Anti-Cigarette Campaigns in Modern China

A Review of “No Smoking” for the Nation: Anti-Cigarette Campaigns in Modern China, 1910-1935, by WENNAN LIU.

This brilliant, meticulously researched dissertation by Wennan Liu, graduate from Fudan University in Shanghai and recent PhD from Department of History at University of California, Berkeley, considers three major anti-cigarette campaigns in modern China: the first initiated by American missionary Edward Waite Thwing (1868-?) in Tianjin in 1910, the second led by retired Qing official Wu Tingfang 伍廷芳 (1842-1922) in Shanghai on the eve of the Revolution in 1911, and the third major anti-cigarette campaign a part of the New Life Movement launched by Chiang Kai-shek between 1934 and 1935.

All three campaigns were unsuccessful. There is no historical evidence that these campaigns brought about significant, long-lasting changes in the consumption patterns of cigarettes across China. Wennan Liu argues that they were “weak in organisation and implementation, because there was no reliable social infrastructure and resources to sustain the campaigns, and also because the civil society and the government lacked co-operation” (p.2). These failures, however, do not diminish their historical importance — unsuccessful campaigns require at least as much sociological explanation as those which did obtain the desired outcomes. As Wennan Liu points out (p.13), the rhetoric, practices and contexts of these exercises in mass persuasion — why they were launched, how they were organised, which groups of actors were involved, what knowledge and evidence were marshalled, and so forth — can illuminate a host of important historical issues.

These issues, which Liu patiently dissects in her dissertation, include: the transnational circulation of medico-scientific discourses concerning smoking and tobacco use; late-Qing social elites, foreign missionaries and their reform agenda; styles of reasoning in mass persuasion and public relations in China; the activities of big companies such as British-American Tobacco around the world; taxation, economic protectionism, the establishment and struggles of the Chinese cigarette industry; the various dynamics and tensions between different levels of the Republican government. The style of writing of this dissertation is exemplary in its clarity and straightforwardness. There is a careful balance of historical detail and argumentation, making this rich and absolutely compelling study accessible to Chinese historians and non-specialists.

Being one of the most important commodities around the world in the twentieth century, the history of tobacco and cigarette-smoking has been covered by a wide range of scholarship. More recent studies in the English language include: Allan Brandt’s The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Eric Burns’ The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); Matthew Hilton’s Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800-2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Cassandra Tate’s Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of “The Little White Slaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Ashes to Ashes: The History of Smoking and Health edited by Stephen Lock, Lois Reynolds and E.M. Tansey (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1998); Jordan Goodman’s Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge, 1994); and my personal favourite, Richard Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

For China specifically, there is Sherman Cochran’s classic Big Business in China: Sino-Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Carol Benedict’s brand new Golden-Silk Tobacco: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Timothy Brook and Zhou Xun’s contributions in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking edited by Sander Gilman and Zhou Xun (London: Reaktion Books, 2004); and shorter treatments in Elizabeth Perry’s Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labour (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, Chapter 7), Karl Gerth’s China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2004); and Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China by Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann and Zhou Xun (London: C. Hurst, 2004, see pp.201-206).

This is indeed a large body of scholarship, involving the history of science, medicine and public health, business history, cultural history and other subfields. What sets Wennan Liu’s dissertation apart, however, is that it combines all these existing works with original research from the Chiang Kai-shek Papers and swaths of Republican newspapers and journals, to shed light on the techniques of governance and disciplinary regimes in modern China. In this regard, Liu aligns herself with Ruth Rogaski’s magnificent Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) in addressing the state administration of life, the surveillance and control of the citizens’ everyday behaviour and its harmonisation with the goals of the nation (p.6) — “the conduct of conduct” (conduire des conduits) as Michel Foucault calls it.

