers, amounting to more than 100,000 yuan annually.362 He even set up his own oil mill, to simultaneously produce oil and bean-cakes. Regarding moneylending, he not only directly dealt with tobacco peasants, but also arranged loans through local gentry, landlord families, and old- time tobacco merchants in various locations across the Fengyang region. He profited of course

361 Ying Mei, 1:402; Chen, Zhongguo jindai gongyeshi ziliao, di’er ji, 141-142. 362 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 10.

137 from every transaction, receiving 1 percent interest. His partners also took their share, earning 9 percent interest on each loan as commission. 363 Moreover, to extend the usury network, Wang collaborated with landlords and tobacco merchants who were involved in the capital-lending business to found the Fengyang Tobacco Farmers Association in the 1920s. Through this semi- official organization, they legitimized their business by gaining support from local government through of political recognition and financial subsidies, and attracted more affluent families to join them.364

Upper class households in rural North China had an absolute monopoly on the capital-lending market. In all tobacco regions, more than 90 percent of usury capital was in the hands of the landlords, local gentry, and merchants.365 Usurers opened up thousands of oil mills and coal shops that covered all tobacco growing areas to issue loans and produce bean-cakes and coal to corner those markets. For example, a small in Weixian alone had no fewer than twenty oil mills and coal shops by 1934.366 At the beginning of July, these oil mills loaned bean-cakes, for which they collected cash payment by the end of November. The coal shops usually granted loans towards the end of September to be paid back in January at the latest. 367 As long as peasants had somebody to guarantee payment, they could easily secure a loan, either from the nearest oil mill and coal shop or from the hired loan agents who were always stationed in the marketplaces.

These capital lenders of course made their profit chiefly from the excessively high interest on loans. All cash, bean-cake, and coal loans extended by usurers were accompanied by a definite

363 Ibid., 10-11; YMYGSCD, [85] 14G1-2, 2. 364 YMYGSCD, [81] 14D5, 12. 365 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 66, Table 21. 366 Ibid., 11. 367 Ying Mei, 1: 400-401.

138 agreement whereby the debtor must pay the debt back within a certain period of time with a fixed monthly interest rate. Although interest rates varied in different areas, they were typically very high, ranging from 2 percent to as high as 10 percent.368 In Yidu of Shandong, for example, bean- cake loans carried a 2 to 2.5 percent monthly rate in 1935.369 Weixian’s usurers loaned coal to peasants at a price of 15 to 15.5 yuan per thousand catties (as compared with a wholesale price of

13 yuan per thousand catties that they originally paid for), plus an exorbitant monthly interest rate of 6 to 8 percent.370 When stock was low and peasants were in urgent need of coal for curing during the harvest time, they would raise the interest rate up to 10 percent. 371 The interest rate was negatively correlated with the amount of the loan; the less you borrowed, the higher the rate.

Therefore, the majority of middle and poor peasants who only could grow a small acreage of tobacco faced higher interest payments on their loans.

Although these compradors, landlords, and merchants did not use the substantial portion their farmland to grow bright tobacco, they were still deeply involved with the tobacco economy by overwhelmingly engaging with the business of lending money and means of production that supported tobacco cultivation. In this way, they became an important part of the commodity chain of cigarette production. Their livelihoods formerly based on accumulating wealth from traditional farming and renting out land thus changed to capital-lending. Through establishing a capitalistic production relationship with tobacco peasants, they formed new relationships with tobacco agriculture.

368 Ibid., 1:401-402. 369 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 67. 370 Ibid., 11. 371 Ying Mei, 1:401.

139

Industrial Workers and Hand-Rollers

At the end of the commodity chain, hundreds of thousands of industrial workers and hand- rollers worked at leaf-processing plants, cigarette factories, and hand-rolling workshops to produce the finished product—cigarettes. These workers, of whom the majority were recruited from rural areas near factories, adopted a radically new livelihood. By directly working for cigarette factories and workshops, they transformed themselves from subsistence peasants into salaried industrial workers or handcraft rollers.

As a major enterprise in early-twentieth-century China, the cigarette industry employed one of the largest groups of Chinese industrial workers. Before BAT further extended its production system in the post-war years, the company had already hired 13,000 workers by 1915.372 Records show that, by the 1930s, there were at least 10,000 people working in cigarette factories owned by either BAT or its competitors.373 The actual figure could be much higher because it does not include the number of workers in related industries such as printing factories and transportation.

In addition, many leaf processing facilities, owned by BAT and Chinese companies, employed thousands of workers across tobacco regions in North China. For example, BAT alone had two re- curing factories in Mentaizi of Anhui, each of which had 500 full-time workers.374 A larger number of temporary workers would be hired during harvest seasons.

Most of the workers in factories were recruited from the nearby countryside, which produced workers who migrated to cities seeking better lives. BAT and other companies relied on a chain of intermediaries to employ workers from the same home areas. In Shanghai’s factories, workers

372 Ying Mei, 3: 1027-1033; Cochran, Big Business in China, 25. 373 YMYGSCD, [02] 2A-1, 23. 374 Ying Mei, 1:414.

140 usually were from rural areas in adjacent provinces such as Zhengjiang and Jiangsu. In North

China, leaf-processing plants simply employed local peasants. In the 1920s and 1930s, rural

Xuchang saw a phenomenon of “leaving the village” (licun). Based on a demographic study of five villages in Xuchang, in 1928, 5.8 percent of the rural population left their homes to work in urban areas. In 1933, the percentage increased to 6.6 percent. 375 As tobacco production had become the major industry in Xuchang, it absorbed most of those people who “left the village” as employees. Like their counterparts in other Chinese industries at the time, the majority of the workforce in cigarette companies was female. For example, 85 percent of all workers in Nanyang’s

Shanghai factory were female.376 The use of child labor was also very common in these factories.

By the 1930s, BAT’s leaf re-curing factory in Xuchang had total of nearly 1,000 workers, of whom

400 were children. The youngest child employee was only ten years old.377

Similar to tobacco peasants in North China, industrial workers were also deeply exploited by cigarette companies. These workers were mostly unskilled, performing simple tasks such as preparation of tobacco leaves and packaging of cigarettes by hand. They normally worked for ten or eleven hours each day, yet received poor compensation for the long working hours.378 In urban cigarette factories, women could only earn 12 cents per day or 40 cents for every 100 pounds of strip they stemmed.379 In leaf re-curing facilities in North China, male workers were paid ten cents per day for doing heavy labor, while female employees, who did lighter work, receive merely five to seven cents a day. Children who handled the same tasks made half their adult colleagues’

375 Wang Wenchang, “20 shiji 30 niandai qianqi nongmin licun wenti,” Lishi yanjiu, no. 2 (1993). 376 Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Nanyang yancao gongsi shiliao, 289-290. 377 YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 58. 378 Ibid.; Zhongguo shehui shexueyuan, Nanyang yancao gongsi shiliao, 22. 379 YMYGSCD, [76] 14B3, 59-60.

141 wages.380 To make conditions worse, workers were not paid at all if they were sick, which was very common due to the poor working conditions.381

Besides low wages, workers in all cigarette factories also were mistreated by management.

Take BAT as an example: American managers and the Chinese “Number Ones” (a foreman or forewoman BAT hired to manage Chinese workers) treated workers harshly on a daily basis.382

One of BAT’s American managers in the Hankou factory once shared his experience of managing

Chinese workers with his supervisor, saying: “I find you have to handle them just like we do

Negroes in the South, and are easily handled after they find out that you are positive in what you say.”383 The Chinese “Number Ones” often beat or verbally abused workers while regularly harassing females sexually and demanding bribery or protection fees from subordinates in cash or

“gifts.”384 It is probably unfair to condemn only BAT since the exploitation of workers was a common phenomenon among all the industries in China, including other cigarette companies, yet the situation with BAT was particularly severe. The recurring strikes that occurred in BAT’s factories confirm this conclusion. BAT’s workers directly responded to the emerging communist movement by organizing many strikes. In 1921, for example, Zhang Guotao (Chang Kuo-t’ao), one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party and an active labor leader, was stationed in BAT’s Shanghai factories to mobilize workers for strikes against the company.385 To be sure, other cigarette companies, such as Nanyang, also became the target of many strikes

380 YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 58. 381 Ibid. 382 For an overview of Chinese “Number One” in BAT’s factories, see Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks, 60- 63. 383 YMYGSCD, [76] 14B3, 59-60. 384 YMYGSCD, [88] 14H6, 58; Chang Kuo-t’ao (Zhang Guotao), The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921- 1927, vol. 1 of The Autobiography of Chang Kuo-t’ao (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1971), 172. 385 Ibid.

142 because of their exploitation of workers.386 None of them, however, faced strikes as frequently as

BAT. In fact, of all the industrial companies in pre-revolution China, it was subjected to the most strikes, a total of fifty-six between 1918 and 1940.387 In these struggles with their employers, industrial workers in cigarette factories grew to be important members of the emerging Chinese working class in the early twentieth century.

Nevertheless, Chinese industrial workers gave BAT and Chinese cigarette companies a large, efficient, and comparatively inexpensive labor force that contributed to the tremendous development of the Chinese cigarette industry throughout the early twentieth century. In turn, working directly for the cigarette industry enabled them to make the transfer from subsistence farmers to modern wage-earners in the capitalistic market system. These Chinese men, women, and children left the rural way of living that they and their ancestors had been practicing for thousands of years and adopted a new working-class livelihood in the modern industry.

An even larger number of workers in the cigarette industry were hand-rollers. As mentioned above, hand-rolling cigarette businesses sprung up in Lower Yangzi region and North China during the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, hundreds of thousands of urban poor and rural peasants in these two areas were employed as hand-rollers. Even though specific statistics for these workers are not readily available in historical records, their total number was certainly enormous and much larger than the number of industrial workers.

The group of hand-rollers consisted of lower-class people from various backgrounds. Due to the low capital requirement, anyone who had a few yuan could start a hand-rolling business. Under

386 See Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Nanyang yancao gongsi shiliao, 322-374. 387 Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1933), 136.

143 these circumstances, a large number of urban poor and peasants poured into the business as self- employed small business owners by using their own or household labor. In rural North China, many tobacco peasants rolled self-produced tobacco into cigarettes, especially in the slack seasons when surplus family labor was available.388 In cities and towns across North China and the Yangzi

River Delta, a wide range of lower class urbanites, including unemployed poor and disabled former soldiers, operated hand-rolling businesses using only domestic labor and low-grade bright or native tobacco they bought cheaply from the market.389 Meanwhile, in major cities such as Shanghai and

Nanjing, a group of the poorest residents, such as refugees and homeless elders and children, collected cigarette ends on streets and recycled the remaining tobacco to produce marketable “new” cigarettes by hand. In Zhang Leping’s Sanmao liulangji (The Winter of the Three hairs), the author recounts how homeless children in Shanghai tried to survive by picking up cigarette butts off the street.390 People jokingly called them “nodding entrepreneurs” (ketou shiyejia) to mock their action of picking up discarded cigarette ends for a living. 391 Some of these small businesses later developed into larger hand-rolling workshops. Normally, workshops only employed a handful to a few dozen local peasants or laborers as hand-rollers.

Whether they worked at homes or at workshops, hand-rollers were making an honest hard- working living. The profits or wages they received positively correlated with the amount of cigarettes they rolled. In 1932, BAT’s comprador Wu Tingsheng noticed in Northern Anhui that a hand-roller made fifty to sixty cents for one day’s work, but this wage was based on rolling 4,000

388 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 148-152. 389 MGSQYCHYDAXB, 96-192-112, 4-369. 390 Zhang Leping, Sanmao liulangji quanji (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1984), 107. 391 See note 302.

144 to 5,000 cigarettes a day.392 Normally, a skilled hand-roller could only produce 1,000 to 2,000 cigarettes per day in exchange for 10 to 20 cents as compensation for the long hours of repetitive labor of operating the wooden rolling apparatus. Theoretically, “nodding entrepreneurs” could make a better profit because their businesses had no cost for tobacco. As Carl Crow witnessed in

Shanghai in the early 1930s, “This flotsam of the pavement is observed by keen-eyed old men who, with a prong on the end of a stick, pick up the commercially valuable butts and deposit them in a tin.” When they brought enough cigarette butts back home, they “remove[d] the charred ends, shred[ded] the tobacco from the papers, and with this material roll[ed] by hand a lot of readily marketable cigarettes.”393 He then concluded, “this is the most profitable business in the world.”394

However, this only could be true if hand-rollers could receive compensation for their labor searching for and collecting the cigarette ends, and if they could find a sufficient and stable supply on the streets.

Even though hand-rollers could only make limited returns from rolling and selling their products, this business did offer them a feasible livelihood. When the Nanjing Government attempted to ban the hand-rolling industry in the 1930s, many scholars and local officials protested against the policy by arguing that these tiny private businesses provided the vast number of unemployed and poor people a means to support their families.395 By producing cigarettes using traditional techniques, hand-rollers became a unique component of the commodity chain of the cigarette, and therefore were incorporated into the market economy.

392 Wu, “Kaocha Jing Wan Yu yidai shouzhi juanyuan zhuangkuang baogaoshu,” 2. 393 Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), 68. 394 Ibid. 395 MGSQYCHYDAXB, 4-369.

145

Conclusion

The Chinese tobacco industry underwent tremendous growth in the 1920s and 1930s. The giant BAT, comparatively smaller Chinese cigarette companies, and countless tiny hand-rolling cigarette workshops all diligently tried to expand their market share. These players constituted the

Chinese cigarette industry in the first half of the twentieth century. More importantly, their business operations resulted in the emergence of an integral commodity chain of cigarette production in China, which linked tobacco cultivation and cigarette manufacturing together.

The commodity chain of cigarette production significantly altered livelihoods of groups of practitioners along the line. Although different people experienced different outcomes, they all formed new relationships with tobacco under the theme of capitalistic production and within the framework of a market economy. For peasants, tobacco was no longer one of the many plants they grew to fulfill their household consumption, but became the major means of support for their families. Landlords, despite their minimal direct involvement in growing tobacco, fueled tobacco agriculture with the necessary capital and means of production. In return, they received high profits from the capital-lending business. Industrial workers and hand-rollers directly rolled tobacco into cigarettes on a daily basis, earning wages or profits offered by cigarette companies or the market.

Along the commodity chain of cigarette production, Chinese peasants, industrial workers, merchants, and entrepreneurs all endeavored to produce tobacco and cigarettes. However, under the market economy, the producers in the cigarette industry no longer directly consumed their product themselves. Instead, they purchased cigarettes from the market. As the next chapter will show, throughout the early twentieth century, Chinese cigarette consumption skyrocketed as a result of Chinese consumers overwhelmingly replacing traditional ways of tobacco consumption

146 with cigarette smoking. A new tobacco culture centering on the cigarette thus started to develop in China and ultimately reshaped people’s relationships with tobacco.

147

CHAPTER FOUR

SHIFTING TOBACCO CULTURE

Lu Xun (1881-1936), a leading Chinese writer and critic, was probably the most well-known cigarette smoker of the Republican era. In his family’s and friends’ memoirs, his photographs, and even today’s commemorative stamps, he is always portrayed as a wise thinker holding a burning cigarette in his hand. In her 1945 article, ’s wife Xu Guangping recalled: “When I met him for the first time at his apartment in Beijing, my deepest impression of him was his constant smoking. One cigarette after another without using an extra match as he simply lighted up the new one with the burning cigarette end.”396 Lu Xun’s fascination about cigarettes is also reflected in his writings. Many of his novels and essays contain either explicit or implicit description of cigarette smoking. For instance, in his 1924 short essay “Autumn Night,” he wrote, “I yawn, light a cigarette, and puff out the smoke, paying silent homage before the lamp to these green and exquisite heroes [wild grass and small flowers].”397 However, despite his obsession with cigarette smoking, Lu Xun was less passionate with writing about it than many other contemporary Chinese writers. Lin Yutang, for example, a devoted smoker who claimed “whenever I am conscious, I smoke,” wrote numerous essays between 1929 and 1935 about the pleasures of cigarette smoking, including a relatively famous piece regarding the “immorality” of quitting.398 His saying, “the cheerful feeling of smoking a cigarette after a meal is better than being immortal,” is still the most

396 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 119. This quote is from Xu Guangping’s article, “Lu Xun xiangsheng de xiangyan” (“Mr. Lu Xun’s cigarettes”), which was originally published in 1945. 397 Lu Xun, “Qiu ye,” Zhongguo wenxue zazhi no. 2 (1956). Lu Xun wrote this essay on September 15, 1924. 398 For the quote, “whenever I am conscious, I smoke,” see Pan Jianbing, Shuaixing Lin Yutang (Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe,2012), 4; Lin Yutang’s 1935 essay about quitting smoking, “Wo de jieyan,” was published two years later in his book Shenghuo de yishu, see Lin Yutang “Shenghuo de yishu,” Yancao yuekan 2, no. 7 (1948), 309-311; Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 232-238. Benedict also mentioned this essay in her book. See Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 181.

148 often quoted motto among today’s Chinese smokers. 399 Like Qing literati romanticizing pipe smoking and snuff in their articles and poems, when the cigarette was widely popularized in China during the 1920s and 1930s, Republican writers who were fond of cigarettes began to write about their smoking experience to justify and advertise this new form of tobacco consumption. The images of these vanguard cigarette smokers and the emerging literay representations of cigarette smoking reflect the shifting Chinese tobacco culture from pipe and snuff to the new paper-wrapped tobacco product in the early twentieth century.

Previous chapters have discussed how international forces reshaped tobacco production in

China by introducing bright tobacco cultivation and establishing a cigarette commodity chain. The growth of the Chinese cigarette industry not only reorganized agriculture in tobacco growing areas but also altered millions of Chinese’s livelihoods and their relationships to tobacco. In the marketplace, by promoting the mass consumption of cigarettes, the power of global capitalism also transformed the “traditional” daily lives of Chinese consumers for better or worse. BAT’s success in distributing its products to customers in both coastal regions and the interior shows how China was incorporated into the world industrial economy through the agency of Western multinational corporations, which initiated new forms of consumer culture and habits of consumption. As Carol

Benedict has remarked, the shift in tobacco consumption from pipe and snuff to cigarettes is “part and parcel of the ‘internationalization of daily life’ occasioned by China’s encounter with Western- style capitalism and modern Euro-American consumerism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”400

399 Pan, Shuaixing Lin Yutang, 3-4. 400 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 146.

149

This chapter outlines the shifting Chinese tobacco culture that followed the explosive cigarette consumption during the early twentieth century. After documenting the dramatic increase of cigarette consumption in China between the 1900s and 1930s, I discuss the changing perceptions of the cigarette over the same period that eventually re-established the relationship between consumers and tobacco. This discussion proceeds with the socio-cultural constructions of the

“modern” cigarette in the Chinese society. By employing the mass marketing methods that had proved successful in the West, BAT brought modern consumer culture directly from the United

States to China. Through its nationwide advertising system, BAT promoted the idea of “modern” cigarettes among Chinese consumers. Over the decades, Chinese smokers progressively abandoned the traditional forms of smoking and embraced the cigarette because they perceived it as a “Western” import and an iconic “modern” consumer product. As a result, a dichotomy emerged in Chinese tobacco culture, in which cigarette smoking was considered urban, fashionable, and socially sophisticated while pipe smoking began to be viewed as rural, old-fashion, and backward. At the same time, to expand their market share in different customer groups, foreign and Chinese manufacturers endeavored to add more Chinese cultural elements into their cigarette products. Within the context of the National Products Movement in the early twentieth century, the cigarette evolved from a “foreign good” to a “national product” as a result of tobacco companies’ efforts to justify and publicize their Chinese background and connections. By the

1930s, even though cigarettes were still statistically less consumed than pipe tobacco, cigarette smoking gained a leading role in Chinese tobacco culture. This new tobacco culture laid down the foundation for the cigarette entirely replacing pipe smoking after 1949.

150

The Mass Consumption of Cigarettes

Since cigarettes first arrived in China’s treaty ports around 1885, the development of the

Chinese cigarette industry resulted in mass consumption of this rolled tobacco product over the next several decades. During the last years of the Qing and the Republican era, more and more

Chinese smokers unceasingly switched from pipes or snuff to cigarettes, either machine-made by foreign and Chinese tobacco companies or hand-rolled by numerous family-run workshops. As part of the globalization of the cigarette, BAT and its Chinese competitors together brought China into “the cigarette century.”401

As discussed in Chapter One, BAT’s predecessor, American Tobacco Company, and many other Western tobacco firms successfully opened the Chinese market for cigarettes in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. The total Chinese consumption of cigarettes in 1900 was about

300 million sticks.402 From when BAT officially initiated its Chinese operations in 1902 to the reorganization of the company in 1919, cigarette consumption in China continuously grew. In

1910, the number of cigarettes sold in China jumped to 7.5 billion.403 The further stimulated the spread of cigarettes in that decade, as people eagerly replaced their old habits and lifestyles with modern choices to fit with the new society. In 1915, BAT alone was selling a billion cigarettes per month. In the same year, a Westerner observed that China experienced an

“astonishingly rapid” spread of cigarette smoking among Chinese “of all classes and ages, from

401 In the field of tobacco studies, scholars have given the name “the cigarette century” to the twentieth century for the domination of cigarette in global tobacco production and consumption during that period. See Brandt, The Cigarette Century. 402 H. M. Wolf, “The Tobacco Industry in China,” Chinese Economic Journal, Shanghai 14, no. 1 (1934): 91-2; YMYGSCD, [07] 2C-1, 22. 403 Ibid.

