UC San Diego

How do governments create expendable populations as a historical process? This question underpins From Users to Criminals: Creating, Pathologizing, and Killing ‘Drug Criminals’ in Twentieth-Century China. My dissertation historicizes how governments create marginalized populations and convince people to enact violence against them by uncovering the social, medical, cultural, and political histories of narcotics treatment and suppression in China from the early modern to modern period.My interdisciplinary work challenges accounts of mass campaigns in China as irrationally destructive and argues that governments used anti-narcotics campaigns to draw ordinary people into the project of building new political communities. I show how the Qing (1636-1911), Republic of China (1912-1949) and People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949-) governments drew on scientific expertise and techniques of population management to create new senses of political and social belonging. The project analyzes how from 1906 to 1953 governments dehumanized drug users to create collective identity and promote state-building. Following China’s defeat in the Opium Wars, narcotics became a symbol of national shame. Reformers during the Republican period authored plays, propaganda, songs, and medical studies that cast drug use as a marker of moral degeneracy and physical illness. While the Republican government saw itself as the agent of punishment, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) persuaded ordinary people to participate in emotional and physical violence against drug users and traffickers to define belonging in China’s new political community and extend the reach of state power to the bodies and minds of citizens. From Users to Criminals is the first study of violence in China that moves beyond accounts of casualties to explore how different governments used non-physical forms of violence. I depart from conventional studies that privilege violence’s physical forms and focus on establishing state culpability or casualty numbers. Instead, I disaggregate violence and examine its different forms, be it discursive, ideological, clinical, emotional, or public. Rather than understanding violence simply as a destructive force, I historicize violence as a flexible and creative process of subject creation that forms a shared community identity based on hatred and exclusion.