Intoxicating Manchuria ─ Alcohol, Opium, and Culture in China's Northeast

Smith (history, U. of Guelph, Canada) fills a lacuna in English-language scholarship on alcohol culture in China in this focused study on its prominence in Northeast China. He analyzes alcohol narratives alongside more well-known opium narratives, asking: how were intoxicants and addiction popularly understood and characterized, how were intoxicant industries impacted by the Japanese occupation, and were serious efforts made to reduce intoxicant consumption? The study is comprised of eight chapters that examine the history of alcohol and opium in China to the mid-20th century, major business and state developments in Manchuria's intoxicant industries, the appearance of alcohol in 1930s and '40s newspapers and journals, selling alcohol as the ticket to modernity, the influence of the intoxicants on fiction of the period, debates over women in the opium trade, attempts to define and treat addiction, and a special focused study of an 1942 Chinese text on opium addiction. U.S. distribution by U. of Washington Press; Canadian by U. of Toronto Press. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Norman Smith is an associate professor in theHistory Department of the University of Guelph. He is the author of Resisting Manchukuo: Chinese Women Writers and the JapaneseOccupation and co-editor of Beyond Suffering: Recounting Warin Modern China.