151 ten years up.”404 In 1916, the total cigarettes consumed in China amounted to four-fifths of those consumed in the United States.405

When the First World War ended in 1919, the cigarette industry was well established in China.

In the next two decades, even as the fortunes of individual companies rose and fell, the market demand for cigarettes only increased. Extensive marketing networks and a flexible pricing strategy enabled BAT to sell its products to customers regardless of location and class. The easy accessibility of the cigarette in most areas of the country further encouraged more Chinese smokers to choose this new product as the form of their daily tobacco use.

As a result, the Chinese cigarette market, whether supplied by multinational corporations,

Chinese-owned industrial companies, or local handcraft workshops, expanded spectacularly in the

1920s and 1930s. Cigarette consumption in China rose from 22.5 billion in 1920 to an estimated

70 billion in 1930. By 1933 it reached a peak of 88.5 billion, and the number remained above 80 billion in the years leading up to the Second Sino-Japanese War.406 The exact number may be even higher because these figures do not include the hand-rolled cigarettes widely consumed by urban poor and the rural population. Statistics for production and consumption of hand-rolled cigarettes do not appear in Republican-era records because central and provincial governments classified them as “native” tobacco products for tax purposes. Howard Cox believes that the hand-rolling industry occupied approximately 25 percent of the Chinese cigarette market by 1934.407 Chinese

404 United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Trade, Tobacco Trade of the World, Special Report no. 68 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1915), 31. Quoted in Cochran, Big Business in China, 27; Goodman, Tobacco in History and Culture, 2:132. 405 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 48. 406 H. M. Wolf, “The Tobacco Industry in China,” 91-2; YMYGSCD, [07] 2C-1, 22. 407 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 187.

152 historian Chen Hongyou’s study indicates the number could be as high as 38 percent in 1935.408

Even according to Cox’s lower estimate, Chinese consumers smoked close to 100 billion cigarettes annually in the mid-1930s. These numbers leave little doubt that cigarette consumption was expanding dramatically in China throughout the early twentieth century.

The unprecedented scale of the Chinese cigarette market and the rapid acceptance of the cigarette by millions of Chinese consumers were impressive. Some scholars boldly assert that by the 1930s, the cigarette had become a mass consumer good, smoked not only by upper and middle classes in the cities but also by poorer urban denizens and traditional peasants. For example,

Cochran concludes that “[cigarette smoking] had penetrated the lower classes and become commonplace among the poor as early as 1911.” 409 Benedict, however, disagrees with this assertion, pointing out there was an urban-rural divide in the Chinese tobacco market by the 1930s.

She argues that, compared to the interior, the consumption of cigarettes was relatively higher in more industrialized urban areas along the coast, where cigarette factories were located and the growing industrial sector contributed to higher standards of living.410

Indeed, until 1937, a larger portion of the Chinese smoking population was still consuming locally grown pipe tobacco due to economic reasons. In general, even the cheapest machine-rolled cigarettes were more expensive than the priciest pipe tobacco. In 1936, the most popular cigarette brands sold wholesale for 1.25 yuan per thousand while the highest grades sold for about 6.07

408 Chen Hongyou, “20 shiji 30 niandai guomin zhengfu dui Lu Yu Wan shougong juanyanye de ‘zhengli’,” Anhui shixue, no.3 (2012), 35. 409 Cochran, Big Business in China, 27-28. 410 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 139.

153 yuan per thousand.411 In comparison, the lowest grade of shredded pipe tobacco sold wholesale for

0.20 yuan per jin (17.5 ounces or 500 grams), and the best grade sold for 0.60 yuan per jin.412

Similar to the pattern of tobacco consumption in the earlier centuries, a segmented tobacco market continued in China due to significant price differentials between cigarettes and pipe tobacco. “At least through the 1930s, the introduction of branded proprietary cigarettes did not immediately transform the socially differentiated patterns of tobacco consumption evident under the Qing.”413 Moneyed urban elite, who previously favored imported snuff or high-class native tobaccos, now chose expensive ready-made cigarettes for their daily usage. Middle class “petty urbanites” (xiaoshimin) tried to follow this new trend by smoking more affordable brands of cigarettes, just like their predecessors had purchased cheaper snuff and relatively high-quality pipe tobaccos in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The vast rural poor largely continued to smoke native tobacco in pipes.

For most Chinese consumers, industrial cigarettes remained expensive luxuries rather than items of everyday mass consumption. According to Barnard J. Gibbs’s study on Chinese tobacco consumption in 1938, only 15 percent of the tobacco produced in China was smoked as factory- made cigarettes. Lower class consumers, comprising the majority of the Chinese population, consumed 80 percent of the tobacco in the form of pipe smoking.414 These figures show that,

411 Gibbs, Tobacco Production and Consumption in China, 34. 412 “Tobacco Crops of Chekiang,” Chinese Economic Journal 5, no. 3 (1929): 806-10. One cigarette approximately contained 0.75 grams of tobacco. If cigarettes were sold by weight, the prices of those brands noted in the text would have ranged from 0.83 yuan to 14.60 yuan per jin. 413 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 149. 414 Barnard J. Gibbs’s study shows 80 percent of the 1.2 billion pounds of tobacco consumed in 1938 were used in the form of pipe tobacco while only 15 percent were smoked as industrial cigarettes (4 percent consumed as cigars, and 1 percent as snuff). Gibbs attributed the limited cigarette consumption to the poverty of the Chinese. At the time, 85 percent of the total Chinese population were peasants whose annual household income was only about 50 US dollars on average. Only middle group (15 percent) and high-income class (3 percent) could afford to smoke machine-rolled cigarettes. See Gibbs, Tobacco Production and Consumption in China, 28.

154 although cigarettes were broadly available in rural markets, cigarette smoking to a significant degree remained an urban and coastal phenomenon in China throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

However, even though Chinese cigarette consumption up to the 1930s did not overwhelmingly cover all regions and social classes as scholars previously argued, the scale of cigarette diffusion among the lower class in inland regions should not be underestimated. Benedict examined the patterns of tobacco consumption in Dingxian, Hebei Province to argue that the cigarette had very a limited impact on rural China.415 However, a case study of one county in North

China is not sufficient to reveal a complete picture of the vast countryside.

Looking at cigarette consumption regionally, rural areas in North China and the Lower

Yangzi River Valley had relatively high rates of cigarette smoking due to the rapid growth of the hand-rolling industry, which Benedict did not take into account in her analysis. In general, the price of hand-made cigarettes was even lower than the most inexpensive machine-rolled product.

By 1932, hand-rollers could sell a case of their products at a wholesale price of thirty-seven or thirty-eight yuan while tobacco companies were taxed fifty-five yuan for a case of their lowest grade cigarettes.416 Therefore, the affordability and availability of these coarse cigarettes enabled a wide range of lower class consumers to begin cigarette smoking. During the 1920s and 1930s, while peasants and laborers in these regions occasionally purchased cheaper industrial cigarettes, they more frequently smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. A 1936 survey recorded 28.3 percent of rural households in Henan and 29.3 percent of rural households in Shandong consumed cigarettes

415 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 172-175. 416 For the price of hand-rolled cigarettes, see Wu Tingsheng, “Kaocha Jing Wan Yu yidai shouzhi juanyuan zhuangkuang baogaoshu,” 2; for the tax rate on machine-rolled cigarettes in 1932, see Fang, Shanghai jindai minzu juanyan gongye, 137.

155 regularly; and 34.4 percent of Henan peasants and 39.3 percent of Shandong peasants purchased and smoked cigarettes on a daily basis.417 A popular saying that circulated in Central Henan in the

1930s reflects this phenomenon: “rich people smoke Hataman [a BAT brand]; poor people smoke

Wangji cigarettes [a local hand-made brand].”418 In the mid-1930s, an “Anti-cigarette-smoking

Movement” (jinxi juanyan yundong) organized in rural Lower Yangzi region, specifically

Zhejiang Province, as part of the New Life Movement was initiated by the Nanjing Government.

This movement later expanded to rural areas in Fujian, Anhui, and Henan.419 The mass social movement against cigarette smoking itself suggests the popularity of cigarettes in the countryside of these provinces.

Looking at the spread of the cigarette in China from a national perspective, similar to upscale tobacco products gradually trickling down the socioeconomic hierarchy and expanding to the countryside during the Qing, common smokers during the Republican era in the interior began to adopt the cigarette as they perceived it as a more upscale style of tobacco consumption. Better off rural populations smoked branded cigarettes regularly as a gesture of pursuing urban fashion. Their actions encouraged less moneyed peasants to purchase the cheapest cigarettes produced either in smaller Chinese cigarette factories or hand-rolling workshops. As noted in previous chapters, BAT always attached great importance to developing China’s inland market. Its nationwide advertising campaign ensured that the rural population was exposed to the image of the cigarette products. Its dual distribution systems passed cigarettes down to the village level across the country. A considerable portion of BAT’s sales came from the rural market. In many places where hand-rolled

417 “Nongqing baogao,” Nong bao 3, no. 26 (1936):1931-32. 418 Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di qi ji, 152. 419 For an overview of the movement, see Huangpu Qiushi, “Jingji weiji zhong de zhongguo juanyan shichang (1931- 1936),” Jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan, no.84 (2014), 119-127.

156 cigarettes did not reach and the prices of BAT’s products were too high for local consumers, less expensive Chinese made brands offered a better option. A combination of factors, such as pirating well-known brands, using low-grade raw materials, and hiring poorly compensated labor, allowed small to medium sized Chinese-owned companies to produce more affordable cigarettes. In 1932, the cheapest cigarette on the market was the Ruyi Tobacco Company’s “Fanru” brand, selling within the price range of pip tobacco at 0.8 yuan per thousand.420 These affordable industrial-made cigarettes gave lower-income tobacco users a chance to catch up with the new fashion. In 1928, the lowest grade cigarettes accounted for 73 percent of the total cigarette consumption in China.

421 This number steadily rose in the 1930s as more common smokers spent their regular budget for pipe tobacco on cigarettes. As a Westerner observed at the time, “that bearers and carters and other haulers of heavy loads gauged the distance between two points not by miles but by the number of cigarette smoked en route.”422 Both statistical and anecdotal evidence indicate the lower-class population in the countryside widely adopted cigarette smoking.

Looking at Chinese cigarette consumption in the early twentieth century from a global perspective better explains this urban-rural divide. The patterns of Chinese tobacco use reflected the course of cigarette modernization and globalization at the time. During that period, the cigarette was still not the predominant form of tobacco consumption anywhere around the world. Even in the United States, a highly industrialized and developed country where the modern cigarette was

420 Tiedaobu, ed., Zhijuanyan gepai mingcheng jiage baio (Nanjing: Tiedaobu, 1932). The most expensive brand was BAT’s “Feiluojie,” selling 250 yuan per thousand. Normally, the price of lower grade cigarette was 2.8 yuan per thousand. 421 Ying Mei, 2:521, 733; Yan Zhongping, ed., Zhongguo jindai jingjishi tongji ziliao xuanji (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1955), 911. 422 Wang Jingyu, Zhongguo jindai gongye shi ziliao, di’er ji (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1957), 1:214-215, 231-232. Quoted in Cochran, Big Business in China, 27-28.

157 originated, the majority of smokers, most of whom were lower income population, still consumed tobacco in traditional ways.423 The situation in the United States shows the modernization of tobacco consumption was still in a transitional stage during the first half of the twentieth century: the cigarette was widespread but its higher price prevented it from overtaking other smoking methods. This transitional stage also occurred globally and China played an important part. From this global perspective, the rapid expansion of cigarette consumption in China was in fact quite impressive. By 1928, the total consumption of industrial cigarettes in China, an agrarian country that was on the whole very poor, was already 87 percent of that in the United States.424 It was even more impressive that a large proportion of the poorer Chinese population regularly smoked cigarettes, either produced from mechanized factories or handcraft workshops.

At any rate, the significance of cigarette consumption in rural China should not be overlooked or underestimated. Through the lens of regional, national, and global perspectives, it is clear that throughout the early twentieth century, cigarette smoking not only stretched deeply into inland

China, but also extended down the social hierarchy from urban elite to traditional peasants. The nature of the modernization of the cigarette determined that this new tobacco product would not completely replace traditional forms of at that time. Therefore, while admitting there were significant socioeconomic differences in the patterns of cigarette consumption between city and countryside as well as between the rich and the poor throughout the Republican era, the cigarette undoubtedly had become a mass consumer good vastly accepted and smoked by the

Chinese.

423 Only in 1941 did cigarettes come to represent 50 percent of total American tobacco consumption. See Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge, 1993), 93-94. Also see Brandt, The Cigarette Century, 2. 424 Cochran, Big Business in China, 234.

158

Socio-Cultural Constructions of the “Modern” Cigarette

Since the invention of the machine-rolled cigarette, people had conferred upon it the idea of a “modern” consumer product. Some scholars have argued that certain qualities of the cigarette, such as standardized appearance, production in industrial factories, and handy portability, were particularly suited to the modern age.425 In particular, the small size and light weight of the cigarette made it popular with the new urban classes that worked in offices or factories because it could be smoked only using one hand or even just the mouth. Hence, the cigarette became an enhancement to modern industrial productivity because it allowed workers to smoke on the job while focusing on the task at hand. In contrast, the traditional forms of tobacco use, especially pipe smoking, required manipulation (i.e., loading and cleaning the bowl) during long periods of idleness and thus were considered more suitable to agrarian societies in which work was less time- sensitive.426

Meanwhile, the industrial cigarette was integral to the creation of the globalized modern mass consumer culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Cigarette companies found it advantageous to promote their products with those “modern” qualities through the newly invented marketing method of advertising. In fact, as one of the first mass-marketed consumer goods in the age of industrialization, the cigarette is often considered a symbol of modern consumerism. Howard Cox summarizes three product features that characterize the “modern international cigarette”: flue- cured bright tobacco as raw material; a standardized product made using methods of mass production that became known as the American system of manufacture; and packaging and selling

425 Michael Schdson, “The Emergence of New Consumer Patterns: A Case Study of the Cigarette.” In Consumption: Critical Concepts in the Social Science, vol. 4, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 2001), 490. 426 Jason Hughes, Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 89-94.

159 as a branded product using marketing methods that characterized it as modern consumer culture phenomenon.427 Once cigarette began to be machine-rolled in Anglo-American factories, it took on an iconic status around the world as a uniquely Western and modern commodity. The globalization of industrial cigarettes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was accompanied by widespread Western lifestyle and modern consumerism.

With this historical background, when manufactured machine-rolled cigarettes first entered treaty-port China towards the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese consumers naturally labeled them a “Western” import because they were produced in American and European factories.

Throughout the early twentieth century, the cigarette further evolved into a “modern” consumer good along with the emergence of mass consumer culture in China. As Benedict has noted,

“Certainly in China as elsewhere, the cigarette has served as a compelling symbol of Western-style modernity ever since its introduction in the 1880s.” 428 Well educated elites became China’s vanguard cigarette smokers because they valued the modernity embodied in the cigarette: its distinctive physical form and its presumed capacity to meet the demands of an accelerated pace of modern life. Under their influence, Chinese smokers who wished to fashion themselves as progressive and up-to-date gravitated to this newly reinvented form of tobacco consumption. As a result, in Republican-era cultural representations, even though it was not exclusively a foreign import anymore due to the localization of production, Chinese consumers invariably imagined the cigarette as a Western artifact consumed only by those affecting a modernized way of life. In contrast, the pipe was rendered a genuine Chinese item of a departed age. Like any other cultural

427 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 3. 428 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 11.

160 movement in human history, the socio-cultural construction of the “modern” cigarette in early- twentieth-century China was a complex process. This section attempts to reveal the dynamics of the process by examining the establishment of modern consumer culture in China, the emergence of the symbolic “Shanghai cigarette,” and the rise of female cigarette smoking.

BAT’s Introduction of Modern Consumer Culture to China

As one who taught cigarette smoking to the Chinese, BAT unquestionably was responsible for introducing modern cigarette consumerism to China. By the time of BAT’s founding in 1902,

James Duke was already famous for using advertising in American Tobacco Company’s conquest of the American cigarette market in earlier decades. When BAT started to penetrate the Chinese market, Duke instructed James Thomas, the managing director of its China branch, to apply the same aggressive advertising techniques there.429 Following Duke’s orders, Thomas immediately transported the newborn American consumer culture to China directly from “Times Square.”430

As concluded in Chapter One, advertising was one of the key reasons behind BAT’s success in China. Started in 1902, BAT invested large sums in launching a nationwide advertising campaign in China. By 1910, the company’s annual advertising budget for China reached about

1.8 million yuan. 431 Backed by this abundant financial support, BAT’s advertising system extended as wide as its distribution network as frontline sales agents served as distributors for both cigarettes and advertisements. The Department of Advertising (guanggao bu) at Shanghai headquarters oversaw the overall marketing strategies and advertisement design. Every level of

429 James A. Thomas, A Pioneer Tobacco Merchant in the Orient (Durham, NC, Duke University Press 1928), 10-23, 36. 430 See Cochran, “Transnational Origins of Advertising,” in Cochran, Inventing Nanjing Road, 37. 431 Julean H. Arnold, et. al, Commercial handbook of China, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Miscellaneous Series no. 84 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 2:393.

161 the distribution network—Divisions (qu), Territories (duan), and Districts (fenduan)—was responsible for the spread of advertisements in their respective jurisdictions.432 By the late 1910s,

BAT had disseminated advertisements of its cigarette brands across the country. In a letter he addressed to James Thomas, Julean Arnold, an American commercial attaché in China who was impressed by BAT’s advertising operation, said: “Yes, when it comes to advertising you have them

[other tobacco companies] all skinned.”433

To provide sufficient quality advertisements for the massive operation, as early as 1905, the company began to import state-of-the-art American advertising technologies by setting up three printing presses in Shanghai. The number of these facilities increased to ten in only three years and all were capable of making beautiful pictures in polychrome.434 Carl Crow, an American advertising agent, described one of BAT’s printing presses in Shanghai as “the largest color- printing plant in the world and one of the finest.”435 For the next several decades, these factories unceasingly printed eye-catching images of BAT’s cigarettes designed by professional artists.

Using the vast network and advanced technologies, BAT’s cigarette brands were advertised by “every approved method we [advertising agencies] or the manufacturers could think of.”436

Larger items such as posters, billboards, wall paintings, and neon lights were displayed on walls and buildings from major cities to remote villages. Smaller printings including calendar posters

(yuefenpai) and collectable cigarette cards were distributed to millions of individual customers.

432 Ying Mei, 2:703-704. 433 Quoted in Cochran, Big Business in China, 22. 434 Chen Zhen, Zhongguo jindai gongyeshi ziliao, di’er ji, 125. 435 Carl Crow, Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), 22. To be clear, Carl Crow never worked for BAT. 436 Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers, 68.

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“The cigarette became a ubiquitous feature in the 1910s, even in the remote interior, as hand- painted advertisements adorned pagodas, street corners, and city walls.”437

Even so, BAT still worried that these images did not draw enough attention from consumers.

Thus, the management instructed its employees to utilize additional channels to broadcast its products. An internal document listed better options for placing BAT’s trademark and advertisements, from larger objects such as the cotton canvas covers for the tops of rickshaws, steamships, and trains, to small things including scrolls, handbills, wall hangings, window displays, notebooks, and traveling bags.438 It contained further suggestions on newspaper advertisements:

“the advertisements on newspapers must be both entertaining and artistic, so people would be happy to read it.” 439 In fact, newspapers was the most important carrier for BAT’s tobacco advertising at the time. Newspaper columns were half-filled by their claims and well-designed pictures. During the early twentieth century, BAT’s and other tobacco firms’ cigarette advertisements paid for the rapid growth of the newspaper business in modern cities such as

Shanghai and Tianjin. In 1925, BAT alone paid Shanghai’s newspapers a total of 115,525.94 yuan for advertising. 440 One of the company’s sales representatives in Tianjin once said “Dong

Xianguang’s Yongbao [Yong Newspaper] definitely would fail without our support.”441

In addition to pictographic advertising, in the 1920s BAT purchased movie studios and theaters to promote its cigarettes through the emerging Chinese movie industry. It either advertised cigarettes in the theaters directly to the audience or produced popular movies with cigarette

437 Goodman, Tobacco in History and Culture, 1:132. 438 Ying Mei, 2:701. 439 Ibid. 440 Ibid., 2:705. 441 Ibid.

163 smoking scenes.442 Due to BAT’s massive marketing operation, cigarettes certainly came to be one of the pioneers of advertising in China. As Carl Crow observed, “thanks to the assistance given by their New York advertising agency, one of the best in America, the campaign we put on in

China was far better than anything that had ever been seen there before.”443

BAT’s advertising served as the primary vehicle to convey the modern consumer culture of the cigarette. In the early years, the company initially adopted advertisements designed for use in the West and exported them unchanged to China. In both big cities and small towns, BAT put up advertising posters and billboards depicting European sceneries and Americans smoking cigarettes.