In the Introduction (pp.1-26), after reviewing the current state of scholarship and the historiographies, Wennan Liu asks a very simple question. Tobacco use lies “at the vague boundary between recreational consumption, as in drinking tea and coffee, and drug-abuse, as in opium smoking” (p.10). There was not yet scientific consensus, in China and elsewhere, on the possible impairment of health caused by cigarette-smoking. The link between lung cancer and smoking was not formally established until the late 1930s and early 1940s in epidemiological studies in Germany, and was certainly not popularised until the 1950s by scientists and physicians in Britain and the United States (Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). There was not yet a public discourse on the effects of “passive smoking” either; for that we have to wait until the late 1970s. So “smoking cigarettes is very bad for you and others” is not in itself an adequate explanation of why these anti-cigarette campaigns took place between 1910 and 1935 in China. As Wennan Liu suspects, multiple social factors and political interests were at play which she carefully disentangled in each chapter.

Chapter 1 is entitled “Protestant Missionaries and the Origin of the Anti-Cigarette Campaigns in China, 1910” (pp.27-86). In 1895, American clergyman and temperance supporter Wilbur Fisk Crafts (1850-1922) founded the International Reform Bureau in Washington D.C. The organisation was a clearinghouse for Christian reform, coordinating political action and lobbying for legislation on a wide variety of social problems: gambling, drug-taking, divorce, Sabbath breaking, prostitution, obscenity in moving pictures, and other vices (pp.30-33). In 1908 Crafts hired Edward Waite Thwing (1868-?), who was then working in a Chinese church in Hawai’i, to be the “representative of IRB in East Asia and promote the anti-opium campaign in China, the Philippines, and other opium-plagued countries in Southeast Asia” (p.36). Thwing was a Minister of the North American Presbyterian Mission and a graduate of the School of Theology at Princeton. In 1887 he had already visited China as part of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, the missionary arm of the intercollegiate YMCA and YWCA in the United States. Staying in China for over a decade, Thwing taught in schools in Canton, worked for Christian journals, and gained a sympathetic understanding of Chinese language and culture. Wilbur Crafts had engaged in the campaign to ban the opium trade outside of America because he wanted to “‘create a more favourable environment for the child races that civilised nations are essaying to civilise and Christianise’” (Crafts quoted on p.32). In a perhaps less condescending way, Thwing himself believed that the “Christian mission was compatible with Chinese reform projects” (p.34) and that “patriotism is a good coating for gospel medicine” (p.33).

Once Thwing arrived in Tianjin in late 1909, however, he discovered that opium consumption appeared to be on the wane in China, and “fashionable and convenient cigarettes replaced opium in maintaining the social rituals due to smoking” (p.38). In fact, cigarettes became immensely popular. First introduced in Shanghai in the early 1880s, sales in China rocketed from 9.1 million cigarettes per year in 1890 to 357.9 million in 1900. By 1910 the annual consumption was 7.5 billion cigarettes, and 87 billion by 1928. British-American Tobacco dominated the Chinese market, manufacturing roughly two-thirds of the cigarettes. It had the greatest financial muscle, widest distribution networks and took advantage of the low trade tariffs brought on by unequal treatises signed by the Chinese and the colonial powers. Cigarettes were modern and Western; they were a status symbol. Cigarettes were aggressively marketed across China, and consumed by the upper class, the emerging bourgeoisie, and the working class.

Edward Thwing thus shifted his attention to cigarettes. He set up the China branch of the International Reform Bureau (in Chinese Wanguo gailiang hui 萬國改良會), and wrote a series of articles on the harmful effects of cigarette-smoking in the newspaper Dagong bao 大公報 between January and October 1910. He also delivered lectures in schools and colleges and distributed flyers in public spaces. Wennan Liu scrutinises Thwing’s writings in detail, arguing that his rhetoric was a “mixture of American anti-cigarette ideas, traditional Chinese elements such as filial piety [xiao 孝] and Confucian morality [de 德], and contemporary reformist discourses like ‘commercial war’, ‘narcophobia discourse’ and ‘constitutional citizens’” (pp.64-65). Thwing displayed a remarkable savviness — “religious flexibility and cultural eclecticism” (p.65) — as he freely mixed: anecdotes from American physicians; Confucian values; economic arguments concerning the silver drain and trade deficits; the loss of virtue and productivity; the imperative of self-cultivation and responsibility towards the nation. This kind of hybrid rhetoric “facilitated acceptance by the Chinese reformist elite and progressive students of the anti-cigarette proposal” (p.84). The pro-Christian reform elite who participated in Thwing’s endeavour shifted the focus from the “strategy of legislation used by social evangelists in the United States, to propaganda and persuasion” (p.85). Wennan Liu ends this diverse chapter with brief discussions of other contemporaneous campaigns launched by the Women’s Anti-Cigarette Association in Beijing — which focussed on the question of household hygiene — and the Chinese YMCA — which more or less grafted American Christian rhetoric without modification.

