Chinese Whispers: ketamine in China

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

It might be an understatement to say that China has a difficult relationship with drugs. Most infamously, the Opium Wars of the 1800s saw British soldiers fight against the Qing dynasty to protect the British right to sell opium to China. When the Qing lost, it wasn’t just the sobriety of their people that they lost – but a series of ports, concessions and reparations signed away in so-called ‘unequal treaties’. Hong Kong was lost to the British at this point, and it’s where the Chinese mark the start of the century of humiliation.

The memory and trauma of opium addiction is still bound up with national decline in the Chinese conscience.

So Cindy Yu was surprised to read about widespread drug use (especially ketamine) in the early 2000s in a recent article by the translator and writer Dylan Levi King. Dylan joins this episode, and they talk about what the popularity of ket says about China's reform and opening, how the Chinese see drug abuse as a disease than a crime, and President Xi's moralistic clampdown on the party scene in the years since.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:31.4	Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I'll be talking to
0:36.3	journalists, experts and long-time China
0:38.2	watches about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering
0:43.4	of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How did the
0:47.9	Chinese see these issues? I think it would be an understatement to say that China has a
0:53.5	difficult relationship with drugs.
0:56.0	Most infamously, the Opium War saw British soldiers fight against the Qing dynasty to protect the British right to sell opium to China.
1:03.0	Now, when the Qing lost, it wasn't just a sobriety of their people that they lost,
1:07.0	but a series of ports, concessions and reparations signed away in the so-called unnequal treaties.
1:13.2	Hong Kong was lost to the British at that point, and this is where the Chinese mark the start
1:17.5	of the century of humiliation. The memory and the trauma of opium addiction is still bound up
1:22.3	with the notion of national decline in China. Or at least, that's what I grew up thinking.
1:31.3	So imagine my surprise to read about widespread drug abuse in the early 2000s in a recent article by the translator and writer Dylan Levi King.
1:36.3	Not just any drug, but Ketamin, a synthetic party drug popular in the West and commonly described as horse tranquilizer.
1:42.3	Dylan joins this episode now and we're going to be
1:45.0	talking about the wild noughties in China, the party scene there and whether or not China has
1:50.1	got over the opium wars and why those party scenes are no longer seen in the country today. So Dylan,
1:56.1	welcome to do Chinese whispers. To start with, can you paint the scene for us? I mean, I wasn't there
2:00.6	in the night there in the
2:01.3	nightlife in the early 2000s. What was it like? Yeah, this is one of those things that you would
2:06.6	really only know about if you had lived in China in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where you
	...

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