To millions of Chinese customers, it issued calendar posters and cigarette cards portraying popular

Western stories, American historical figures such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and most numerous of all, Western women.444 (See Figures 4.1 to 4.3) Through these vivid portraits of Western landscape, culture, and people, BAT explicitly showed the Chinese that the cigarette was an exotic Western import and smoking it was a fashionable modern choice. In return,

Chinese consumers had the impression that cigarettes were industrially made in the West and were widely consumed in modernized societies.

442 Ibid., 2:708 443 Crow, Four Hundred Million Consumers, 17. 444 See Chaonan Chen and Yiyou Feng, ed., Old Advertisements and Popular Culture: Posters, Calendars and Cigarettes, 1900-1950 (San Francisco: Long River Press, 2004), 3-4, 55, 58-59; Wu Hao, Zhuo Botang, Huang Ying, and Lu Wanwen, ed., Duhui modeng: yuefenpai 1910s-1930s (Hong Kong: Hong Kong sanlian shudian youxian gongsi, 1994), 9, 161.

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Figure 4.1 (Left): “A BAT’s billboard showing Westerners smoking cigarettes.”445 Figure 4.2 (Middle): “A of BAT’s “Pin Head” brand depicting a Western family.”446 Figure 4.3 (Right): “An advertisement of BAT’s “Pin Head” brand with pictures of Western women.”447

Following BAT’s example, other tobacco companies, foreign and Chinese, quickly applied mass advertising in their marketing operations. For example, in 1923, Nanyang spent 481,000 yuan on advertising, which was 11.42 percent of its sales revenue.448 Most firms attempted to imitate

BAT by designing and producing advertisements filled with Western content. The American- owned Tobacco Product Company, for instance, used images of Western women to issue the very first set of cigarette cards in China.449 Among Chinese cigarette manufacturers, the Huacheng

Tobacco Company adopted the most thoroughly Westernized advertising strategy. In 1929,

Huacheng established its own Department of Advertising (guanggao ke) to carry out the advertising concept of a luxurious urban lifestyle to attract city consumers. It intentionally printed the packaging of its products in English and Western design to make them look like imported brands. The company’s Western-style advertisements were broadly published in Shanghai’s newspapers, popular magazines, and public transportations. (See Figures 4.4 and 4.5) In 1931, it also set up a neon-light advertisement next to BAT’s on Nanjing Road, the commercial center of

445 “Ying Mei yan gongsi zai Nanjing de guanggaopai,” accessed August 23, 2016, http://www.meihua.info/a/68194 446 Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 58. 447 Ibid, 55. 448 Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Nanyang yancao gongsi shiliao, 247. 449 Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 65.

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Shanghai.450 Through this publicity, Huacheng successfully disguised its cigarettes as foreign imports and established a reputation among consumers as a high-end cigarette manufacturer.

Figure 4.4 (Left): “Western-designed advertisment of Huacheng’s “Beauty” brand on a bus in Shanghai.”451 Figure 4.5 (Right): “The packaging of Huacheng’s “The Rat” brand.”452

Besides Western-style images, tobacco firms also frequently emphasized the “modern” qualities of the cigarette in their advertising, such as their elegance to smoke, convenience to carry, fashionable image, and refreshing taste. Many cigarette advertisements expressed the idea that cigarettes were particularly suitable for urban elites who worked in modern offices. They claimed that certain features of the cigarette, such as easy of consumption and refreshing taste, would increase workplace productivity. (See Figures 4.6 to 4.8) As travel was an increasingly popular modern activity, several cigarette brands were marketed as “the best companions of modern travelers.”453 These tobacco commercials painted an image of modern life in which cigarette smoking was an essential component.

450 For Huacheng’s advertising campaign, see Zhongyang gongshang xingzheng guanliju, ed., Shanghai Huacheng yanchang lishi ziliao (1924-1957) (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan, 1958), 37. 451 “Meili pai xiangyan cheti guanggao,” accessed November 1, 2016, http://www.ad518.com/article/id-9644 452 “Jiefangqian yanbiao,” accessed November 1, 2016, http://www.gexiaoxingmuseum.com/jfq/jiefangqian.htm 453 Zhou Xun, “Smoking in Modern China,” in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun (London, Reaktion Books, 2004), 165.

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Figure 4.6 (Left): “Advertisements of Huacheng’s “The Rat” brand.”454 Figure 4.7 (Middle): “Advertisements of Nanyang’s “Big Great Wall” brand.”455 Figure 4.8 (Right): “Advertisement of BAT’s “Hatamen” brand.”456

In posters, magazines, newspapers, and films, cigarettes were portrayed as imported Western commodities that appealed mainly to fashionable citizens of a modern society. Those glamorous cigarette-smoking Western models only served to underline this message. Therefore, the cigarette embodied socio-cultural representations of “Western” and “modern” tobacco use. Urban elites, including Western-educated intellectuals, trendy city residents, and businessmen, took up cigarettes to show their identities as progressive citizens of an emerging modern nation. Images in advertisements commonly expressed the cigarette as a high-quality modern commodity that shaped traditional consumption practices by suggesting there were either progressive or backward ways to consume tobacco. The tobacco pipe thus was identified as an old item used only by cultural conservatives and non-educated commoners who live in backward places. Lower class urbanites and country folk received these messages through media of advertising and began to think that it

454 “Jinshu pai xiangyan guanggao,” Shen bao (Shanghai), July 6, 1928. 455 “dachangcheng pai xiangyan guanggao,” Shen bao (Shanghai), July 28, 1923. 456 “Hataman pai xiangyan guanggao,” Shen bao (Shanghai), September 2, 1923.

167 was better to light up shredded tobacco wrapped in fine imported paper than inhale it through a native pipe.

The Shanghai Cigarette

The mass consumer culture represented in advertising successfully established the perception of the cigarette as a “Western” and “modern” commodity in China. Meanwhile, Chinese consumers also developed their own symbolic imaginary of the modern cigarette: the Shanghai cigarette. In Chinese tobacco history, the emergence of the cigarette was intertwined with the city of Shanghai. As the biggest treaty port in China, Shanghai served as a gateway for introducing the cigarette into the country. On the one hand, major tobacco companies and many cigarette factories located in Shanghai manufactured great volumes of cigarettes for Chinese consumers. On the other hand, the city produced a consumer culture of the cigarette as Shanghainese incorporated cigarette smoking into their modern lifestyle while, at the same time, Shanghai-based writers constructed and spread the idea of the stylish “Shanghai cigarette” through their writings. In the cultural discourse of early-twentieth-century China, the “Shanghai cigarette” became a synonym for “the modern cigarette.”

The status of Shanghai as the most important treaty port in modern China determined its central place in the cultural construction of the modern cigarette. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as China entered the full swing of “modernization,” Western lifestyles and foreign consumer goods appeared in the coastal areas. Treaty ports served as the primary channel for introducing the West to the Chinese. Foreigners brought Western goods, customs, ideas, and material culture to these coastal cities and into China’s interior. As Karl Gerth has pointed out, treaty ports provided “showcases” for a new, Western-inspired, industrialized consumer culture to

168 provide a vision of what was in store for the rest of China.457 Among these “showcases,” Shanghai certainly was the biggest and most significant one.458 Starting in the late nineteenth century,

Western-style goods flooded the Shanghai market along with modern places of entertainment originally designed for foreigners, such as cinema, restaurants, dance halls, swimming pools, zoos, and amusement parks. Shanghai’s urban dwellers who aspired to be “modern” desired anything

Western, which was also perceived as being “exotic.” They indulged in tinned food, powdered milk, chewing gum, patent Western medicines, and, of course, foreign cigarettes. For

Shanghainese, smoking cigarettes, together with taking Western medicine, going to the cinema, and shopping in department stores, were prestigious activities. Pipe smoking increasingly represented China’s “backwardness,” especially as it was often associated with opium smoking.

Therefore, ever since the cigarette first appeared in Shanghai in the 1880s, it was included in the city’s modern “showcase” of the Western lifestyle. Chinese consumers in the interior invariably perceived cigarettes from Shanghai as authentically “Western” and “modern” because they received the message of the cigarette not directly from the West but through the “showcase” of

Shanghai.

Moreover, the significance of Shanghai to China’s cigarette production and consumption during the early twentieth century reinforced the idea of “the Shanghai cigarette” among Chinese consumers. Rhoads Murphey once noted, Shanghai “provides a key to what has since happened and is still to happen in China.”459 This comment also applies to the history of the cigarette in

457 Gerth, China Made, 37. 458 As a result of the (1839-1842), Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Guangzhou stipulated in the Treaty of Nanjing as the first treaty ports in China. The number of treaty ports grew to nearly fifty by the time of the Revolution of 1911, and, a few years later, the total number increased to almost one hundred, spread along China’s coast and major rivers. See Ibid. 459 Rhoads Murphey, Shanghai: A Key to Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 4.

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China. As the center of both the cigarette industry and the advertising business that supported it, cigarettes were synonymous with Shanghai. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Chinese cigarette industry was concentrated in Shanghai. BAT had its headquarters in the city, of course, and many foreign and Chinese tobacco companies had headquarters and factories there.

By the 1930s, Shanghai had more than a dozen foreign tobacco companies, some sixty Chinese- owned firms, and hundreds of hand-rolling cigarette workshops. Each year, these rival businesses accounted for 60 percent of cigarette production in China.460

Meanwhile, Shanghai was also the largest cigarette market in the country. According to a

1928 survey, there were more than 4,000 specialized cigarette shops spread across the city, selling

4 million cigarettes per day.461 In the year of 1931, Shanghainese consumed a total of six billion cigarettes, a number far larger than the cigarette consumption in any other major Chinese city, such as Beijing, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong.462 Shanghai produced the cigarette at the material level. In return, the cigarette constructed the city at the cultural level. Not only did those tobacco companies located in Shanghai manufacture cigarettes, cultural institutions centered in Shanghai also generated socio-cultural meanings of cigarette smoking. The media, including advertising, films, radios, newspapers, and magazines, constantly broadcasted massive amounts of images and cultural discourse about the modern cigarette. Consequently, the cigarette went beyond a simple commodity to social symbols that, in part, constituted the Shanghai cosmopolitan cityscape. When cigarettes produced in Shanghai’s factories were transported to the interior by China’s commercial

460 Ying Mei, 2:512, 773. 461 “Shanghai shangye xiguan diaocha,” Shehui yuekan 1, no. 7 (1929), 11-12. 462 Howard Cox, “Learning to do Business in China: The Evolution of BAT’s Cigarette Distribution Network, 1902- 41,” Business History 39, (1997), 56.

170 networks, socio-cultural meanings embodied in “the Shanghai cigarette” also spread to other parts of the country.

While popular culture in Shanghai was inundated with modern images of the cigarette, in highbrow culture, local intellectuals and writers also endeavored to culturally construct the cigarette as modern through their writings. Representations of the “modern” cigarette were particularly pervasive and evident in Republican-era literature. In the 1920s and 1930s, cigarettes were one of the most frequently mentioned subjects in Chinese modernist literature, especially in the short essays written by Haipai, or Shanghai-style, authors. These Shanghai-based writers utilized the cigarettes as a symbol of certain Western values and modern ideologies they admired.

For example, the Cambridge-trained romantic poet Xu Zhimo (1897-1931) published “Xiyan yu wenhua” (Smoking and Culture) in 1926. He praised the smoked-filled salons of Oxford and

Cambridge universities because these places fostered the talents of the British elite. By admiring these salons’ abilities to inspire great minds, Xu recommended Chinese universities to imitate the smoking practices in British academia and adopt what he called “smoking-ism” (chouyan zhuyi), by which he meant engaging debates and discussions while smoking cigarettes in classrooms to open students’ eyes to new ideas.463

Other writers emphasized the liberalism in modern society that was insinuated by the cigarette. Western educated novelist Lin Yutang (1895-1976), for instance, particularly appreciated the feeling of self-liberation that came with cigarette smoking. In his “Qiutian de kuangwei” (A Taste of Autumn), he wrote, “In the autumn twilight, I sit on the sofa and smoke by myself. When I see the faint red light under the white ash at the tip of the cigarette…my mood

463 Xu Zhimo, “Xiyan yu wenhua”, Chen bao fukan (Beijing), January 10, 1926, 21.

171 goes up into the air with the blue smoke. I am just as relax and free as the smoke.”464 Zhu Ziqing

(1898-1948), on the other hand, looked at the liberalism associated with the cigarette from a broader perspective, indicating that the universal feeling of freedom generated from smoking standardized cigarettes represented the social equality in a modernized society. In his essay, “Tan chouyan” (A Discussion on Smoking), he wrote: “The mind of a smoker begins to be lost in reveries when he lights up a cigarette. At the moment, his body goes completely free, whether his is a gentleman lying on a sofa, or he is a bricklayer crouching on a footstep.”465

Modernist writers also used the cigarette to demonstrate the hyper individualism and loneliness of modern society. In an essay entitled “Yan, jimo zhong de qinglÜ ah” (The Cigarette,

My Lover in the Loneliness), the author described one of his friends, who was a single urbanite, smoking in his empty apartment with the light off to ease his loneliness after work.466 Similarly,

Zhu Ziqing also stated in his article, “A lot of people smoke because they want companionship.”467

He then gave a vivid example of a single urban resident who, upon returning to his empty apartment at night, would always light up a cigarette because the blinking fire at the tip of the cigarette made him feel like “somebody is whispering [to him] intimately.”468

Although Shanghai authors wrote about the modern cigarette from different perspectives, in

Republican literary discourse, cigarettes were consistently depicted as foreign, modern, and progressive, while pipes were portrayed as Chinese, traditional, and backward. This dichotomized image was reflected in many writings. As Zhu Ziqing commented: “Smoking water pipe or dry

464 Pan, Shuaixing Lin Yutang, 8. 465 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 122. 466 Mingming, “Yan, jimo zhong de qinglÜ ah!” Yancao yuekan 2, no.13 (1948), 249. 467 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 122. 468 Ibid.

172 pipe was an inelegant habit. Nowadays, smoking cigarettes has become a fashionable style

(paitou).”469 Another essayist more candidly criticized the “backwardness” of pipe smoking by comparing it to “the modern cigarette,” saying, “Chinese are idle. Here is the proof: foreigners smoke cigarettes. They can smoke while working. Chinese, on the other hand, smoke water pipes and dry pipes, fill up a pipe and take a puff, enjoy at leisure.”470

These essays, written by Shanghai writers and published in Shanghai’s literary journals and popular magazines, successfully established the idea of the cigarette as a modern form of tobacco consumption. Thus, the imagery of the “Shanghai cigarette” propagated widely in China as readers and consumers from all over the country learned about the modern interpretations of the cigarette from Shanghai-style writings.

New Women and Modern Girls

Omnipresent representations in the media of the cigarette as “Western” and “modern” resulted in millions of Chinese smokers overwhelmingly adopting cigarette smoking as their tobacco practice. In the early years, as elsewhere, the consumption of cigarettes remained principally a male pursuit in China because of the “masculine” attribute of the modern cigarette.471

Chinese women, however, quickly learned how to smoke cigarettes. During the early twentieth century, fashion-conscious women accepted cigarettes and smoked them publically to underscore their identities as “new women” and “modern girls.” The pervasive use of female models in tobacco advertising greatly enhanced this trend. In turn, female smoking further reinforced the

469 Ibid. 470 Yanning, “Cong xiyan, kan rensheng,” Yancao yuekan 2, no.13 (1948), 249. 471 In the history of tobacco use prior to the early twentieth century, smoking had always been considered an “unwomanly” behavior in many places around the world. Women, particularly the Western women, began to widely smoke cigarettes after the First World War. For an overview of the world history of female smoking, see Goodman, Tobacco in History and Culture, 2:679-687.

173 idea of the modern cigarette in Chinese society by becoming a distinctive feature of the new

Chinese tobacco culture.

At the turn of the twentieth century, with the increasing availability and popularity of the cigarette in China, women from the upper and professional middle classes in urban centers began to replace their water pipes with imported cigarettes. The late-Qing scholar Xu Ke (1869-1928) recorded in his Qingbai leichao (Anecdotal sources on the Qing) that Chinese newspapers frequently reported cigarette smoking among women during the New Policies reform era (1901-

1911).472 Even the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) became fond of cigarettes and smoked her favorite brand, BAT’s Peacock, regularly.473 Katherine A. Carl, the American artist who painted

Cixi’s portrait for the 1904 World Exposition in Saint Louis, noted in her memoir that the empress dowager was “extremely grateful for her use of both the cigarette and the water-pipe.”474 The tremendous political and social changes following the 1911 Revolution, as well as the development of the Chinese cigarette industry, propelled the continuous growth of female cigarette consumption throughout the Republican era.

As noted in Chapter One, before cigarettes appeared on the scene in the late nineteenth century, many Chinese women of all social ranks were already accustomed to tobacco smoking, mainly in the form of the water pipe. Thus, the rise of female cigarette consumption during the early twentieth century seemed a reasonable outcome in that Chinese women simply used rolled tobacco products as a handy way to indulge a smoking habit formed centuries ago. The significance of this development, however, was embodied in the change of social norms that accompanied

472 Xu Ke, Qingbai leichao [1917]. (repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984-86), 13:6363. 473 “Taihou jieyan que wen,” Dagong bao, June 27, 1905, Tianjin edition. 474 Katherine A. Carl, With the Empress Dowager of China (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 19-20.

174 cigarette smoking: women began to go out of their chambers and smoke openly in public. In traditional China, unlike men who smoked socially and publically, women enjoyed tobacco privately at home. According to Confucian decorum, women possessed virtue while vice was reserved for men. Women only presented themselves to strangers as virtuous wives and demure mothers. For “respectable” women, smoking, as an inelegant entertainment, was an intimate behavior that could only be practiced in their boudoirs (guifang). In this way, female smoking in pre-modern Chinese society was linked, at a symbolic level, to male ownership and control of women’s bodies. 475 When Chinese women gave up the traditional water pipes and adopted cigarette smoking, they also accepted the modern values that came with the cigarette and began to smoke in public. As Benedict’s research shows, Shanghai courtesans, China’s earliest modern women, were the first to smoke cigarettes openly at the turn of the twentieth century.476 When the

Republic was established, in imitation of these Shanghai courtesans, the “respectable” women in urban elite families started to publically smoke cigarettes. A 1922 book, Zhonghua quanguo fengsuzhi (Chinese Customs Gazetteer), recorded: “ladies from respectable families eagerly try to smoke cigarettes in public. They consider this [behavior] as a fashion.”477 (See Figure 4.10) Since then, the phenomenon of observable female cigarette smoking became an important part of the emerging ethos of modern Chinese society.

475 Numerous written and visual sources from the Qing Dynasty reflect the restriction on public female smoking in traditional China. For a few examples of the written records, see Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 20-21; Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 23. Late Qing artist Wu Youru’s painting Chuiqi rulan depict the scene of upscale women smoking in a boudoir. See Zhuang Ziwan, ed., Shijiu shiji zhongguo fengqing hua: haishang baiyan tu (Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 1998), 14. 476 Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 201-210. 477 Gao Yan, Lao yuefenpai nianhua (Shanghai: Shanghai huabao chubanshe, 2003), 2.

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By breaking the taboo, these women took up the cigarette not merely as a new form of tobacco use, but also as a way to show their progressive identity as “new women.” The growing visibility of female smokers can be explained by the fact that Chinese women seized new opportunities to gradually enter the public space due to social changes following China’s modernization. Starting in the late Qing, teenage girls and young women began to enroll in Western-style schools, educated urban women increasingly participated in political and social movements, and rural women migrated to the cities to work in industrial factories. The 1911 Revolution further legitimized and encouraged Chinese women to go public by creating the discourse of the “new woman” (xin nÜxing), according to which the new and independent modern women must leave the cages of their homes and be fully committed to serve society.

Entry into the public space provided women with chances to reject established gender norms and to embrace modern feminism. As such, open-minded “new women” used the behavior of smoking cigarettes publically as a visual statement of rebellion against the prevailing domestic ideal and as a critique of gender relations that positioned women as unequal and subordinate to men. A Republican writer commented on the issue: “The first step of the women’s liberation movement is to equalize men and women. For example, men can smoke cigarettes, so can women.”478 For them, smoking a water pipe alone in the boudoir was a sign of their enslavement by the old society. In contrast, smoking industrial cigarettes on the streets served as a symbol of modern women’s new feminine identity as responsible citizens who devoted themselves to social change, political reform, or personal emancipation. With this political agenda, “new women” integrated cigarette smoking into their modern daily lives, along with attending schools, working

478 Ba Ren, Pibao he yandou (Shanghai: Guangming shuju, 1946), 5.

176 at offices and factories, wearing Western-style dresses, and enjoying modern entertainments. (See

Figure 4.9)

Figure 4.9 (Left): “Cigarette-Smoking Women on Bicycle.”479 Figure 4.10 (Right): “Sidney D. Gamble. “Women and cigarette,” 1924-1927.480

While Chinese women established their modern identities by lighting up cigarettes in the outside world, the media also attempted to reconstruct female smoking by presenting images of the “modern girl.” Throughout the early twentieth century, the visual images of female cigarette smoking were widely printed in China’s burgeoning media, especially in newspaper cartoons, illustrated pictorials, and, most frequent of all, advertising. The use of female figures in many cigarette advertisements was particularly striking. As early as the 1910s, the renowned Chinese artist Zhou Muqiao first included modern Chinese women in the calendar-poster advertising paintings (yuefenpai guanggao hua) that he painted for BAT. In his and other Chinese artists’ works, faces of classic Chinese beauties were often matched with the bodies of modern female nudes. 481

479 Hubei meishu chubanshe, Minjian meishu: Hubei , nianhua, jianzhi, piying (Wuhan: Hubei meishu chubanshe, 1999), 49. Quoted in Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 207. 480 In Sidney D. Gamble Photographs; Archive of Documentary Arts, Duke University (no. 426-2663). Quoted in Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke, 209. 481 See Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 12-17.

