Was drug and medicine smuggling from India to China an attack on British colonial rule?

On the afternoon of January 5, 1943, a dozen Indian police officers broke into a shophouse in Park Street, Calcutta. Their target was Chen Mengzhao, a Chinese businessman who had been accused of making tremendous profits through smuggling contraband from India to China. When the policemen
entered the second floor of the shophouse, they found Chen Mengzhao and two other Chinese, Gao Wenjie and Wang Li-an, as well as large quantities of medicines, jewels, and clothes, which the police believed would be smuggled to China. Later investigations indicated that all three men were involved in India-China smuggling in different patterns.

Chen Mengzhao ran his smuggling enterprise through a collaboration with an American pilot who took the contraband into China on his flights. Gao Wenjie, disguised as a Chinese army officer, evaded custom checks. Wang Li-an was authorised by a Chinese government sector to travel to India for the purpose of smuggling medicines back to China.

Although Chen Mengzhao, Gao Wenjie, and Wang Li-an were unfamiliar with one another and their smuggling businesses were unrelated, the uncovering of their experiences in Calcutta sheds new light on our understanding of the smuggling in modern China and India.

In recent years, a growing number of studies have been produced to explore the interaction between modern state-building and smuggling in China. The Chinese government under Nationalist rule tried hard to build a strong central state through regulating and taxing foreign trade. Ordinary people, however, had to pay higher prices for their daily commodities due to increased regulations and taxes.

To evade state control, smuggling through China’s coastal areas had become widespread by the 1920s and 1930s. The Nationalist government saw the smuggling as a menace to its revenue and as a challenge to the state-building ambitions.

In fighting against the smuggling, the Nationalist government progressively expanded the state capacity by centralising its legal authority and advancing its reach over almost all aspects of economic life. Ironically, as Philip Thai observes, smuggling in modern China did not undermine the state authority but dramatically strengthened it.

Scholars studying smuggling in colonial India, however, pay less attention to the state-building aspect. In fact, the British colonial authorities in India were concerned more with its own security, both internal (threat from Indian nationalists) and external (threat mainly from Russia), than of building India into a centralised modern state. Amar Farooqui argues that smuggling in western India as conducted by indigenous groups was a systematic and organised effort to undermine the colonial monopoly of India’s economy and challenge the colonial regime.

While Kate Boehme does not agree that the smuggling in colonial India was a planned subversion against the Raj, she persuasively demonstrates how the Government of India imagined and constructed smuggling as a subversive enterprise, which not only damaged the colonial economy but was designed to overthrow the British rule altogether.9 Jonathan Hyslop’s study of Indian sailors’ gun smuggling in the 1920s further shows that although sailors’ motivations of smuggling weapons were largely for making profits, colonial officials always tended to correlate their activities to nationalist and revolutionary movements.

In other words, while the Chinese Nationalist government’s concern of smuggling was primarily due to its state-building ambitions, the Indian colonial authorities’ fight against smuggling can be attributed to its anxieties of the survival of British colonial rule.

However, scholars on smuggling in both modern China and India have largely confined their discussions within the boundaries of the two countries. Since most smuggling took place across the border, their influence had been transnational instead of merely national. Eric Tagliacozzo convincingly demonstrates how the interplay between colonial states and smugglers in Southeast Asia contributed to the formation and construction of borders in British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.

In this case, the British Malayan government’s measures and regulations against the smugglings along the Straits of Malacca led to the response of the Dutch colonial authorities in the East Indies, which was determined to build up its own authority against the underground trades and tax evasion. Therefore, the smuggling in colonial Southeast Asia not only gave rise to the colonial state’s border construction programs of mapping, lighting, surveillance, and patrolling but also sowed the seeds for the decades-long competition, negotiation, and collaboration between the Dutch and British colonial authorities around containing the smuggling.

Nisha Mathew’s study of the gold smuggling between Dubai and Bombay before and after the Partition further elaborates that the cross-boundary smuggling reflected not only local/regional economic activities but the broader context of the international monetary politics of the time.

Excerpted with permission from Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942-1945, Yin Cao, Oxford University Press.