I'd never heard of the claim that China was flooding America with methaqualone in the '80s, pushed by Reagan friend and drug warrior Paula Hawkins. Her later claims to have demanded to Deng Xiaoping's face that he stop selling dope helped Bob Graham defeat her in 1986.
By 1986, Qualuudes had been taken off the market and methaqualone was rescheduled to make it completely illegal. The market for bootleg pills was evaporating. Paula Hawkins here describes the "yellow trail of methaqualone": c-span.org/video/?150709-…. Might be true. I don't know.
By 1990, when Larouche publication Executive Intelligence Review raised the specter of "Communist Quaaludes for America," I don't know if you could still find fake Quaaludes. Maybe you could. The idea of Kissinger facilitating Deng's narco-state is fun, though.
You would struggle to find methaqualone in the United States, but that's not to say it's disappeared completely. The market changed. It started to Africa and the Middle East. Like with ketamine, another illicit drug associated with China, India was usually the source.
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The methaqualone claim is not exactly true, or, like with fentanyl, a sliver of the larger story. But it starts with the idea that China was using heroin to fight American imperialism in Indochina, covered in books like Red Cocaine, which suggests Zhou Enlai was running things.
The idea of heroin coming from Red China has less truth than the methaqualone story. But through the 1950s and '60s, anticommunism was a reliable way for Harry J. Anslinger to sell war on drugs—and, then, for the China lobby to sell their war on communism.
British customs agents reported no seizures of heroin from Red China after 1949, for example, and it didn't appear that they were just missing shipments. ("Bureaucratic Cold Warrior: Harry J. Anslinger and Illicit Narcotics Traffic"). The story kept going, though.
Yi-hung Liu has a paper—"The World Comes to Iowa in the Cold War: International Writing Program and the Translation of Mao Zedong"—on another part of the American project of shaping Chinese literature. The International Writing Program was started by Paul Engle and his wife...
...Hualing Nieh Engle 聂华苓, two members of the Iowa crew that included Richard M. McCarthy, HK USIS head. The CIA had funded Engle's Writers' Workshop, and the IWP was a scheme to bring in writers from outside the free world to hear the gospel of American freedom.
Writers from unfree states were granted a chance at liberation—a "left-liberal ideal of international integration." Like in HK and TW, the emphasis was not on anticommunism, but on individualism, becoming a global citizen (in a world governed by the United States).
Richard M. McCarthy was Eileen Chang's handler, planning her anticommunist output, and the shadowy figure that ran the ideological fight against communist influence in Chinese-language literature. An important figure in modern Chinese literary history, he's rarely acknowledged.
An Iowa boy with a degree in American literature, he was given a job at the US Information Service China while working at the Beijing consulate. It's interesting that work actually continued in the PRC—at least for a short time, until the reds booted them out.
He wound up in Hong Kong. This 1988 interview by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project is a bit vague. "We discovered Eileen Chang," he says, but forgets the second anticommunist novel she produced for USIS (it was Naked Earth).
Mei-hsiang Wang 王梅香 explains that the Cultural Cold War being waged by the "U.S. aid literary institution" 美援文艺体制 against red ideology was about more than a few magazines, and about more than just Taiwan and Hong Kong, extending out to greater East Asia and the diaspora.
Translation and popularization of American works in HK-TW were crucial, but maybe just as important was selling the diaspora on the idea that Free China was the source of authentic Chinese culture. Part of that was Eileen Chang's anticommunist efforts, funded and planned by USIS.
Those books were also shipped off to shore up the propaganda effort in Japan, where there was quite a bit of sympathetic interest in Red China. (From "Reporting on 'China' in a 'Novel' Way," also by Mei-hsiang Wang, all about USIS-Tokyo translations of Chinese literature.)
When talking about Taiwanese literature, it's usually imagined as a more ideologically free space, compared to Mainland literature. That impression and the literature written during the Cold War were the result of the US Information Service's own ideological project in East Asia.
The concept of a "U.S. aid literary institution" 美援文艺体制 comes from Chien-Chung Chen 陈建忠, who contrasted it with the national arts and culture institution 国家文艺体制—both pushed an anticommunist message, but the American institution was a soft system 软性体制...
...developing Taiwanese literature in a direction that would allow it to match up with the world view and esthetic point of view of the United States, breaking the author's connection to society, turning it into pure esthetics.
This is mostly an excuse to look around Yinchuan on Baidu's street view. I read about mosque architecture Sinicization, then spent an hour or so looking at Yinchuan mosques. I have no conclusions. Some of the pictures are interesting. This is the Xinhua Mosque 新华清真寺...
From memory, it was built in the early '50s by a local entrepreneur, fell into disrepair, and was renovated into the more international style above sometime in the '90s. Two years ago, it was restored to what you see below. They switched handset sponsors, too.
This is a view of the Nanguan Mosque 南关清真寺. It was rebuilt mostly from scratch in 1982, the original structure having been heavily damaged in the 1960s. I've never come across a clear explanation of why Yihewani mosques tend toward more international architecture...