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To be sure, these early advertisements were designed as fetish objects to attract male consumers. For this reason, they did not directly show female figures smoking cigarettes. However, the portrayal of modern women with unbounded feet wearing imported high heels did convey the message that the cigarette was deeply associated with the modern female lifestyle. (See Figure

4.11). As Cochran has noted, these paintings “showed a new fashion-consciousness and an interest in revising popular conceptions of feminine beauty.”482

In the 1920s and 1930s, images of “modern girls” (modeng nÜlang) smoking cigarettes became prevalent in tobacco advertising and popular culture. Commercial artists began to depict vogue women smokers in modern settings to give the behavior of female smoking modernist and feminist meanings. In these advertisements, female models were shown to be smoking cigarettes confidently in the metropolitan while engaging modern activities such as riding bikes, driving cars, playing golf, and making phone calls (See Figures 4.12 to 4.16). These images did not merely serve to promote cigarettes among Chinese consumers. More importantly, they echoed the perception that China’s modernization was reflected in the changing lifestyle of new urban women and men.

During the early twentieth century, the phenomenon of women smoking cigarettes in public and the pervasive use of female images in the media of the cigarette redefined female smoking and

Chinese women. The cigarette became emblematic of the modern lifestyle or modern personal identity for self-styled “new women” and “modern girls.” This development in female smoking

482 Cochran, “Transnational Origins of Advertising in Early Twentieth-Century China,” in Cochran, Inventing Nanjing Road, 45.

178 played a key role in modernizing Chinese tobacco culture by constituting a significant level of the broader socio-cultural construction of the modern cigarette in China.

Figure 4.11 (Far left) “BAT’s calendar-poster advertisement”483 Figure 4.12 (Left) “Advertisement of Nanyang’s ‘Yinhang’ brand”484 Figure 4.13 (Middle left) “Advertisement of Huacheng’s ‘The Beauty’ brand”485 Figure 4.14 (Middle right) “Advertisement of Nanyang’s ‘Golden Dragon’ brand”486 Figure 4.15 (Right) “Advertisement of Huacheng’s ‘The Beauty’ brand”487 Figure 4.16 (Far right) “Advertisement of Huacheng’s ‘The Beauty’ brand”488

Becoming “Chinese”: Cigarettes in Chinese Nationalism

While the idea of the “modern” cigarette was deeply rooted in China, indigenization also occurred with Chinese tobacco culture as cigarette manufacturers and Chinese consumers attempted to justify the consumption of “foreign” cigarettes in the context of emerging Chinese nationalism. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the Chinese launched the National

Products Movement to nationalize Western commodities and the modern consumer culture by attempting to redirect consumer spending to goods manufactured by native Chinese companies.

As a purely Western-originated consumer good, the cigarette often became a target of the movement. In response, Chinese companies and BAT competed with each other while both made

483 Wu Hao, ed., Duhui modeng: yuefenpai 1910s-1930s (Hong Kong: Hong Kong sanlian shudian youxian gongsi, 1994), 2. 484 “Yinhang pai xiangyan guanggao,” Liangyou huabao, December 1939, 15. 485 “Meili pai xiangyan guanggao,” Liangyou huabao, December 1940, 8. 486 “Baijinlong pai xiangyan guanggao,” Meishu shenghuo, December 1935, 12. 487 “Meili pai xiangyan guanggao,” Shen bao (Shanghai), August 6, 1935. 488 “Meili pai xiangyan guanggao,” Shen bao (Shanghai), September 16, 1934.

179 great efforts to legitimize their products as “China made.”489 The cigarette, therefore, gradually evolved from a “foreign import” to a “national product” in the process. More importantly, tobacco firms attempting to remold the cigarette consumer culture by emphasizing strong Chinese characteristics in tobacco advertising resulted in the emergence of the new tobacco culture in China.

By the 1930s, although traditional pipe smoking still represented a genuine native tobacco practice in Chinese culture and society, cigarette smoking began to take center stage in Chinese tobacco culture.

The Cigarette in the National Products Movement

From the 1900s to the 1930s, two key forces shaping the modern world—nationalism and consumerism—developed in tandem in China. The emergence of Chinese nationalism was accompanied by many anti-imperialist boycotts and nationalist activities, which have become known collectively as the “National Products Movement.” In this movement, the Chinese branded every commodity as either “Chinese” or “foreign,” and consumer culture became the place where the notion of nationality was articulated, institutionalized, and practiced. The cigarette, along with other modern industrial goods such as soap, matches, patent medicines, and machined-made textiles, served as an important prop for the Chinese to articulate their nationalism. As a result of tobacco companies reshaping the images of their products to cater to patriotic fervor, the “foreign” cigarette eventually transformed into one of the “national products.”

China’s efforts to nationalize consumer culture originated in a crisis over commodities during the second half of the nineteenth century. Since the First Opium War (1840—1842), China was gradually dragged into the modern world system. Politically, it faced increasing imperialist

489 This phase is borrowed from Gerth, China Made.

180 aggressions from the West and Japan. Repeated military defeats in international conflicts and intensified political pressure from foreign powers directly led to the birth of Chinese nationalism.

For the , the perception of China changed from the Middle Kingdom at the center of the world to a single nation in a world consisting of many independent nation-states.

Economically, the Chinese market experienced an unprecedented invasion of Western industrial goods. As imports grew, elite Chinese realized that their country was no longer a productive, self- sufficient civilization that produced desirable goods for the world. Instead, they started to visualize

China as a weak and backward “nation” unable to produce industrial commodities to even fulfill domestic demand. A strong anxiety emerged in Chinese society that foreign goods were pervasively replacing China’s material culture. This anxiety, combined with growing nationalist sentiment, greatly affected the Chinese people’s perspectives on commodities. Consumer goods began to acquire national identities: in contrast to “foreign products” (yanghuo), those produced in China became “Chinese products” or “national products” (guohuo).490

The development of modern industries in China during the early twentieth century further enlarged the crisis over commodities and directly stimulated the National Products Movement.

The Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) granted Japan and Western powers the legal right to build factories in Chinese treaty ports, and it consequently led to the rapid growth of modern industries in China.491 In the next few decades, while foreign investments kept expanding, Chinese-owned enterprises also began to stake out positions in the market. The National Products Movement, which stretched from the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s, thus started at the beginning of China’s

490 For an in-depth discussion on China’s crisis over commodities in the late nineteenth century, see Gerth, “The Crisis over Commodities and the Origins of the Movement,” Chap. 1 in China Made. 491 For this reason, many historians consider 1895 as the beginning of China’s industrialization. For the details on the development of modern industries in China after 1895, see Wang, Zhongguo jindai gongyeshi ziliao, di’er ji.

181 delayed and uneven industrialization. Chinese entrepreneurs were convinced that Chinese-owned industries would be much larger and stronger without the presence of imperialism. Naturally, these

Chinese industrialists became the most active sponsors and strongest financial supporters for the movement. They used slogans such as “Chinese people ought to consume Chinese products,” seeking to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern “nation” with its own “national products.”

The movement’s agenda quickly gained political support from Chinese authorities and from consumers. From fashion to food additives, from museums to department stores, from product fairs to advertising, this movement influenced all aspects of China’s burgeoning consumer culture.

Anti-imperialist boycotts, commemorations of national humiliations, exhibitions of Chinese products, and the vilification of treasonous consumers helped enforce nationalistic consumption and spread the message—patriotic Chinese bought goods made of Chinese materials by Chinese workers in Chinese-owned factories.492

The National Products Movement certainly also targeted the cigarette, one of the major

Western consumer goods in China at the time. Those produced by foreign tobacco companies, most notably BAT’s, were hit hard throughout the movement. As early as 1905, during the Anti-

492 The National Products Movement was a three-decades long political, social, and economic movement that included many anti-foreign goods boycotts and other nationalist events or activities. It started with the Anti-American Boycott in 1905, then it continued to the anti-Japanese boycotts in 1908, 1915, and 1919, as well as the Anti-British Boycott followed the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925. In the 1930s, it came to a climax with the Nanjing Government directly participated in the movement by organizing “National Products Year” (1933), “Women’s National Products Year” (1934), and “Students’ National Products Year” (1935). Over the decades, Chinese companies, governments, organizations, social groups, took opportunities of political events to organize numerous exhibitions, commemorations, trade fairs, and other activities to promote “national products.” For an overview of the movement, see “Paihuo zhi yanjiu,” Dongfang zazhi 12, no.5 (1915), 16; “Dizhi rihuo zhi lishi jiqi jingji yingxiang,” Dongfang zazhi 26, no.3 (1929), 52-66; LÜ Jianyun, “Lun zhongguo sanshi niandai de guohuo yundong,” Zhejiang shehui kexue, no. 6 (1991), 57-62.

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American Goods Boycott, Chinese consumers started to boycott and attack BAT’s products.493

According to a Tianjin newspaper, even Empress Dowager Cixi made a gesture to support the boycott by throwing eight packs of BAT Peacock cigarettes into Lake at the Summer

Palace. She also prohibited cigarette smoking in the Forbidden City and other royal palaces during that year.494

Simply refusing to buy foreign cigarettes was in fact the most peaceful way to participate in the movement. Boycotts and protests very often ended up with radical actions. For example, during the May Thirtieth Movement and the following Anti-British Boycott in 1925, angry protesters, most of whom were young students, vandalized countless BAT’s sales stations and advertisements throughout the country.495 Any tobacco shops that sold BAT cigarettes were forced to close down and their inventories were immediately confiscated or burned by protestors. Many BAT sales agents and independent dealers received verbal and physical abuse from students. Street paddlers had to replace “Hatamen” or “Pin Head” brands with Nanyang’s products to avoid attacks and beatings. Activists labeled those who smoked foreign cigarettes as “unpatriotic consumers” or

“traitors.”496

493 The Anti-American Goods Boycott in 1905 was caused by the Chinese Exclusion Movement that occurred in the United States during the earlier years. See “Paihuo zhi yanjiu,” 16; Ying Mei, 4:1299-1307. 494 “Taihou jieyan que wen,” Dagong bao (Tianjin), June 27, 1905. 495 On May 30, 1925, about three thousand demonstrators marched into the International Settlement in Shanghai to protest the killing of Chinese workers by foreign companies and other recent conflicts between the Chinese and foreigners. During the demonstration, a British police officer ordered his unit to open fire on the crowd, killing ten people and injuring more than fifty others. As the news of the incident spread, anti-British protests and boycotts were organized in many cities across the country, which have become known collectively as the May Thirtieth Movement. For details of the movement, see Deng Zhongxia, “Wusa yundong,” Chap. 12 in Zhongguo zhigong yundong jianshi (Beijing: Xinhuashudian, 1949). For protesters vandalizing BAT’s properties, see Ying Mei, 1299-1338. 496 Ying Mei, 1299-1338.

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Under these circumstances, nobody was willing to sell or purchase BAT’s cigarettes. The company suffered a great loss during the boycott.497 To be sure, other foreign tobacco companies were also under attack during the movement, but BAT became the primary target because of its dominant position in the Chinese cigarette market. As a BAT Chinese employee in Nanjing noted in 1925: “Our cigarettes are most famous, so they draw the most attention…the boycott is particularly aimed at BAT’s products.”498

The movement certainly provided a great opportunity for Chinese-owned tobacco companies to expand their businesses in the domestic cigarette market. In fact, Chinese firms directly funded many boycotts against BAT, and, more importantly, played a significant role in disseminating movement ideology. They appropriated their domestically produced cigarettes as “national products” by using the language of nationalism and patriotic slogans in advertising to claim that their products were authentic “Chinese.” The slogan “Chinese should smoke Chinese cigarettes” was commonly used as a catchphrase in many Chinese companies’ advertisements and promotional campaigns. (See Figure 4.17 and 4.18) During the May Thirtieth Boycott in 1925, several Chinese tobacco firms started a specialized tobacco journal Cigarette Monthly (Juanyan yuekan) to propagandize the idea of the “national” cigarette. The first issue included an offensive cartoon which stated “Chinese cigarettes are for humans; foreign cigarettes are for dogs.” (See

Figure 4.19) Odd ones such as “Beauty is lovely; cigarette is also lovely. National product is even more lovely” also appeared in newspapers.499 They also frequently utilized political incidents and events of “national humiliation” in advertising to remind customers that smoking Chinese-made

497 For details, see Ibid., 4:1339-1351. 498 Ibid., 4:1314. 499 Zhou, “Smoking in Modern China,” in Gilman and Zhou, Smoke, 165.

184 cigarettes was a good way to fight against foreign aggression. On the nine-year anniversary of the

May Thirtieth Movement in 1934, Nanyang issued an advertisement that said: “What day is it today? Please observe three minutes of silence. Do not forget national cigarettes. Please smoke

Nanyang’s products.” (See Figure 4.19)

Figure 4.17 (Left) “A Nanyang advertisement entitled ‘Chinese should smoke Chinese cigarettes.’”500 Figure 4.18 (Middle Left) “A propaganda poster issued by Association for the Protection of National Cigarettes that reads ‘Chinese should use Chinese products; Chinese should smoke Chinese cigarettes.’”501 Figure 4.19 (Middle Right) “A carton picture in the first issue of Cigarette Monthly entitled ‘Chinese cigarettes are for humans; foreign cigarettes are for dogs.’”502 Figure 4.20 (Right) “A Nanyang advertisement on Shen bao (May 30, 1934) that reads ‘What day is it today? Please observe three minutes of silence. Do not forget national cigarettes. Please smoke Nanyang’s products.’”503

Besides advertising, Chinese tobacco companies also cooperated with each other to organize many activities and events to publicize their “national” cigarettes. When the movement came to its climax in 1935, Chinese cigarette manufacturers, tobacco leaf merchants, and printing agencies together founded the Chinese Association for the Protection of National Cigarettes (zhonghua guohuo juanyan weichihui) in Shanghai504 On August 8, this association sponsored the “August

Eighth National Cigarettes Festival” (ba ba guohuo juanyan jie), and used the slogan “Chinese

500 “Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi guanggao,” Shen bao (Shanghai), August 8, 1935. Karl Gerth also used this image in his book. See Gerth, China Made, 215. 501 “Minguo shiqi de xiangyan guanggao,” accessed November 1, 2016, http://2010.cqlib.cn/g.asp?cid=359 502 Yang, Zhongguo yanye shi huidian. images. 503 “Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi guanggao,” Shen bao (Shanghai), May 30, 1934. 504 “Guohuo juanyan weichihui chengliji,” Gongshang banyuekan 7, no.16 (1935), 89-90.

185 should smoke Chinese cigarettes” to advertise their products in the event as well as on newspapers and radios.505

Encouraged by the positive outcome of this festival, the association organized a spectacular

“National Cigarettes Exposition” (guohuo juanyan zhanlanhui) a month later. At the entrance, there was an antithetical couplet that read “The Association for the Protection protects the movement; Chinese should smoke Chinese cigarettes.” 506 Forty-two Chinese companies participated in the event and spent large sums of money to build a very well decorated exhibition hall that included a giant power-driven spinning globe, a grand merry-go-round, and other up-to- date recreational facilities. The exposition attracted more than 10,000 visitors in 10 days. National media made daily coverage of the event in the forms of supplement or newspaper extras.507

The success in Shanghai inspired cigarette manufacturers in other parts of the country to organize themselves and to hold similar events. Through these publicities, Chinese tobacco companies successfully established a perception of the distinct “national” cigarette among Chinese consumers. As a contemporary journalist commented, “[Chinese] tobacco companies’ broad publicity campaigns…leave a lasting impression of national products…in people’s minds.”508

Facing this situation, BAT of course did not sit back and take the hits quietly. In response to the movement, the company employed a variety of methods to minimize its foreign ties and emphasize the “Chinese” properties of its products. As boycotts escalated, BAT began to counter the accusation that it was exploiting the Chinese economy. In advertisements and newspaper articles, BAT made the argument that, for decades, it had contributed to China’s industrialization

505 “Guohuo juanyanye queding jinri ba ba guohuo juanyan jie,” Shen bao (Shanghai), August 8, 1935. 506 “Guohuo juanyan zhanlanhui xunshi,” Shen bao (Shanghai), September 26, 1935. 507 “Kongqian qiguan guohuo juanyanzhan,” Shen bao (Shanghai), September 13, 1935. 508 “Caizhengbu qudi quanyan zengquan zhi shangque,” Ningbo shangbao, December 17, 1934.

186 by localizing its operations. It introduced the bright tobacco growing, cigarette-rolling technologies, a modern printing industry, and even tinfoil production into China. 509 Due to localization, BAT’s cigarettes were no less “national products” than those produced in Chinese factories. As one of its advertisement said, “Hatamen is completely ‘made in China’, Chinese workers make them using Chinese tobacco leaves grown by Chinese farmers… it is a genuine

Chinese product.”510 Therefore, the company claimed that a boycott of BAT’s cigarettes was indeed a boycott on thousands of Chinese workers and millions of tobacco farmers in North China who were directly or indirectly employed by the company. In 1925, BAT instructed workers in its

Hankou factory to issue an open letter that said, the boycott on Hatamen cigarettes “would greatly affect our jobs…our livelihoods depend on Hatamen.”511

Furthermore, management decided to adjust the product lines and make BAT’s cigarettes appear as “Chinese” as possible. New products with Chinese names and Chinese-style packaging designs replaced popular Western brands. 512 Meanwhile, the ever-intensifying movement eventually forced BAT to undertake a reorganization of the company in 1934. The name BAT ceased to be used in China. The company was divided into several smaller companies with

Chinese-style names, some of which were placed under direct Chinese management.513 Although these “counter-boycott” methods received limited results in general, BAT’s propaganda and the

509 Ying Mei, 4:1427-29, 1434-37, 1440. To further publicize the company’s localized operations and its contributions to China, in 1925, BAT even published a book, A Brief History of BAT’s Deeds in China (Ying Mei yan gongsi zaihua shiji jilue), and distributed 25,000 copies. See, Ibid., 4:1437-38. 510 Ibid., 4:1426. 511 Ibid., 4:1442. 512 Ibid., 4:1443-45. 513 Ibid., 4:1446; YMYGSCD, [07] 2C-1, 21.

187 remodeling of its products and managerial structure did further nationalize “foreign” cigarettes and reinforced the notion of “national products” among Chinese consumers.

In fact, during the early twentieth century, no cigarette in China was authentically “Chinese,” because, even for Chinese tobacco companies, the raw materials, industrial machinery, and technical know-how used for manufacturing cigarettes were more or less imported. However, guided by the movement ideology, Chinese firms and BAT made great efforts to adjust their cigarettes to meet the standards of “national products” and promoted them in the market as such.

In the nationalized Chinese consumer culture, the perception of the cigarette thus transmuted from a “foreign” and “Western” commodity to a “national product.” The significance of this conceptual transition lays in the justification of cigarette smoking in the modernization of China. To be sure, nationalist manufacturers and consumers never denounced the “modern” attribute of the cigarette.

On the contrary, they imagined it as a necessity for China’s struggles to modernize. In the cultural discourse of the National Products Movement, the consumption of cigarettes defined by the concept of nationality not only helped create the very idea of “modern China” but also became a primary means by which Chinese consumers began to visualize themselves as citizens of a modern nation.

Reinventing Chinese Tobacco Culture

In the National Products Movement, nationalism and consumerism intersected to create a deep and far-reaching constraint that called upon people to consume Chinese-made commodities.

Facing this change of consumer behavior, foreign and Chinese tobacco companies recognized the need to disguise their foreign ties and market their cigarettes as “Chinese” as much as possible.

Particularly, BAT and its Chinese competitors responded to the need by redesigning their

188 advertisements based on Chinese culture. Pictures depicting Chinese scenes such as stories from classic literature, historical figures, landscapes, and the most common of all, the Chinese people, gradually replaced Western-style images in tobacco advertising. Through these adjustments in advertisements and cigarette consumer culture, tobacco companies reinvented Chinese tobacco culture by establishing the central role of the cigarette in China’s tobacco consumption.

Among all types of tobacco advertising in early-twentieth-century China, the calendar poster was the first to be “Sinicized.”514 When the National Products Movement started in the mid-1900s,

BAT immediately attempted to indigenize its advertising to enhance the appeal of its cigarettes among nationalist customers. As previously mentioned, in the late 1900s, the company hired

Chinese artists and calligraphers to draft Chinese-style advertisements mainly in the form of calendar posters. These leading artists, most of whom were based in Shanghai, showed a talent for adapting BAT’s cigarettes to the Chinese cultural setting. Following BAT’s lead, in the 1910s, newly founded Chinese tobacco companies also widely adopted similar calendar posters to publicize their products. Since that time, calendar-poster paintings became a principle feature of the Chinese-style tobacco advertising in the Republican era.

