Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History

In this book, Alan Baumler examines how Chinese reformers convinced the people and the state that eliminating opium was one of the crucial tasks facing the new Chinese nation. He analyzes the process by which the government borrowed international models of drug control and modern ideas of citizenship and combined them into a program, that successfully transformed opium from a major part of China's political economy to an ordinary social problem.