During the 1900s and 1910s, in advertisements they designed for tobacco companies, Chinese artists broadly utilized their knowledge of Chinese culture as well as former conventions in

Chinese art to draw pictures of figurines and objects in the traditional style. For example, portraits of legendary figures familiar to the Chinese were one of the major themes in calendar posters. A

514 The calendar poster was a unique form of advertising that only existed in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was derived from the traditional Chinese New Year’s picture. During the closing decade of the nineteenth century, in searching for an appropriate form for their advertisements that would suit the Chinese market, foreign merchants and Chinese artists in Shanghai first redesigned some New Year’s pictures and used them as calendar posters for commercial purpose. See, Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 3-10.

189 wide range of subjects from Chinese history, classic novels, Beijing operas, and even fairy tales were painted, including Yu Ji, the main character in the popular opera Farewell, My Concubine;

Yue Fei, a patriotic general of the Southern Song Dynasty; the White Snake (Baishe or Bai niangzi), an immortal boa that transformed into a beautiful woman and fell in love with a man; and whole series of stories and characters from classic novels such as The Journey to the West (Xiyou ji) and

A Dream of Red Mansions (Honglou meng).515 (See Figures 4.21 and 4.22)

With the tremendous political and social changes that accompanied China’s accelerated modernization in the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese consumers began to demand more up-to-date cultural representations in advertising. In response, commercial artists started to portray Chinese figures and scenes from their own day in calendar posters. For instance, the Sanxing Tobacco

Company published a set of posters with portraits of Dr. Sun Yat-sen.516 Although well-known political figures and celebrities endorsing cigarette products occasionally appeared on calendar posters during this period, designers often preferred to picture nameless representatives of general social groups and common scenes of everyday life. The images of the “new women,” fashionable modern activities, happy family life, and working people engaged in the “360 professions” (Sanbai liushi hang, an expression to represent all professions) were popular topics in artists’ works. (See

Figures 4.23 and 4.24) Of course, the patriotic theme also pervaded calendar posters when the

National Products Movement intensified during this period. Many Chinese tobacco companies

515 See Ibid.; Wu, Duhui modeng: yuefenpai 1910s-1930s; Song Jialin, ed., Lao yuefenpai (Shanghai: Shanghai huabao chubanshe, 1997); Zhang Yanfeng, Lao yuefenpai guanggao hua 2 vols. (Taipei: Huasheng zazhi, 1994). 516 Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 7, 12.

190 made a bid to redraw the image of the patriotic Chinese smokers as ones who smoked only national brands made in China.517

Whether traditional or modern, these calendar posters all featured with Chinese cultural characteristics. This new type of artistic advertising and the message of the cigarette it carried were well received by the Chinese. For instance, a poster entitled “Guan Yunchang Reads the Chronicle of Spring and Autumn” (Guang Yunchang du chunqiu), designed by renowned artist Zhou Muqiao, became a classic in the 1910s. It was reprinted year after year, and hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed to and hung in small shops, street corners, and private homes across China.518 An

BAT’s American employee recalled that its calendars became a “big advertising smash every year,” and large volumes of copies were disseminated “in every nook and corner of the nation” around the Chinese New Year.519 Needless to say, calendar posters filled with Chinese-style pictures not just represented a successful type of tobacco advertising in general, but also played an important role of pioneer in the localization of the cigarette consumer culture in China.

517 See Ibid.; Wu, Duhui modeng: yuefenpai 1910s-1930s; Song, Lao yuefenpai; Zhang, Lao yuefenpai guanggao hua. 518 Lianchuanyinqiushi, “Zhou Muqiao xiaozhuan,” Fanhua zazhi, no. 3 (1914), 86. 519 James Lafayette Hutchison, China Hand (Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, 1936), 266-276. Cochran also quoted this comment in his 1980 book, see Cochran, Big Business in China, 38.

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Figure 4.21 (Left) “BAT’s calendar poster with the portrait of Yu Ji.”520 Figure 4.22 (Middle Left) “Asia Tobacco Company’s calendar poster depicts scene from A Dream of Red Mansions.”521 Figure 4.23 (Middle Right) “Huafei Tobacco Company’s calendar poster with the portrait of a modern Chinese woman wearing stylish Chinese dress qipao.”522 Figure 4.24 (Right) “BAT’s calendar poster portrays ordinary Chinese women playing with children while smoking ‘Private’ cigarettes.”523

Inspired by the success of the calendar poster, tobacco companies also applied similar changes in other forms of tobacco advertising. In billboards, wall paintings, newspaper advertising, and even cigarette packaging, Chinese models and cultural symbols almost completely replaced

Western-style pictures in the 1920s and 1930s. Notably, the cigarette card, a widespread and effective type of tobacco advertising in the Chinese market, became another significant channel for adapting the cigarette to Chinese culture.524 Unlike the calendar poster, the cigarette card was a Western invention. When foreign tobacco companies first entered the Chinese market, they also introduced the cigarette card to Chinese customers along with their products. Thus, in many parts

520 Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 14. 521 Ibid., 27. 522 Ibid., 42. 523 Ibid., 62. 524 Cigarette cards were small hard-board pictures placed inside packs of cigarettes for protection and promotional purposes. When the industrial cigarette was first popularized in the West, tobacco companies used small pieces of thick cardboard to strengthen soft paper wrappers of cigarette packets, then the package of cigarettes could remain intact in one’s pocket. In the 1890s, tobacco companies began to print colorful pictures and advertisements on the cardboard. As such, cigarette cards evolved to a popular type of tobacco advertising that could promote sales of cigarettes as many customers treated them as collectable items. Some companies even put glue on the backs of cigarette cards so they could be affixed to a collection book. See Goodman, Tobacco in History and Culture, 1:11-12; Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 64-65.

192 of China, they were referred to as “foreign pictures” (yanghua’er) or “heads of ”

(maopian’er).525 Chinese tobacco firms soon followed their foreign competitors to put these cards into cigarette boxes in the opening decade of the Twentieth Century. For cigarette manufacturers and Chinese consumers, the cigarette card was not only an entertaining and collectable advertising that provided protection for cigarettes in the packet, but, more importantly, it also distinguished genuine factory-made cigarettes from hand-rolled counterfeit ones—hand-rolling workshops could not produce cigarette cards without the aid of modern printing presses.526 Due to its multi- functional nature, the cigarette card quickly became one of the most popular practices of tobacco advertising in China adopted by the majority of tobacco companies. During its heyday in the 1930s, there were more than 4,000 types of cigarette cards in the market.527

In terms of content, cigarette cards also underwent a process of localization just like calendar posters. In the early years, cigarette card advertising centered on human figures, mostly attractive

Western female celebrities and film stars. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however,

Chinese beauties of the time gradually displaced these foreign women. For instance, in the 1900s,

BAT issued a set of 370 cigarette cards for its “Pin Head” brand, each picturing a famous Qing courtesan.528 In the 1920s and 1930s, the content became more rich and diverse. Themes in cigarette cards not only overlapped with those in calendar posters, such as Chinese classic literature, popular novels, traditional operas, local customs, and landscape, but also covered a wider range of topics from Chinese music to domestic bird species.529

525 Deng Yunxiang, Shuqing jiumeng: Deng Yunxiang suibi (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 1996), 35. 526 Ying Mei, 2:717; Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 288-289. 527 Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 68-69. 528 Ibid., 73; Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 289-290. 529 See Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 72-76; Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 285- 291.

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Along with the growth of Chinese nationalism, patriotic themes more frequently appeared in cigarette cards. Especially after the Mukden Incident of 1931, cigarette cards with patriotic images and slogans flooded the market, aiming to fulfill people’s demand for the resistance to Japanese aggression. Chinese tobacco companies published countless sets of cigarette cards with titles and slogans such as “The Nineteenth Route Army Fights Heroically Against Japanese Invaders,”

“Wipe out the Invaders, Recover Our Mountains and Rivers,” and, most notably, “Buying national

Cigarettes is as good as joining up [the army]!” to advocate patriotism.530

Cigarette cards with Chinese contents met the aesthetic, cultural, and political tastes of

Chinese consumers, and, therefore, they were well accepted and highly acclaimed in early- twentieth-century China. To be sure, other forms of tobacco advertising also largely adopted

Chinese-style design at the time, but the cigarette card undoubtedly made the most far-reaching impact on the modernization of Chinese tobacco culture. Certain characteristics of the cigarette card, including aesthetically pleasing and entertaining resulted in its vast popularity among

Chinese consumers. Moreover, the unique feature of collectability made it even more widespread than cigarettes themselves as smokers and non-smokers alike collected them. Even markets for cigarette cards (yanghua jishi) emerged spontaneously in many urban areas across the country during the 1920s. Beijing, for instance, had a cigarette card market in the commercial district of

Xidan, where local card collectors gathered regularly to buy, sell, or exchange their collections.531

As cigarette cards became so popular, some unrelated industries began to include them in their products as a method to attract customers. For example, the Guanshengyuan Company, one of the

530 Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 76-77. 531 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 287-289.

194 oldest and most well known foodstuff company in China, put cigarette cards in packages of sweets or cakes in the 1930s.532

Most importantly, as rich and encyclopedic contents increasingly appeared on cigarette cards, they were no longer merely a kind of tobacco advertising but also a carrier of Chinese culture.

Renowned Beijing-opera singer Wong Ou’hong (1908-1994) recalled that he was fascinated with cigarette cards as a child. The knowledge about Chinese classic literature and traditional operas he learned from those cards directly inspired him to choose a career path in Beijing opera.533 Similarly,

Chinese modernist writer Bing Xin (1900-1999) also mentioned on multiple occasions that cigarette cards played a significant role in her early literary enlightenment as she memorized every word of Chinese classic writings and poems printed on her cigarette cards.534 These two instances show the cigarette card went beyond advertising and became a cultural phenomenon in Republican

China. While people purchased and smoked cigarettes, they also acquired cigarette cards and consumed the Chinese cultural elements on them. By playing and collecting those cards, as well as learning their Chinese-style contents, Chinese consumers began to unconsciously accept the massage that the cigarette was a Chinese item. In this sense, the cigarette card greatly contributed to the indigenization of the cigarette consumer culture in China by establishing a firm tie between the cigarette and Chinese culture.

The developments of the calendar poster advertising and the cigarette card represent how modern cigarette consumer culture was “Sinicized” during the early twentieth century. That is,

BAT and Chinese tobacco companies remolded tobacco advertisements to suit Chinese taste.

532 Chen and Feng, Old Advertisements and Popular Culture, 69. 533 Guo Changjiu, ed., Yancao bainian (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 2001), 111-112. 534 Li Hui, ed., Bingxin zishu (Zhengzhou: Daxiang chubanshe, 2005), 108.

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Accordingly, by the 1920s and 1930s, commercial advertising and popular culture almost universally displayed the cigarette as a domestic product with distinct Chinese characteristics. The

Chinese, in turn, started to perceive the cigarette as an inherent component of Chinese culture. As such, cigarette manufacturers, commercial artists, and Chinese consumers together reinvented

Chinese tobacco culture into a modern version that centered in the cigarette consumption.

The cigarette was deeply rooted in modern Chinese tobacco culture, which can be best shown by its significant impact on Chinese customs and social life. As noted in Chapter One, offering a guest tobacco had become a Chinese traditional courtesy during the Qing. In the early twentieth century, however, jingyan (respectfully offering cigarettes to others) took over sharing pipe smoking and snuff to become one of the essential rituals of hospitality and sociality in Chinese society. When having guests at home, it was customary for hosts to serve them with fine cigarettes.

Chinese Customs Gazetteer recorded this formality in Republican China: “In Shanghai’s high class society, ‘The Three Castles’ [A BAT’s brand] was considered an appropriate cigarette to entertain guests. In Beijing…middle and upper class homes usually prepare more expensive ‘Golden Star’ cigarettes [A high-end Chinese brand] for visitors.”535 Given the increasing importance of the cigarette in Chinese social life, some people even advocated that it should be included in the traditional “seven necessities” in Chinese households, along with firewood, rice, oil, salt, vinegar, and tea.536

535 Zhongguo yancao baike zhishi quanshu bianweihui, Zhongguo yancao baike quanshu, 1:18. 536 The traditional “seven necessities” includes firewood, rice, oil (for cooking and lighting), salt, sauce, vinegar, and tea. In an article, writer Xu Shusong argued that the sauce should be displaced by the cigarette because its growing popularity and importance in ordinary daily lives of the Chinese people. See Xu Shusong, “Yan yu rensheng,” Yancao yuekan 1, no. 1 (1947), 26.

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The cigarette’s portable feature expanded the hospitality of smoking further into the public.

In daily contacts and social occasions, jingyan served as proper behavior for people to greet, get acquainted, and establish social relationships. As a contemporary writer noted, “Smoking cigarettes now is indispensable in modern urban life. When meeting with a friend or anybody else, you should always first offer a cigarette and smoke with him, then you talk business.”537 Tobacco companies also helped to promote this manner through their channels of publicity, using slogans such as “offering a cigarette to establish an intimate friendship” in tobacco advertising.538

Seemingly a small gesture, jingyan suggested that the cigarette had “become Chinese” during the early twentieth century as it embodied the incorporation of cigarette consumption into Chinese culture and customs. With Chinese consumers universally adopting this social mannerism, it turned into the very essence of the modified Chinese tobacco culture, in which cigarette smoking was not only a modern practice of tobacco use, but, more importantly, a necessity for social interactions as well as a reflection of morals and mores of Chinese society. As a Chinese scholar stated, “Respectfully offering cigarettes to others is a basic social protocol. The manner of which a cigarette is offered entails one’s attitudes toward others, whether it is casual, solemn, respectful, or frivolous. Such gestures reflect the quality of a person, a group, or even a nation.”539 In this way, through cigarette consumption, the Chinese redefined their relationships with tobacco and each other.

537 Wen Ke, “Chouyan miaoqu,” Yancao yuekan, 1, no. 8 (1947), 98. 538 Huangmu Sanlang, “ chuiyan ji,” Yancao yuekan 2, no. 13 (1948), 243. 539 Zhongguo yancao baike zhishi quanshu bianweihui, Zhongguo yancao baike quanshu, 1:18.

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Conclusion

Throughout the early twentieth century, the development of the modern tobacco industry in

China was accompanied by the dramatic growth of cigarette consumption. More and more Chinese smokers continuously displaced the traditional pipe tobacco and snuff with the modern cigarette.

Although pipe smoking remained a prevailing form of tobacco use in the vast interior due to its affordability, the cigarette was pervasively accepted, purchased, and consumed by Chinese consumers in both urban centers and the countryside. By the 1930s, it had become a widely used product constituting a considerable portion of the tobacco consumed in China.

The mass consumption of the cigarette in China directly resulted from modern consumerism that reshaped Chinese tobacco culture during the same period. The emerging Chinese tobacco industry utilized mass consumer culture represented by advertising to foment deeper changes in

Chinese culture that served to promote the use of cigarettes. Due to tobacco companies’ efforts, commercial advertising and popular culture invariably enshrined the cigarette as a “modern” commodity. Consequently, in the perceptions of Chinese consumers, the cigarette came to be a central symbol of modernity that possessed progressive traits such as industrial, urban, and fashionable. Pipe smoking, in contrast, began to be viewed as a representation of conservative values including handcraft, rural, and old fashioned.

At the same time, from the outset regarded in the dominant political discourse as a “foreign” commodity, the cigarette evolved to a “Chinese” product during the rise of Chinese nationalism.

During the National Products Movement, BAT and Chinese firms strove to keep their market shares by justifying and publicizing their Chinese ties. The consumer culture of the cigarette thus was indigenized as these companies almost entirely changed tobacco advertising with Chinese-

198 style design. By the 1930s, despite the fact that a large group of Chinese smokers still consumed tobacco in pipes, cigarette smoking acquired the leading position in Chinese tobacco culture.

The cigarette’s rise to cultural dominance in the tobacco consumption of China during the early twentieth century marked a remarkable shift in Chinese tobacco history that brought together developments in China’s modern consumerism as well as deep changes in social norms and customs. In other words, the cigarette moving from the periphery of Chinese cultural practice of tobacco to its center comprised critical transformations in consumer culture and social behaviors.

In this sense, the cigarette redirected the cultural connections between the Chinese and tobacco, and the social relationships between Chinese smokers. The patterns of cigarette consumption and the “Sinicized” tobacco culture continued to develop in China during the second half of the twentieth century.

199

CHAPTER FIVE

“TOBACCO CAPTIAL”: A CASE STUDY OF THE “SMOKING SOCIETY”

After more than 400 years of prosperity, the Han Dynasty, the first long-lasting regime in the history of imperial China, finally came to an end in the late second century when peasant uprisings and the tangled warfare among the warlords destroyed the foundations of the country. China therefore entered the chaotic “Three Kingdoms” era (184-280). During this period, the city of

Xuchang served as de facto capital of the Han and the official capital of the Wei State after warlord

Cao Cao moved the imperial court and the last Han emperor to the city in 196. For over one and half millennia, Xuchang existed in history books, classic literatures, and memories of the Chinese as a capital city where the heroes of the “Three Kingdoms” used to live, while in reality it remained as an ordinary prefecture-level town in the vast North China Plain.

It was not until the early twentieth century that Xuchang regained the name of “capital” for its well-known reputation of tobacco production. Since BAT introduced bright tobacco cultivation into North China in the early 1910s, the Xuchang region in Central Henan, that included about a dozen counties, quickly grew to be the largest tobacco growing area in China.540 Cheap yet high quality tobacco leaves produced in this region supplied China’s emerging cigarette industry during the early twentieth century. The city of Xuchang developed into the most important center for tobacco production and leaf tobacco trade in the country. People began to give Xuchang alternative names, such as the “tobacco city” (yancheng) and “Virginia of the East” (dongfang de fujiniya) to

540 For the geographic setting of the Xuchang tobacco region, see Map 2.2 in Chapter Two.

200 praise its significant place in the modern Chinese tobacco industry.541 Among all the names, the most widely known certainly was the “tobacco capital” (yandu) of China.542

This chapter provides a case study of Xuchang to reveal the process of building a “smoking society” in China. Particularly, the discussion focuses on struggles for control over tobacco resources between BAT and its local rivals that took place in the Xuchang area throughout the early twentieth century. From 1913 to 1927, while BAT endeavored to monopolize the leaf tobacco market in Xuchang, Nanyang and local practitioners of the tobacco business posed serious challenges to its plan. Even though Nanyang did not prevail in the competition, thousands of local businessmen worked together to contest BAT’s dominance and eventually drove the company out of Xuchang in 1927 when Guomindang’s North Expedition reached Henan. In the 1930s, BAT hired Wu Tingsheng, its chief comprador in China, to regain its dominate position in Xuchang.

Once again, however, local people forced the company to retreat from the Xuchang market in 1937.

Xuchang probably cannot be taken as a representative of the entire region of North China as

BAT had relatively better control of the leaf tobacco markets in Eastern Shandong and Northern

Anhui. Its history, however, represented the far-reaching effects of BAT’s activities in China. The development of the tobacco business in Xuchang revealed the complex social relations of a variety of forces: the foreign multinational company; Chinese government circles and businessmen; tobacco peasants and other members of the local population widely different in social status and professional function—all moved or were being moved around the axis of tobacco. The competition and cooperation between these global and local forces eventually turned Xuchang into

541 Zhang Yibin, “Dongfang de fujiniya—Xiangcheng,” Yancao yuekan 1, no.1 (1947), 22-24. 542 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 323; Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 25; Li, “Ying Mei yan gongsi he Xuhang yanqushi,” 35.

201 a “smoking society” by the 1930s, in which agriculture, economy, politics, and culture centered at tobacco production and consumption. The case of Xuchang mirrors the formation of a “smoking society” in China during the early twentieth century.

BAT and Local Rivals, 1913-1927

In the 1910s, when BAT started the large-scale promotion of bright tobacco cultivation in

Central Henan, it also tried to organize a direct purchasing system aiming to monopolize tobacco resources in the region. However, this attempt later faced serious challenges from its Chinese rivals.

In 1920, Nanyang built a purchasing center in the city of Xuchang to directly compete with BAT in tobacco collecting. At the same time, local businessmen also joined the business and worked as intermediary agents between tobacco growers and cigarette manufacturers. By the mid-1920s, although BAT successfully defeated Nanyang in the competition, it was unable to relieve the threat from independent tobacco collectors. As Xuchang’s leaf tobacco market became larger, the tension between BAT and local rivals continued to intensify. Eventually, at the height of the May Thirtieth

Movement (1925) and Chiang Kai-shek’s North Expedition (1927), local forces drove BAT out of

Xuchang.

As detailed in Chapter Two, BAT succeeded in building a tobacco growing base in Central

Henan by introducing bright tobacco to local farmers. Since the first trial planting in 1913, the cultivation of the American variety spread explosively in the region because of BAT’s willingness to offer free seeds, equipment, and, most importantly, generous prices for the harvest. Between

1913 and 1918, the company purchased the best leaves at 0.6 yuan per jin (1.1 pounds), and the lowest grade at 0.25 yuan per jin. At the time, even the return of selling one jin of the lowest grade

202 tobacco to BAT could buy sixteen jin of wheat.543 Attracted by the high profit, hundreds of thousands of farmers in about a dozen counties around Xuchang rushed into bright tobacco growing within just a few years. By 1917, the total yield of bright tobacco in the area had already reached approximately 2.5 million pounds.544 In the following years, the Xuchang tobacco region quickly developed into the largest bright tobacco growing area in China.

As the tobacco production kept increasing, establishing a leaf tobacco purchasing system rose up the agenda. In the early years, BAT mainly relied on local businesses, especially tobacco shops

(yanhang) and transportation firms (zhuangyunhang), to secure tobacco in Xuchang. Between

1913 and 1919, the company authorized the Chinese-owned Gongxingcun Company and a few smaller firms to collect leaves.545 These local agencies collected tobacco in ways which their predecessors had practiced for centuries—using their extensive social and commercial networks in the countryside and going around villages to purchase leaves from door to door. Tobacco growers were quite willing to sell their harvest to local dealers because they were used to the old- fashioned way of conducting business. Thus, this purchasing operation was proven very effective.

In 1918, for example, BAT’s authorized leaf collectors in Xuchang procured nearly two million pounds of tobacco for the company.546

Although the collaboration with local firms worked well, BAT’s management still decided to build a direct purchasing system in Xuchang following the example of Eastern Shandong to achieve full monopoly on the leaf tobacco market there. In 1917, the company instructed comprador Ren Boyan to buy 100 mu of land in the Western suburbs of the Xuchang city. Using

543 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 21. 544 Ibid., 20; Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di qi ji, 241. 545 Li. Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 55 546 Ibid., 24.

203 a Shanghai-based Chinese company, Yong’antang, as the dummy front, Ren soon built a huge purchasing center on the location, which included a leaf re-curing factory equipped with advanced

American-made machineries and other ancillary facilities such as boilers, a water tower, and a power station.547 In 1919, BAT started to purchase tobacco directly from Xuchang growers in this establishment.

At the same time, up until 1927, BAT did not completely terminate its partnership with local firms. Alongside the direct purchasing system, transportation companies and tobacco shops maintained a significant role in BAT’s operation.548 The purchasing center mainly received leaves from contracted growers. Authorized local collectors continued to collect tobacco from peasants who either did not sign contracts with the company or only produced small amounts of tobacco.

In fact, although BAT usually offered higher prices, many peasants still preferred to sell their harvest to local dealers because they could save expenses on transporting tobacco to Xuchang city.549

Through both the direct and indirect purchasing systems, BAT ensured the maximum control of Xuchang’s tobacco resources. In 1919, when the purchasing center first began to operate, the company set a record in leaf collection at 7.58 million pounds. The total number almost doubled next year, unprecedentedly increasing to 14.33 million pounds.550 In 1921, BAT collected 92.3 percent of the total tobacco yield in the Xuchang region. From 1918 to 1925, BAT on average purchased 81.3 percent of tobacco produced in Central Henan per year, either directly from tobacco

547 Ming, “Ying Mei yan gongsi he yuzhong nongmin,” 69-70. Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di qi ji, 240; Henansheng defang shizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Henan shengzhi, yancao gongye zhi, 29-30. 548 Ying Mei, 377-378. 549 Ming, “Ying Mei yan gongsi he yuzhong nongmin,” 70. 550 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 24.

204 growers or indirectly through local agents.551 Undoubtedly, BAT monopolized Xuchang’s leaf tobacco market using these dual systems. As reported in a 1934 study on Henan’s tobacco agriculture, “Before 1920, only BAT purchased leaf tobacco in the Xuchang region…at the time, there was no competition…tobacco produced in Xuchang was totally controlled by BAT.”552

In 1920, however, Nanyang entered Xuchang to challenge BAT’s dominance in the local leaf tobacco market. During the 1910s, Nanyang grew to be the largest Chinese-owned tobacco company and a primary competitor for BAT in the Chinese cigarette market. As its business continued to expand, Nanyang was also in urgent need of cheap domestically grown tobacco to support its massive cigarette production. As a result, Nanyang came to Xuchang and started a leaf collection operation. Inevitably, it was engulfed in a competition with BAT over tobacco resources in the area. In 1920, Nanyang launched its purchasing business in Xuchang by building a leaf purchasing center and a leaf re-curing factory in the city right across from BAT’s facilities.

Nanyang’s establishment was located on the West side of the Beijing-Hankou Railway while

BAT’s was on the East side. Xuchang people began to refer to Nanyang and BAT as the “West company” and the “East company” for their tit-for-tat competition. 553 BAT’s business was seriously threated by Nanyang as its collection suddenly dropped from fourteen million pounds in

1920 to only about eight million pounds in 1921. In the next year, the number further decreased to about 5.5 million pounds while Nanyang secured nearly 4 million pounds of tobacco.554

551 Liu, Henan jindai jingji, 23; Henansheng difang shizhi bangongshi, Henan shengzhi, nongye juan, 127. 552 Yu E’ Wan Gan sisheng nongmin yinhang, Jinling daxue nongxueyuan nongye jingjixi, Yu E’ Wan Gan sisheng nongcun jingji diaocha chubu baogao di liu hao, Henansheng chanyanyequ zhi diaocha baogao (Nanjing: Jinling daxue nongxueyuan nongye jingjixi, 1934), 6. 553 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 26-27. 554 Ibid., 27.

205

In response to this challenge, BAT adopted an aggressive pricing strategy to compete with

Nanyang in the early 1920s. It increased the collection price from 0.2 yuan per pound to 0.25 yuan to attract tobacco growers. Nanyang responded by raising the price to 0.3 yuan. By the mid-1920s, both companies offered 0.5 yuan for a pound of average grade tobacco.555 Eventually, this fierce pricing war caused Nanyang to forfeit. In 1926, Nanyang’s purchasing center ceased to operate due to a lack of funds. Two years later, Nanyang’s board even discussed the possibilities of selling or renting out their facility in Xuchang.556 Even though Nanyang reopened its direct purchasing system in the 1930s, the scale of its operation became very small that it was no longer a major player in Xuchang’s leaf tobacco market. In fact, the company had to largely rely on local dealers to purchase tobacco.

Nanyang failed in breaking BAT’s monopoly in Xuchang. However, the significance of its attempt lies in the fact that it initiated a free market for tobacco resources. “After 1920,

Nanyang…changed the situation in Xuchang…tobacco merchants from different parts of the country came here to purchase tobacco. Xuchang therefore transformed from a market monopolized by BAT to a free market.”557 Following Nanyang’s example, many other Chinese cigarette manufacturers also started to purchase tobacco from Xuchang. Without their own purchasing centers on site, these companies had to secure leaves through tobacco merchants and local agencies. Consequently, by the mid-1920s, independent local tobacco collecting businesses thrived in Xuchang. Groups of tobacco merchants from major cigarette manufacturing areas, such as Shanghai, Hankou, Tianjin, and Qingdao, worked with local tobacco shops and transportation

555 Ibid., 28. 556 Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan, Nanyang xiongdi yancao gongsi shiliao, 197-198. 557 Yu E’ Wan Gan sisheng nongmin yinhang, Jinling daxue nongxueyuan nongye jingjixi, Yu E’ Wan Gan sisheng nongcun jingji diaocha chubu baogao di liu hao, Henansheng chanyanyequ zhi diaocha baogao, 6.

206 firms to purchase tobacco in large quantities. Under this background, the Xuchang people preliminarily formed their own system of tobacco collecting and trade, which soon became the third force in Xuchang’s leaf tobacco market alongside BAT’s and Nanyang’s direct purchasing operations. (See Figure 5.1) As a retired tobacco farmer recalled, “[at the time], there were three places in Xuchang you could sell your tobacco: the East Company [BAT], the West Company

[Nanyang], or the tobacco shop street [tobacco shops].”558

Figure 5.1 “Tobacco Collecting Systems in Xuchang during the 1920s and 1930s.”559

Compared to BAT and Nanyang, who simply bought tobacco from growers at their purchasing centers, different groups of Chinese businessmen and middlemen together formed a much more complicated system to collect leaves. In the long chain of purchasing, the group of tobacco merchants was the most important link because they served as the buyers in Xuchang’s leaf tobacco market, and as such were the middlemen who dealt Xuchang tobacco to cigarette

558 Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di qi ji, 177. 559 Mo Ling, Henan zhi yanye (Kaifeng: Henan nonggong yinhang jingji diaochashi, 1939), 82; Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 1193-94.

207 manufacturers across the country. Although all tobacco merchants conducted the same business, they were a group of people with diverse backgrounds. While some tobacco merchants were local

Xuchang businessmen, most of them were from major cigarette manufacturing areas in North

China and the Lower Yangzi region. Meanwhile, the group consisted of both independent dealers who bought and resold tobacco for a profit and purchasing agents hired by cigarette factories or trading firms. After harvest time, usually around the Chinese New Year, tobacco merchants from different parts of the country all gathered in Xuchang to purchase leaves. When sufficient amounts of tobacco were collected, re-processed, and properly packed, they then transported their collections in great bulks back home to resell to local mechanized cigarette factories or hand- rolling workshops.560 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, tobacco merchants in the Xuchang market gradually organized themselves into a few yanbang (tobacco merchant leagues) based on region of origin. Larger ones included Shen bang (the Shanghai league) and Ningbo bang (the Ningbo league) from the Lower Yangzi region, Jining bang (the Jining league) from Shandong Province,

Han bang (the Hankou league) from the Middle Yangzi region, and local Henan bang (the Henan league).561 These organized buyers increasingly came to be an influential and powerful force in the Xuchang market.

The growing number of tobacco merchants coming to Xuchang for tobacco led to the rise of another important group of players in the local leaf purchasing system—tobacco shops, who used to collect, process, and sell pipe tobacco and snuff in the earlier centuries. In the 1920s, these traditional firms switched to the bright tobacco collecting business because of the rise of tobacco

560 Nie Changhong, ed., Xuchang yancaozhi (Zhengzhou: Henan keji chubanshe, 1993), 87. 561 Ibid.; Ying Mei, 1:377.

208 cultivation and the decline of pipe smoking in Xuchang. While tobacco merchants served as the middlemen between the Xuchang leaf tobacco market and cigarette manufacturers, tobacco shops served as the middlemen between tobacco merchants and Xuchang growers. At the time, it was unlikely for tobacco merchants to visit villages and directly buy tobacco from peasants because they were not familiar with the area, and, more importantly, tobacco growers usually would not sell their leaves to strangers. Tobacco shops hence became the intermediary agents that connected outside buyers with local growers. When purchasing tobacco in Xuchang, almost all the tobacco merchants would hire tobacco shops to collect leaves for them. Although they had to pay fees and commissions to these local middlemen, tobacco merchants were happy with the collaboration because they could collect large quantities of tobacco at reasonable prices through the tobacco shops’ extensive social and commercial networks in the region.562 Tobacco shops sometimes sent out employees to visit villages and collect tobacco at peasants’ homes. More often, peasants brought their harvest to the shops in Xuchang and other town centers for a better price.563 Tobacco merchants could easily acquire the leaves they needed at tobacco shops without spending much time and energy traveling around villages collecting tobacco at each household.564 In addition, tobacco shops also provided several necessary services for tobacco merchants, such as lodging, re- curing tobacco, packaging, and arranging transportation. 565 Overall, this system was a very efficient and convenient way for tobacco merchants to collect tobacco. In return, tobacco

562 Mo, Henan zhi yanye, 73. 563 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 1200. 564 Ibid. 565 Mo, Henan zhi yanye, 73.

209 merchants usually paid tobacco shops a 3 percent commission on the amount of tobacco they purchased.566

Figure 5.2 “Tobacco merchants purchasing leaves at a tobacco shop in Xuchang.”567

Furthermore, transportation firms also played an important role in the local leaf purchasing system. Tobacco shops did not usually provide storage and transportation services. 568 Therefore, when buyers were ready, they went to transportation firms for short-term storage and long-distance transportation of their collections. These transportation firms, which were newly emerged along with the construction of China’s modern railway network during the early twentieth century, had equipment and personnel to ship Xuchang tobacco across the country through railways. Strictly speaking, none of the transportation firms in Xuchang was exclusively shipping tobacco as its business because they handled all types of cargos. However, given the massive scale of the tobacco trade in Xuchang, shipping leaves for tobacco merchants was the main source of business for these firms. As the tobacco business kept expanding in Xuchang, many transportation firms also started to provide leaf purchasing service for tobacco buyers. Although collecting tobacco remained as a

566 Ibid. 567 Zhang Yibin, “Xiangcheng yanshi,” Yancao yuekan 1, no. 10 (1947), 147. 568 To be sure, some tobacco shops did assist their customers with transporting tobacco from nearby counties to Xuchang. See Ibid.

210 sideline in their scope of business, transportation firms were vital to the local leaf purchasing system as they provided the necessary transportation for the tobacco trade.569

Tobacco merchants, tobacco shops, and transportation firms constituted the main body of the local tobacco purchasing system in Xuchang. Meanwhile, thousands of independent tobacco dealers were also actively involved in the system. These local dealers were usually rich farmers or small businessmen. In the winter, they travelled around villages and collected tobacco from door to door with the assistance of their local contacts hanghu (agent in the village).570 However, low on capital and lack of means of transportation prevented them to carry out a larger operation.

Unlike tobacco shops, dealers typically only purchased tobacco in a very small area around their home villages from a few pounds up to about a hundred pounds at each peasant household. In some cases, relatively well-financed tobacco dealers purchased higher grade tobacco from outlying areas where tobacco shops were reluctant to visit and peasants there could not afford the transportation costs to Xuchang. Nonetheless, the majority of them collected lower grade leaves that could only be used for hand-rolling cigarettes because of their limited funds and resources.571

When dealers collect a marketable amount of tobacco, they then either passed it on to tobacco shops or directly sold it to hand-rolling cigarette workshops in the local area. Despite the small scale of their business, tobacco dealers were an important component in Xuchang’s tobacco purchasing system. On the one hand, they acted as middlemen between tobacco shops and small tobacco producers scattered throughout the countryside. On the other hand, their collections of lower grade tobacco provided ample raw materials for local hand-rolling cigarette industry.

569 For an overview of Xuchang’s transportation firms in the 1920s and 1930s, see Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 57-58. 570 Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di qi ji, 175-176. 571 Ibid.

211

During the great development of the Chinese tobacco industry in the 1920s, countless cigarette factories and hand-rolling workshops sprung up in China. The local tobacco purchasing system in Xuchang underwent a rapid growth as these small cigarette manufacturers demanded enormous quantities of raw materials from Xuchang. With the decline of Nanyang’s direct purchasing operation, the local businesses inevitably turned into the primary competitor to BAT.

The expansion of the local system caused serious obstacles for BAT achieving monopoly. In the meantime, the existence of the giant multinational in Xuchang impeded local businesses from growing further. The tension between BAT and its local rivals continued to worsen over the years as Xuchang businessmen often united to strongly oppose BAT’s monopolization. In 1925, the May

Thirtieth Movement provided local people with a great opportunity to defeat BAT and take over the control of Xuchang’s tobacco resources.

In 1925, soon after the May Thirtieth Incident in Shanghai, Henan people organized a series of anti-British protests and boycotts. In June, several activist groups met in Zhengzhou to discuss strategies for the movement. The participants unanimously agreed that “boycotting British cigarettes should be the first step of the movement.”572 This meeting thus started the Anti-Hatamen

Movement in Henan that was specifically aimed at BAT. 573 Students began to hand out leaflets in the cities and the countryside, which said “The British-made Hatamen cigarettes are worse than the opium. Fellow countrymen! If you do not want to be enslaved by foreigners, please do not smoke Hatamen! Please join us and boycott British products!” 574 In many places across the province, students and protesters vandalized BAT’s advertisements and seized or burned its

572 “Yusheng fanying yundong gaozhang,” Chen bao (Beijing), June 18, 1925, 2. 573 Ying Mei, 4:1326. 574 Ibid., 4:1324-1325.

212 products. They also forced the company’s sales agents and retailers to stop selling BAT cigarettes by harassing them.575 Some BAT employees were even attacked. The company’s chief sales manager in the Henan region, Zhao Zhongtao, and his staff were paraded through the streets and released only after agreeing to pay a fine of 5,000 yuan.576 The director of Yongtaihe’s Henan office, Zheng Shunmin, tried to smuggle BAT’s products into Zhengzhou by disguising them with

Nanyang’s boxes. When protesters discovered this plan, they confiscated Zheng’s cigarettes and held him in custody. He had to pay a fine of 1,000 yuan to avoid being humiliated and paraded in public. 577 One of the executives in the Shanghai headquarters reported to London, saying:

“Henan—this province is the most troublesome… it is impossible to sell our cigarettes there… our cigarettes have been seized and destroyed… all our businesses have stopped.”578

This province-wide Anti-Hatamen Movement greatly escalated the conflict between BAT and local businessmen in Xuchang. Tobacco merchants, tobacco shops, and transportation firms not only provided great financial support to the boycotts and protests in Xuchang, but also began to unify together to oppose BAT’s leaf purchasing operation. While they ceased to collet leaves for

BAT, they also discouraged peasants from selling tobacco to BAT by organizing a propaganda campaign. BAT’s staff at the purchasing center soon found that “nobody was even willing to talk to them.”579 Even worse, workers in BAT’s re-curing factory went on a strike. A Chinese employee reported to Shanghai headquarters frustratingly, “Our business in Henan has completely stopped.

Even stevedores at the railway station refuse to unload our cargos…transportation companies don’t

575 Ibid., 4:1319-1320, 1323-1324. 576 Ibid., 4:1323-1324, 1451, 1454-1455; “Yusheng fanying yundong gaozhang,” Chen bao (Beijing), June 18, 1925, 2; Wou, Mobilizing the Masses, 35. 577 “Yongtaihe zousi zhiyan,” Chen bao (Beijing), July 23, 1925, 4. 578 Ying Mei, 4:1320. 579 “Xuzhou yanshi jinkuang,” Chen bao (Beijing), August, 17, 1925, 7.

213 let us use their warehouses anymore.”580 With the purpose of forcing BAT to close down its establishment completely, local businessmen filed a lawsuit against BAT’s comprador Ren Boyan, accusing him of illegally purchasing land for foreigners.581

This anti-BAT campaign lasted to 1927 when the political situation became turbulent in

Henan. In the South, Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition had already reached Southern Henan at the beginning of the year. In March, the Nationalists defeated the Manchurian warlord Zhang

Zuolin’s Feng Army (Fengjun) in Central Henan and took over the city of Xuchang. A few months later, the Nationalist Army transferred its authority over Xuchang to General Feng Yuxiang, a

Northwestern warlord who had been one of Chiang Kai-shek’s allies in the Northern Expedition.582

At this point, BAT executives realized that the situation in Xuchang put the company at a serious disadvantage because they knew General Feng Yuxiang was very unfriendly to BAT.

During the May Thirtieth Movement, a BAT agent, who worked in the northern border province of Chaha’er, had noted, “General Feng Yuxiang rules this part of the country, and he supports the boycott…Students and workers were encouraged by his attitude. Our cigarettes have been labeled as ‘enemy products’ here.” 583 Similarly, another BAT employee also observed that “Feng

Yuxiang’s attitude towards the incident in Shanghai shows that he strongly opposes the British presence in China. The authority of the Border Region [Feng Yuxiang’s territory] is more supportive to students’ anti-British protests than any other authorities in North China.” 584

580 Ying Mei, 4:1325. 581 Ming, “Ying Mei yan he yuzhong nongmin,” 70-71. Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 28. 582 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 48-54. 583 Ying Mei, 4:1328. 584 Ibid., 4:1322.

214

BAT’s concerns turned out to be legitimate. Once he came to Xuchang, Feng began to take a hard line on BAT. Local rivals also seized this opportunity to urge Feng to take more radical moves against the company. In late June, Feng ordered his troops to seize BAT’s establishment and detain some of the staff. BAT’s inventory of three million pounds of tobacco was confiscated and auctioned off while its curing equipment was dismantled and sent to an arsenal in .585

Finally, at the request of local people, Feng ordered his troops to burn BAT’s purchasing center and the leaf processing facility to the ground.586 Under Feng’s order, the local court charged BAT’s comprador Ren Boyan with illegally selling land to foreigners. Ren immediately fled to Hong

Kong to avoid imprisonment. 587 Almost at the same time, over one thousand local tobacco merchants, tobacco shops, and transportation firms formed the Xuchang Tobacco Guild (Xuchang yanye gonghui) to control the tobacco market in Central Henan.588 After the British government declined BAT’s plea of military intervention, the company’s purchasing system in Xuchang was completely left in disarray.

BAT’s losses turned into its rivals’ gains as the local system began to purchase tobacco on a grander scale. After 1927, BAT was compelled to buy huge quantities of Xuchang tobacco from

Chinese collecting agencies, “amounting to at least five million Chinese dollars annually”.589

Local businessmen therefore gained the full control of Xuchang’s tobacco resources.

585 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 28-29. 586 Ying Mei, 1:282-283; Ming, “Ying Mei yan he yuzhong nongmin,” 70; Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 48-54. 587 Ming, “Ying Mei yan he yuzhong nongmin,” 70-71. 588 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 57. 589 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 28; Ying Mei, 1:377.

215

Wu Tingsheng and the Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company: 1932-1937

Since BAT left Xuchang in 1927, the local tobacco purchasing business entered a period of rapid development. The Xuchang Tobacco Guild, joined by tobacco merchants, tobacco shops, and transportation firms, controlled the leaf tobacco market in Xuchang. During the 1930s, however, BAT attempted to regain its position in Xuchang by turning to its former comprador Wu

Tingsheng. In 1930, with strong financial and political support, Wu set up the Xuchang Leaf

Tobacco Company to help BAT in collecting tobacco in Central Henan. In just a few years, Wu achieved a tremendous success as his company monopolized the tobacco purchasing business in

Xuchang. Yet, Wu’s aggressive expansion was strongly resisted by local rivals. In 1937, by using extreme measures, local businessmen again successfully forced BAT out of Xuchang.

Between 1927 and 1933, the absence of BAT in Xuchang resulted in the rapid expansion of a local tobacco colleting system. The number of tobacco shops in Xuchang city grew from ten to around fifty while the total number of transportation firms increased from a few to thirty- three.590 Most tobacco shops were located at the Western suburbs of Xuchang in an area along the

Beijing-Hanko Railway that used to be a wasteland. Due to the prosperity of the tobacco trade, this area, known as the “tobacco street,” quickly transformed into the biggest commercial district in the city and the center of tobacco trading in Central Henan.591 Meanwhile, tobacco shops also appeared in large numbers in surrounding counties. Xiangcheng, for instance, had fifty tobacco shops specialized in buying bright tobacco.592 These smaller county-level shops were usually well

590 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 57; Xuchang Municipal Archives, 2:238; Zhu Youlian, Xuchang xianzhi [1933]. (repr., Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1987), 367-369. 591 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 58-59; Nie, Xuchang yancaozhi, 88. 592 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 59; Yu E’ Wan Gan sisheng nongmin yinhang, Jinling daxue nongxueyuan nongye jingjixi, Yu E’ Wan Gan sisheng nongcun jingji diaocha chubu baogao di liu hao, Henansheng chanyanyequ zhi diaocha baogao, 8.

216 connected with big firms in Xuchang. During the harvest season, they collected tobacco produced in the county and then delivered it to tobacco merchants gathered in Xuchang’s “tobacco street”.593

More than one thousand tobacco shops, transportation firms, and trading companies formed the

Xuchang Tobacco Guild to collect over 80 percent of the tobacco produced in the area.594 They also organized a Weights and Measures Regulatory Commission (duliangheng guanli weiyuanhui) to regulate the tobacco trade in Xuchang.595 Moreover, transportation firms in the Guild formed the Xuchang Transportation Company to control the transportation of tobacco from Xuchang to

Hankou and Shanghai.596 Through the Guild, local tobacco buying firms had a complete control of the tobacco resources in Xuchang during the late 1920s and early 1930s. At the time, cigarette manufacturers across the country, including BAT and Nanyang, had to go through member firms of the Guild to procure tobacco produced in Central Henan.

BAT certainly did not reconcile to losing Xuchang. Not being able to directly collect Xuchang tobacco significantly affected BAT’s cigarette production because it now had to pay higher prices to purchase leaves from Chinese agencies. The issue of restoring direct purchasing in Xuchang even drew close attention from the London headquarters. In 1931, the Chief Executive of BAT,

Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen, visited China from London. Accompanied by BAT’s tobacco expert

Newson, he spent a month inspecting the tobacco production and leaf tobacco market in Henan.

Their visit was endorsed by Chiang Kai-shek and Minister of Finance T.V. Soong, both of whom wrote to the governor of Henan requesting protection and assistance for the inspection team in case

593 A few examples can be found in Ibid. and Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 1197. 594 Ming, “Ying Mei yan he yuzhong nongmin,” 76-77; Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 29. 595 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 55. 596 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 30.

217 of need.597 The inspection concluded that “the power of ‘tobacco shops’ is growing dramatically.

If we don’t restore our operation in this year [1931], we could be facing the danger of losing the leaf tobacco market [in Xuchang] completely.” 598 Therefore, Sir Cunliffe-Owen met with T.V.

Soong after the tour and indicated his desire to further improve the quality of tobacco in Henan and re-establish BAT’s business there.599 Evidently, regaining its former prominence in Xuchang had become a crucial task for BAT at the time. The management eventually decided to turn over this task to its original Chinese fixer Wu Tingsheng.

Wu Tingsheng probably was the most important Chinese employee BAT had ever had in

China. Been born and raised in a Christian family from Ninigbo prefecture of Zhejiang Province,

Wu made contact with James Thomas in 1898 right after he graduated from the Shanghai Anglo-

Chinese College, a school founded in 1882 by the American Southern Methodist Mission. With the Western background, Wu soon found favor in the eyes of Thomas and began to work for BAT even before its China branch was first founded in 1902. For about two decades, Wu made important contributions to BAT’s business expansion in China by helping the company build the production and distribution systems through his extensive connections in the Chinese business and government circles. In 1919, however, Wu and BAT decided to terminate their partnership due to some disagreements over the management of the company. Since leaving BAT, Wu briefly worked at Nanyang, opened his own cigarette factory for a few years, and then held official positions in the Nationalist Government’s Ministry of Finance. Meanwhile, he also founded the Shanghai

Guild of Chinese Cigarette Factories (Shanghai huashang yanchang tongye gonghui) and served

597 Ying Mei, 1:292-293. 598 Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 1199. 599 Ying Mei, 1:292-293.

218 as the chairman.600 Thus, although Wu left BAT, he continued to be an influential figure in Chinese tobacco industry. It was also for this reason that BAT turned to Wu for resolving the “Xuchang issue” in the early 1930s, hoping he could use his influence among Chinese tobacco businessmen and his connections with the Chinese authorities to rebuild a direct purchasing system for the company in Xuchang.601

Knowing that it was impossible for BAT to return to Xuchang in its own name, Wu proposed the company to work with Chinese cigarette manufacturers and form a Chinese-owned company in the name of the Shanghai Guild of Chinese Cigarette Factories to directly purchase tobacco from Xuchang growers.602 On October 12th, 1932, Wu formed a new firm called the

Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company in Shanghai. The company started with a capital of 100,000 yuan that was divided into 1,000 shares. A group of BAT’s Chinese compradors led by Shen

Kunsan held 51 percent of the shares while Wu held about 20 percent. The rest was owned by a number of Chinese businessmen who were the members of the Shanghai Guild of Chinese

Cigarette Factories.603 The share distribution of the company indicated that it was a dummy front for BAT as Shen and Wu controlled over 70 percent of the total share capital.

In a couple of weeks, Wu immediately visited Xuchang as the director of the Xuchang Leaf

Tobacco Company to meet with local officials, gentry, and leading tobacco businessmen to discuss

600 Many sources and studies contain a bibliography of Wu Tingsheng. A few examples include Ying Mei, 3:982-996; Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 68-72; Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Shanghaishi weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao gongzou weiyuanhui, Shanghai wenshi ziliao xuanji, di wushiliu ji, 145-155; Cochran, Big Business in China, 28; Cox, “Learning to do Business in China,” 46. 601 Ying Mei, 1:299; Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Shanghaishi weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao gongzou weiyuanhui, Shanghai wenshi ziliao xuanji, di wushiliu ji, 153. 602 Ying Mei, 1:293. 603 Ibid., 1:294,4:1025,1620; Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Shanghaishi weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao gongzou weiyuanhui, Shanghai wenshi ziliao xuanji, di wushiliu ji, 153; Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 1203- 1205.

219 the possibility of the new company entering the Xuchang market. In multiple occasions, Wu asserted that the Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company was entirely Chinese-owned, and the sole purpose of its operation in Xuchang was to “promote the common good of the Xuchang people.”604

Nevertheless, members of the Xuchang Tobacco Guild refused to accept this firm because they knew Wu was trying to help BAT returning to Xuchang. They understood that if Wu’s plan succeeded, BAT would destroy the local system and take back the control of tobacco resources in

Central Henan. It was because of this that the Guild took actions to against Wu and his company.

It issued a regulation to the members prohibiting them from conducting business with Wu.

Whoever violated this regulation would be fined ten yuan per pack of tobacco they sold to the

Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company. It even attempted to drive Wu out of Xuchang by hiring villains to aggressively threat and harass him at home.605 Wu spent the entire year of 1933 and 10,000 yuan of his money, in addition to 5,000 yuan operating fund provided by BAT, trying to ease the tension between him and the locals as well as to establish good relationships with the Guild and local authorities.606 Even so, he still could not make any progress for his plan.

With all his attempts being in vain, Wu finally realized that it was impossible to reach an agreement with the Guild that would allow him to directly purchase tobacco from the growers. He thus changed his strategy to fighting against the Guild by taking full advantage of his political connections with the Nanjing Government. In 1934, Wu linked his campaign in Xuchang with the central government by forming the Committee for the Improvement of American Seed Tobacco

(meizhong yanye gailiang weiyuanhui), which worked in cooperation with the Ministry of Finance.

604 Ying Mei, 1:292-293. 605 Ying Mei, 3:994-995. 606 Ibid., 1:297-298.

220

Through this organization, Wu began to align local officials and other members of Xuchang’s elite against the Guild.607 He also used the committee as a front of the Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company distributing seeds and collecting leaves in the name of improving the quality of tobacco. In 1935,

Wu pushed his operation one step further. After receiving these official sanctions, Wu brought the original premises of the destroyed BAT establishment in Xuchang and rebuilt the purchasing center on the site.608 Moreover, he helped the Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company to obtain the exclusive privilege of transporting tobacco on freight trains operated by the Ministry of Railways at rates that could not be matched by local transportation firms.609 At this point, Wu successfully rebuilt BAT’s direct purchasing system in Xuchang.

The Guild struck back at Wu’s operation in the same way they did in the 1920s. When the

Committee for the Improvement of American Seed Tobacco came to Xuchang in 1934, the Guild immediately started an anti-BAT propaganda campaign. It issued a public letter called “To

Tobacco Farmers” (jinggao zhongyan nongmin shu) to explain the connections among the

Committee, the Xuchang Leaf Tobacco Company, and BAT, as well as to remind peasants of

BAT’s “imperialist exploitation” in Xuchang before 1927.610 The Guild also composited many slogans, jingles, and poems to portray BAT as an evil foreign corporation and spread them among peasants.611 Furthermore, employing the same action against Ren Boyan, it sued Wu for illegally buying land on behalf of foreigners and for engaging in corrupt dealings with government officials.

607 Ying Mei, 1:298; Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinses Peasants, 29-30. 608 Ying Mei: 1:299. 609 Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 30; Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Shanghaishi weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao gongzou weiyuanhui, Shanghai wenshi ziliao xuanji, di wushiliu ji, 154. 610 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 30-31 611 Ibid., 38-39.

221

Then, after the local court ruled in favor of Wu, the Guild filed another lawsuit accusing Wu of bribing the judge.612

Yet their efforts yielded little result. As BAT took control of the tobacco resources and railway transportation by 1935, the Guild soon began to dissolve and hundreds of tobacco merchants withdrew from the tobacco business. Tobacco growers in Central Henan were left with little alternatives other than selling their crops to BAT’s purchasing center at the Xuchang Leaf

Tobacco Company. Indeed, in 1935, large numbers of them began to do so, traveling up to seventy or eighty miles for the purpose.613 As such, Wu successfully ended the competitive threat that local rivals had posed and BAT finally engaged in direct purchasing of tobacco in Xuchang.

The conflicts and struggles between BAT and the Guild eventually led to a bloody end. Over the year of 1935, Wu constantly received threats from desperate local businessmen. In the end, he suffered from an attack that he did not survive. On December 31st, 1935, while walking home from the purchasing center after an end of the year banquet held by the company, he was stopped by two men who pointed their guns at his left temple and shot him to death.614 BAT’s management,

American Consulate in Nanjing, and the Chinese government were all very concerned about the incident. Chiang Kai-shek personally ordered the commissioner of Xuchang to swiftly solve the case and punish the perpetrators harshly.615 Although it was clear to local authority that the Guild was behind the assassination, it could not arrest or charge the people involved because the Guild members united to protect them.616 After Wu’s death, BAT’s purchasing center continued to

612 Ying Mei: 1:301-305. 613 Ming, “Ying Mei yan he yuzhong nongmin,” 178-179; Chen, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, 30-32. 614 Ming, “Ying Mei yan he yuzhong nongmin,” 178; Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 85-86; Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, Xiangcheng yancaozhi, 255-256. 615 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 89. 616 Ibid., 87-90.

222 collect tobacco under the supervision of American tobacco expert Newson. Encouraged by the successful assassination of Wu, the Guild decided to strike again on a larger scale with the aim of forcing BAT to completely close its operation in Xuchang. On December 4th, 1936, a gang of bandits hired by the Guild raided BAT’s purchasing center at Xuchang. Two gunmen attacked the cashier’s office and killed Newson and a Chinese employee who were working there. Again, the local police did not find the men responsible for the attack. Moreover, becaue 4,000 yuan of cash was taken at the scene, the case was even classified as an armed robbery instead of murder.617

Using violent means, local tobacco businessmen again successfully forced BAT out of

Xuchang. After Newson’s death, many Chinese employees resigned their positions at the purchasing center because they felt unsafe working for BAT. Following the American Consulate’s suggestion, BAT instructed its Western personnel to withdraw from Xuchang to Shanghai. The company’s purchasing center therefore ceased to operate in 1937.618 Until it left China in the late

1940s, BAT never went back to Xuchang again due to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the

Chinese Civil War.

A Smoking Society

It is probably incorrect to say that Xuchang represented the entire region of North China because the conflicts between BAT and locals were much less intense in Eastern Shandong and

Northern Anhui. Its experience, however, reflects historical significances of the development of the modern tobacco industry in early-twentieth-century China. The power struggle between BAT and the Xuchang people provides a typical example of the clash of a global force’s expansion and

617 Ibid., 90-92; Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, Xiangcehng yancaozhi, 256. 618 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 93-97.

223 its local reaction. In the process, the tobacco business in Xuchang underwent a localization which eventually led to the emergence of a “smoking society” in the region. In this sense, the case of

Xuchang reveals the historical process of building a “smoking society” in China.

At the superficial level, struggles for control over Xuchang’s leaf tobacco market seem like simply a commercial rivalry between BAT and local businessmen. In fact, it was a much more complicated socio-political movement that involved many people. The giant multinational, various groups of Chinese businessmen, levels of Chinese authorities, British and American diplomatic organizations in China, tobacco growers, ordinary consumers, as well as other members of the local population widely different in social status and professional function, all either voluntarily participated or were dragged into struggles and conflicts over the tobacco resources. As the situation progressed, these groups constantly adjusted or reconstructed their relationships with each other. The dynamic of the tobacco business in Xuchang thus demonstrated the complex social and political relationships of a variety of forces that were revolved around tobacco. From this point of view, the competition in Xuchang’s tobacco market induced profound environmental changes.

More importantly, the tobacco history of Xuchang can be further understood from a broader global perspective as it shows how BAT, as a multinational corporation, excised its power

“globally,” and the Xuchang people, as subaltern actors, responded “locally.” On the global side,

BAT attempted to vertically integrate tobacco production and trade of Xuchang into its global business operation by using the power of a modern multinational corporation. In other words, it aimed to turn Xuchang into a raw material base for its globalized cigarette business. On the local side, the Xuchang people reacted to the trend of globalization that BAT initiated by building their own systems for modern tobacco production and trade. In this sense, the Sino-Foreign rivalry that

224 happened in Xuchang is historically significant because it was in essence a clash of global expansion and local reaction.

This rivalry is perhaps more significant as an illustration of a process of localization, or, as

Sherman Cochran has pointed out, Sinification.619 To win the fierce competition over control of

Xuchang’s leaf tobacco market, both BAT and local tobacco businessmen made great efforts to adapt to local social, economic, and political conditions, and Sinify their operations. BAT grew steadily more dependent on Chinese and less dependent on foreigners throughout the history of its global expansion in Xuchang. Although Western agriculturalists were first to introduce bright tobacco to this region, BAT soon came to rely on Chinese compradors and employees as well as local businessmen (many of whom later became its competitors) to build and operate its tobacco purchasing system. During the political unrest in the mid-1920s, the company used publicity to emphasize its Chinese ties saying that it was making great contributions to the material welfare of people in Xuchang.620 When it returned to Xuchang in the 1930s, BAT tried to appear even more

Sinified than it actually was by disguising itself as an authentic Chinese company while seeking to establish connections with Chinese authorities and the local elite with the help of its Chinese comprador Wu Tingsheng.

At the same time, locals also attempted to conduct the new tobacco business in any traditional ways possible to win the popular support and ensure the collection of tobacco from peasants.

Tobacco shops, which were derived from the old shops that collected, processed, and sold native pipe tobacco in the earlier centuries, carried on their predecessors’ business practice to collect

619 Cochran, Big Business in China, 218-219. 620 Ying Mei, 1:287-288.

225 tobacco through the preexisting commercial and social networks in the villages. Tobacco merchants formed groups and leagues based on home regions to trade tobacco just like the merchant houses did in Qing’s trading networks. Local collectors also organized themselves into an old-style guild to protect their joint interests. These examples, along with many others, show how Chinese businessmen incorporated their traditional commercial practices into the new business of trading bright tobacco for modern cigarette manufacturing.

However, this Sinification cannot be interpreted as carrying out the tobacco business entirely in Chinese ways and resisting any foreign influence. BAT by and large maintained its characteristics as a modern multinational company and persisted to establish a direct purchasing system under the framework of its global business. Local businesses also upgraded many aspects of their operations to meet the needs of a modern tobacco industry. In collecting tobacco, they adopted industrial standards, such as the grading of tobacco leaves, mechanized leaf processing, and specialized packaging. Using external capital and Western-style management, many tobacco shops and transportation firms began to run their businesses like modern companies rather than traditional family-owned workshops. The members of the Xuchang Tobacco Guild even jointly set up a large modernized corporation, the Xuchang Transportation Company, to provide professional railway transportation for the tobacco trade. Therefore, the nature of this Sinification was a collective effort of both BAT and local businessmen attempting to build a business that was acceptable to Chinese society by compromising the merits of Chinese tradition and Western modernity. Struggles for control over tobacco resources in Xuchang demonstrated the conflict between globalization and localization that eventually led to a Sinified tobacco business which was neither entirely global or foreign, nor local or Chinese, but a combination of both.

226

To this extent, the success of BAT and its local rivals at adapting to Chinese conditions and

Sinifying their operations is perhaps the single most persuasive explanation for the growth of the leaf tobacco market in Xuchang during the early twentieth century. Both global and local forces accommodated themselves to the circumstances that they faced in China to ensure the prosperity of Xuchang’s tobacco production and trade. This Sinification and the consequent thriving tobacco business greatly advanced other aspects of Xuchang’s tobacco industry and thus directly led to the emergence of a “smoking society” in the region by the 1930s, in which the agricultural ecology, economy, and culture centered around the production and consumption of tobacco and cigarettes.

As detailed in Chapter Two, following the introduction of American bright tobacco in the

1910s, Central Henan quickly developed into a specialized tobacco growing area. The traditional agricultural structure of the Xuchang region was altered as bright tobacco became one of the major crops.621 In 1937, local farmers used 916,000 mu of their land to produce nearly 88 million pounds of tobacco.622 Although in general wheat was still the chief crop in the area, bright tobacco cultivation had surpassed the production of wheat in many districts. In Xiangcheng in 1935, for example, the planting areas for tobacco were 2.5 times greater than those for wheat.623 In some villages and districts, peasants used up to 80 percent of the total arable land to grow tobacco.

Consequently, “food needed to be imported from the outside.” 624 The cultivation of tobacco continued to increase after the Second World War. In the mid-1940s, the total tobacco acreage in

621 “Henan kangyan gaikuang,” Henan zhengzhi yuekan 4, no. 3 (1934), 1. 622 Henansheng difang shizhi bangongshi, Henan shengzhi, nongye juan, 181. 623 Henan tongji xuehui, ed., Minguo shiqi Henan tongji ziliao (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1987), 156- 169,178-189. 624 “Henan kangyan gaikuang,” 1.

227

Xuchang reached one million mu. According to a 1947 survey conducted in ten counties of the region, 25 percent of the cultivated land was dedicated to tobacco growing.625

Based on the large-scale tobacco cultivation, Xuchang transformed from a self-sufficient peasant economy to a tobacco-centered commercial economy in the 1920s and 1930s. As discussed above, during this period, the businesses of tobacco collecting and trade grew to a tremendous scale in the area. Meanwhile, the expanding local cigarette consumption and the availability of abundant tobacco resources also led to the rise of cigarette manufacturing. As early as 1917, hand- rolling cigarette workshops began to appear in Xuchang.626 In the 1920s, workshops mushroomed all over the region. In Xuchang city alone, the total number of these small businesses increased from around 20 in 1923 to 360 in 1927, producing over 0.7 million cigarettes per day.627 At the same time, many successful hand-rolling workshops, which had accumulated considerable amounts of capital over the years, began to mechanize their businesses. In 1926, a local workshop owner Wang Jieting purchased a cigarette-rolling machine and opened the first cigarette factory in

Xuchang. In two years, four other large cigarette factories were set up in the city, all of which had a few of the most up-to-date cigarette-rolling machines and employed several hundred workers to produce in total of three million cigarettes per day. By 1933, there were already more than forty mechanized cigarette manufacturers in Xuchang. 628 Surrounding counties also saw a rush of cigarette factories being built in the 1930s. , for example, opened eleven factories between 1930 and 1936.629 By 1936, also had twelve cigarette factories, producing

625 Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, 24-25; Li, “Yingmeiyan gongsi he Xuhang yanqushi,” 35. 626 Nie, Xuchang yancao zhi, 190. 627 Ibid., 191. 628 Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, ed., Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di shiliu ji (Xuchang: Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, 2002), 145. 629 Luoheshi yancao zhi bianweihui, ed., Luoheshi yancao zhi (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1993), 105.

228 approximately 2.7 million sticks of cigarettes daily.630 The fast growing cigarette manufacturing, together with tobacco growing and leaf collection, completed a commodity chain of cigarette production in Xuchang. The tobacco industry undoubtedly became the pillar industry of the local economy, yielding large amounts of tax revenue for the authorities. In 1936, for instance, the local taxation department in total collected over three million yuan taxes from tobacco-related businesses.631

The growth of the tobacco industry also accelerated the development of many other industries which provided necessary services for tobacco production and trade. The best example perhaps was the emergence of modern banking in Xuchang. Tobacco growing, leaf purchasing, and cigarette manufacturing were all very capital-intensive. While tobacco growers could borrow the money they needed from local usury capital, leaf collectors and cigarette manufacturers demanded much greater financial support from larger lenders. In addition, the big-volume transactions in tobacco purchasing created a demand for money transferring services because it was unpractical and unsafe for tobacco merchants to carry large sums of cash to Xuchang. Therefore, a modern banking system emerged in Xuchang as the times required. By 1937, seven large banks, including national banks such as Bank of China and Shanghai Commercial Savings Bank, opened seventeen branches across the tobacco growing area in Central Henan.632 These banks provided convenient money transferring services for the tobacco trade while investing considerable amounts of capital in the tobacco industry by lending money to tobacco shops and cigarette factories.633

630 Xuchang Municipal Archival, 2:560; Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 1199. 631 Mo, Henan zhi yanye, 52; Yang, Zhongguo yanyeshi huidian, 1198. 632 Zhongguo yinhang jingji yanjiushi, ed., Quanguo yinhang nianjian, 1937 (Shanghai: Hanwen zhengkai shuju, 1937), 81-84. 633 Nie, Xuchang yancaozhi, 83.

229

In addition, the booming tobacco industry also brought along a robust commercial economy in Xuchang. In the 1920s, people had noticed an explosion of various kinds of firms, factories, and businesses in the city. The area around the railway station developed into a commercial center filled with not only tobacco shops and transportation firms but also many other businesses such as trading firms, coal and kerosene companies, and food processing factories. In the downtown area, many up-scale stores were opened, selling luxury silk and fur, as well as expensive imported goods.634 The commercial activities in Xuchang continued to flourish in the 1930s. After the formation of the “tobacco shop street”, hospitality and entertainment businesses, such as tea houses, restaurants, hotels, theaters, brothels, and Western-style clubs, emerged in large numbers near the street to carter for tobacco merchants from all over the country.635 In downtown Xuchang, there were also many new modern businesses including department stores, Western pharmacies, photo shops, and a telegram office. 636 The tobacco industry boosted Xuchang’s economy and transformed it from an ordinary prefecture-level town to one of the richest and most prosperous cities in Henan.

The center position of tobacco in Xuchang’s economy inevitably changed the culture of the city and the region. First, in the 1920s and 1930s, a new smoking culture was formed in Xuchang as an increasing number of local consumers were replacing traditional pipe tobacco with cigarettes in their daily tobacco use. The statistics of the local cigarette consumption is not readily available in historical records, but indirect evidence indicates that cigarettes were purchased and smoked by the Xuchang people on a large scale. BAT was selling on average up to two billion sticks of

634 Wang Xiuwen, et al., Xuchang xianzhi, shiye, juan liu (Shanghai: Shanghai tushuguan, 1923), 2. 635 Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, ed., Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di jiu-shi ji (Xuchang, Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, 1997), 217. 636 Ibid., 205-206.

230 cigarettes every year in Henan throughout the 1930s, a considerable portion of which were distributed in the Xuchang area.637 In County, for instance, BAT sold 132 million cigarettes in 1931.638 While BAT and other large tobacco companies supplied high-class cigarettes for better off smokers, small local hand-rolling workshops and cigarette factories produced affordable products for lower-class consumers. In the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of hand-rolling workshops across the Xuchang region produced hundreds of millions of cigarettes each year. With modern machineries, cigarette factories were able to manufacture several billion cigarettes per year. Most of these locally made cigarettes were consumed by people in the Xuchang region because per government regulations, cigarettes made by hand-rolling workshops and small factories could only be sold within the production place. Besides, these small manufacturers usually were not capable of distributing their products to distant markets. Overall, these numbers show that cigarette smoking had become the main form of tobacco consumption in Xuchang.

With the widespread sale of cigarettes, a new cigarette smoking culture fermented in Xuchang.

The rise of this new tobacco culture was in accordance with the development of a Chinese tobacco culture during the early twentieth century. Cigarettes at first entered Xuchang as a high-end foreign import that were only consumed by the fashionable and wealthy local elite.639 After the political turmoil in the mid-1920s, large tobacco companies began to design and publicize the images of their products using Chinese cultural elements. Local cigarette manufacturers in Xuchang also contributed to this effort by branding their cigarettes with Chinese-style names and designs that were well-known by local people. Meanwhile, the less-expensive local-made cigarettes

637 Ying Mei, 2:737. 638 Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di qi ji, 154. 639 Xuchangshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, Xuchang wenshi ziliao, di shiliu ji, 143.

231 transformed the nature of the cigarette from a luxury imported good to a popular consumer product that was smoked by people from all social classes. Under these circumstances, Xuchang consumers therefore started to perceive the cigarette as a national product or local product that was an important part of the local culture and social life.

Secondly, the Xuchang people also constructed a unique culture for tobacco production. As tobacco cultivation and trade became increasingly significant in people’s life, various kinds of cultural works about tobacco appeared in Xuchang. Experienced tobacco farmers wrote proverbs that contained useful tips for good farming in tobacco fields to speared the knowledge of cultivating tobacco. Folk music artists composed songs to sing the hardships of the tobacco growers’ life or to praise their diligent work in producing tobacco. Local literati wrote poems and articles to record and publicize tobacco growing. People told stories and folklores to create the history of the Xuchang tobacco.640 A folklore called “The Legend of the Tobacco King,” which circulated in the Xuchang area since the 1930s, provides a good example of these literatures:

“Once upon a time, there was a diligent and brave young man named Zhang Jinshan. He hid in a valley called Lichuan [in Xiangcheng County] after he assassinated an evil gentry to free the villagers from the burden of evilness. Zhang worked the land diligently day and night, yet harvested very little. One day, he fell asleep in the field, worrying about the poor crops. Suddenly, he woke up to a voice calling “Tobacco King! Tobacco King!” and saw a beautiful lady standing on a colorful cloud and smiling at him. When the lady was gone, Zhang found a tall, green, beautiful seedling next to him. He was ecstatic and immediately planted the seedling. In just one day and one night, it grew into a thrifty golden tree that produced endless amount of golden tobacco leaves. Having this magical tobacco tree, Zhang lived a comfortable and abundant life.

640 A few examples can be found in Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, ed., Xiangcheng yancaozhi, 1988-1997 (Beijing: Fangzhi chubanshe, 1998), 285-290.

232

As the news spread, a greedy local gentry, Xibatian, wanted to take over the magical tree. He and a group of his servants raided Lichuan and seized Zhang Jinshan and the tobacco tree. As they were about to kill him, Zhang roared angrily, pulled the tree out, and blasted off to a cloud. Xibatian and his servants were too terrified to stand. Before he disappeared into the sky, Zhang waved the tree and spread numerous tobacco seeds across the fields and valleys. Since then, this area [Xiangcheng] had become a land of tobacco where golden leaves grow and flourished every year.”641

Albeit fictional, this folklore shows how the Xuchang people attempted to incorporate the bright tobacco and the production of this American variety into their traditional cultural narratives. The story, along with other literatures, constructed a unique tobacco culture to justify and praise tobacco production in Xuchang, as well as to publicize Xuchang tobacco to the whole country. As a result of this cultural construction, tobacco soon became the cultural symbol of the city and the region. By the 1930s, Xuchang had earned alternative names, such as “tobacco capital,” “tobacco city,” and “Virginia of the East,” for its reputation of producing the best tobacco in China. Even Mao Zedong called Xuchang a

“tobacco kingdom” (yancao wangguo) when he visited the area in 1958 (See Figure 5.3 and

5.4). Although Mao made his remark decades later, Xuchang’s tobacco culture that earned it the name of “tobacco kingdom” had been established much earlier in the 1930s.

641 Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, Xiangcheng yancaozhi, 262.

233

Figure 5.3 (Left): “Mao Zedong visits the tobacco fields in Xiangcheng county of Xuchang Prefecture (1958).”642 Figure 5.4 (Right): “Mao Zedong’s calligraphy that reads ‘This place [Xuchang] has become a ‘tobacco kingdom’ (1958).”643 Conclusion

Since it introduced bright tobacco cultivation into North China in the 1910s, BAT made great efforts to monopolize Xuchang’s tobacco resources as part of its global expansion in China.

Chinese businessmen, however, united together to resist BAT’s plan. In such struggle between global and local forces, Xuchang’s tobacco industry underwent a process of Sinification that transformed the region into a “smoking society,” in which tobacco became the center of its agricultural ecology, economy, and culture. The case of Xuchang reflects Chinese tobacco history during the early twentieth century as it demonstrates the historical trajectory of building a

“smoking society” in China.

Throughout the early twentieth century, the development of the Chinese tobacco industry was accompanied by tensions between global influences and local reactions. Besides the struggles for control over tobacco resources discussed above, BAT and its Chinese rivals also fiercely competed

642 Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, Xiangcheng yancaozhi, Illustration 9; Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, Illustration 1. 643 Xiangcheng yancaozhi bianjishi, Xiangcheng yancaozhi, Illustration 1; Li, Xuchang kaoyan fazhan shihua, Illustration 2.

234 with each other on the Chinese cigarette market. As cigarette consumption grew, a tension between

Western and indigenous cultural discourses of the cigarette also emerged, with cigarette manufacturers and Chinese consumers striving to replace the image of the “global cigarette” with the perception of the cigarette as a “national product” during the social and political movements in the 1920s and 1930s.

These conflicts drove BAT and Chinese companies to Sinify their operations by adapting to the circumstances that faced businesses in China. Indeed, BAT introduced the Western cigarette and American bright tobacco into China and at first established a modern tobacco industry there according to the standards of a multinational corporation. However, it soon started to localize itself by hiring Chinese workers and staffs to manufacture the cigarettes it sold in China using locally grown tobacco. Moreover, realizing the need for coping with the particular social, economic, and political context in China, BAT came to be more dependent on the Chinese to make its business socially respectable, distribute its products through the preexisting trading networks, and adjust its advertising to suit the political atmosphere and cultural milieu to make a successful business acceptable to the Chinese society at local, regional, and national levels. Similarly, even though

Chinese cigarette firms initially formed their businesses by importing foreign technologies and imitating BAT’s business practices, their operations were inherently Chinese because the production and distribution of their products heavily relied on Chinese personnel and resources.

As a result of the Sinification, a “smoking society” emerged in China in the 1920s and 1930s as the production and consumption of tobacco and cigarettes came to be an important aspect of

China’s agriculture, economy, and culture. First, BAT introducing and promoting bright tobacco cultivation in North China created three large tobacco growing areas in the region. Local

235 agricultural structure therefore was transformed as bright tobacco became the most dominate cash crop that replaced indigenous tobacco as well as a number of food crops. Secondly, BAT, Chinese tobacco companies, and countless hand-rolling cigarette workshops together constituted the modern Chinese cigarette industry which not only created an integral commodity chain of cigarette production, but also developed a nation-wide cigarette market through their distribution systems.

Since then, the cigarette business had gained an important position in the Chinese economy. Lastly, in terms of the cultural aspect, the cigarette evolved from the outset regarded in the dominant political discourse as a “foreign” commodity to a “Chinese” product during the rise of Chinese nationalism. Even though a considerable percentage of Chinese consumers still smoke tobacco in pipes, cigarette smoking acquired the leading position in the Chinese tobacco culture.

The historical significance of the “smoking society” lay at the reestablishment of the relationships between the Chinese people and tobacco. In producing tobacco and cigarettes, different groups of people in the new tobacco industry, such as tobacco peasants, local elite, tobacco businessmen, government officials, and cigarette manufacturers, formed new social and economic relationships with tobacco and with each other under the theme of capitalistic production and within the framework of a market economy. In terms of consumption, the rise of the cigarette to cultural dominance in Chinese tobacco consumption marked a remarkable shift in Chinese tobacco history that brought deep changes in social norms and customs. As such, the cigarette redirected the cultural connections between the Chinese and tobacco, and the social relationships among Chinese smokers. The reorganized environmental, economic, social, and cultural relationships between the Chinese people and tobacco deep-rooted in a Sinified “smoking society”

236 was the reason why, even after BAT left China in the late 1940s, the production and consumption of tobacco and cigarettes continued to thrive in China to this day.

237

EPILOGUE

This dissertation aims to find the historical roots of the tobacco issue in contemporary China.

The earliest tobacco cultivation and consumption in China dates back to the late sixteenth century when the global diffusion of tobacco first reached Southeastern China. Since then, the Chinese gradually built a nationwide system for tobacco production and trade, as well as a mature smoking culture throughout the Qing Dynasty. However, the course of Chinese tobacco history was changed during the early twentieth century when Westerners introduced the industrial cigarette into China.

Specifically, BAT’s business expansion in China reshaped Chinese tobacco production and consumption by establishing a modern tobacco industry and a mass consumer culture centering on the cigarette. In making these changes, BAT, domestic tobacco companies, Chinese consumers, and other practitioners in the cigarette business, together constructed a “smoking society,” in which the Chinese forged intimate ecological, economic, social, and cultural relationships with tobacco in both the production and consumption of the cigarette. The newly formed relationships had far- reaching environmental effects as it led to the mass production and mass consumption of tobacco in today’s China. As Cochran and Benedict have noted, “the foundations for the ‘massification’ of the Chinese cigarette in the second half of the twentieth century were already being laid by foreign and domestic cigarette companies in the decades before 1949.”644

After it successfully opened the Chinese market at the turn of the twentieth century, BAT quickly began to amplify its business expansion by bringing in a tobacco industry that included a cigarette manufacturing system and a tobacco growing operation. In major cities, it set up many

644 Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men, 166-67; Benidict, Golden Silk Smoke, 147. This quaotation is from Benedict’s book.

238 mechanized cigarette factories that were capable of making millions of cigarettes per day. In North

China, it built three large bright tobacco growing bases to provide ample high-quality raw materials for its factories. The success of BAT’s business stimulated the Chinese to follow its steps. By imitating BAT’s operations, well-financed Chinese entrepreneurs opened their own tobacco companies to compete with the giant multinational on the national market. Small businessmen also joined the cigarette business by investing their limited capital in hand-rolling workshops that mainly served the growing market demand for affordable cigarettes. Meanwhile, local merchants in tobacco growing areas participated in the leaf purchasing business and tobacco trade as middlemen between tobacco growers and cigarette manufactures. BAT, the tobacco growing in

North China, and levels of Chinese-owned tobacco businesses together constituted the tobacco industry in early-twentieth-century China. This brought about the emergence of an integral commodity chain of cigarette production.

In this modern tobacco industry, groups of people along the commodity chain of cigarette production, such as tobacco peasants, local businessmen, industrial workers, and Chinese entrepreneurs, all formed new ecological, social, and economic relationships with tobacco and with each other within the framework of a market economy. In rural North China, tobacco agriculture transformed from a mode of self-sufficiency and semi-self-sufficiency to one featuring commercialization and marketization. In other words, BAT’s capitalization of bright tobacco cultivation initiated the transition of local agriculture from the peasant economy towards the market economy. Growing bright tobacco under this agroeconomic setting, peasants engaged in new ecological and economic relationships with tobacco. They ceased to produce native leaves for personal use and started growing bright tobacco to supply the cigarette industry. Meanwhile,

239 although having minimal direct involvement in planting tobacco, the influential and affluent local population also reorganized their economic and social connections with tobacco and peasants by participating in the commercialized tobacco economy. Local gentry, landlords, and rich farmers were critical to the capitalistic tobacco agriculture as they provided necessary capital and means of production to tobacco growers through the money-lending business. Another group of local elites undertook the leaf collecting business and tobacco trade as middlemen who linked tobacco production with cigarette manufacturing.

In major cities and small towns across China, the Chinese who worked in the cigarette industry also established new relationships with tobacco. By opening modern tobacco companies, many Chinese business elites became “innovative” entrepreneurs who successfully built a

Western-style enterprise in the Chinese context. 645 Meanwhile, a larger number of small businessmen became hand-rolling workshop owners who utilized their traditional handcraft skills to produce a modern tobacco product. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of peasants left their villages and came to work in the tobacco industry as industrial workers and hand-rollers. For these groups of people, tobacco came to be a commodity that gave them new livelihoods in the market economy. By making it into cigarettes, they earned profits or wages that were offered by the market or tobacco companies.

To millions of Chinese smokers, the more significant change of relationship occurred in tobacco consumption as cigarette manufacturers and consumers together accepted cigarette smoking into the Chinese tobacco culture. Throughout the early twentieth century, the emerging

Chinese tobacco industry utilized mass consumer culture to promote cigarette smoking. In the

645 Cochran, Big Business in China, 212-216.

240 early stage, commercial advertising and popular culture unanimously portrayed the cigarette as a

“modern” and “Western” product. As a result, in the perceptions of Chinese consumers, the cigarette symbolized modernity as well as many progressive traits such as industrial, urban, and fashionable. With the rise of Chinese nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, however, the cigarette evolved to a “Chinese” product from the outset regarded in the dominant political discourse as a

“foreign” commodity. Under the social and political pressure that was generated by the National

Products Movement, BAT and Chinese tobacco companies strove to keep their market shares by justifying and publicizing cigarette smoking in the Chinese cultural milieu. The consumer culture of the cigarette thus was indigenized as cigarette smoking became the center of the Chinese tobacco culture and a crucial part of Chinese social etiquette. The cigarette’s rise to cultural dominance in the tobacco consumption of China marked a remarkable shift in Chinese tobacco history that brought together developments in China’s modern consumerism as well as deep changes in social norms and customs. In this sense, the cigarette redirected the cultural connections between the Chinese and tobacco, and the social relationships among Chinese smokers.

The reorganized environmental, economic, social, and cultural relationships between the

Chinese people and tobacco that was deeply rooted in a Sinified “smoking society” accounted for the prosperity of cigarette production and consumption in early-twentieth-century China. More importantly, it was for this reason that BAT was no longer essential to the Chinese tobacco industry.

The outbreak of war between China and Japan in 1937 soon brought BAT’s operations in China to a complete halt due to the active combat across a large part of the country. The company reemerged from a time after the end of the war in 1945 but then quickly collapsed after the

241

Communist victory in 1949.646 Without BAT’s presence, the Chinese carried on its legacy and proceeded with producing and consuming cigarettes. While many Chinese tobacco firms, such as

Nanyang and Huacheng, were seized or destroyed by the Japanese during the war, some of them moved to Southwestern China, continuing to manufacture large sums of cigarettes for Chinese consumers.647 As tobacco growing areas in North China were under Japanese occupation, these

Chinese companies worked with the Nationalist Government to promote bright tobacco cultivation in Southwestern provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan to fulfill their demand for raw materials.648 The attempt was especially successful in Yunnan, making it one of the largest bright tobacco growing areas in China. To this day, Chinese cigarette manufacturers are still using the well-known “liangnan yancao” (two nan tobacco or tobacco grown in Henan and Yunan) to produce the majority of their products.649 After 1949, the communist regime included the tobacco production and consumption in its socialist scheme of industrializing and modernizing China. The

Chinese tobacco industry and cigarette smoking thus developed into a grander scale during the second half of the twentieth century.

Therefore, in light of BAT’s and the Chinese people’s record at building up new relationships with tobacco in the “smoking society,” no one should be surprised to discover that the Chinese continue to produce and smoke cigarettes on a large scale today. According to the most recent figures, in 2013, China produced 2,551 billion sticks of cigarettes using 3,201,850 tonnes of the

646 Ying Mei, 1:187-210. 647 Song Jicheng, Jing Shuping, “Zhongguo juanyan gongye de guoqu xianzai he jianglai,” Yancao yuekan 2, no. 8, (1948), 318-319. 648 “Qiansheng meiyan xinqixiang,” Yancao yuekan 2, no.2-6, (1948), 270; Chen Naixian, “Meiyan tuiguang zai Wenjiang,” Yancao tongxun 1, no.1 (1941), 19-23; Du Yuran, “Meiyan zai Sichuan tuiguang gaikuang,” Yancao tongxun 1, no. 2-4 (1941), 66-71. 649 Yang, Zhongguo yancao wenhua jilin, 323-325.

242 tobacco it grew to meet the needs of 276.2 million Chinese smokers.650 Thus, the modern tobacco industry and the habit of cigarette smoking that BAT started and spread in China during the era of its global expansion is now pervasive there. This shows that the cigarette has been deeply immersed into the image of China as an economic, social, and cultural symbol throughout the twentieth century and beyond. As Howard Cox has remarked, “as much as the Nineteenth Century was dominated by opium, the cigarette defined the Twentieth Century in China.”651

650 The Chinese smoking population consists of 264 million male smokers and 12.2 million female smokers, see Eriksen, Mackay, Schluger, Gomeshtape, and Drope, The Tobacco Atlas, 32-34. Figures for China’s tobacco and cigarette production can be found in Ibid., 46, 49. 651 Cox, The Global Cigarette, 132.

243

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