As Liu argues, the American missionaries such as Edward Thwing “prepared a full arsenal of anti-cigarette rhetoric for the campaign against cigarettes in China, but it was not until Chinese social elites understood comprehensively the anti-cigarette agenda and actively joined in the campaign that the anti-cigarette campaign could gain real momentum to develop substantially in China” (p.86). Chapter 2, “The Urban Social Elite and the Voluntary Anti-Cigarette Campaigns in Shanghai, 1911” (pp.87-143), analyses the way that the Chinese elite re-interpreted and re-organised the American agenda for their own ends. It focusses on the activities of Wu Tingfang伍廷芳 (1842-1922). Wu was a “typical transitional leader shaped by both Chinese and Western cultures” (p.91). He received his education in Canton and Hong Kong, studied law in London, and became Hong Kong’s first Chinese barrister in 1877. He later became Li Hongzhang’s 李鴻章 (1823-1901) advisor for foreign affairs and self-strengthening projects, had two stints as Chinese ambassador to the United States (1896-1902, 1907-1909), retired from officialdom in 1910 and settled in Shanghai. In 1911 he supported the revolution and negotiated with the Qing government on behalf of the revolutionaries. He eventually went to Canton to assist Sun Yat-sen’s government in 1917, and died there in 1922 (pp.91-92).

In September 1910 Wu established the “Society for Rational Diet and Hygiene” (Shenshi weisheng hui慎食衛生會). During his time in the United States, Wu had come in contact with various medical fads and “holistic” hygienic regimes, involving, for instance: vegetarianism; eating wholewheat bread and drinking soy milk; taking regular exercise and fresh air; following a strict daily routine; abstaining from alcohol and tobacco, and so forth (p.93). In 1914 he published New Methods Toward Longevity (Yanshou xinfa 延壽新法) (p.93), gradually establishing himself as an “expert in hygiene” (weisheng jia 衛生家) (p.95). His Society was a voluntary association, involving the non-official, Chinese social elite in Shanghai who mediated between foreign authorities and Chinese commoners. They were gentry merchants, newspaper editors and publishers, returned overseas students, lawyers, doctors and other professionals. The Society offered a platform for Wu and his compatriots to share Western, modern trends on the rational management of health, as well as promote progressive ideals and social reform. Fortnightly meetings were held at Wu’s home and they were open, in principle at least, to all (pp.97-100).

Wu’s anti-cigarette campaign was officially launched in April 1911. This involved publishing articles in newspapers such as Shen bao 申報 and Shi bao 時報, translating medical writings into Chinese, distributing flyers and pamphlets, putting up anti-cigarette posters. There were also public meetings (jihui 集會) held in Zhang’s Garden (Zhang Yuan 張園), the largest and most popular amusement park in Shanghai at the time, involving: speeches from the members of Wu’s society; theatre performers and opera actors sing popular songs incorporating anti-cigarette ideas (pp.110-114). As Wennan Liu argues, Wu and his associates helped themselves to the existing American discourse on the harmful effects of smoking — for example, the pamphlet “China and the Cigarette” written by Max J. Exner (1872-1943), YMCA’s Physical Director in China — but also incorporated their own perspectives. They cited (and sometimes exaggerated) maritime customs statistics and argued that the consumption in cigarettes in China caused the silver drain and trade deficit (pp.124-125). They suggested that cigarettes disrupted social order: “the convenience and simplicity of cigarette-smoking levelled the visible social differences among smokers” (p.131). One used to be able to distinguish lower-class and upper-class smokers by their pipes, but cigarette smokers looked basically the same when they were smoking — “cigarette-smoking threatened the clear distinction between social ranks, and thus undermined ‘timian’ [體面], as a symbolic value based on social rank and proper behaviour” (p.131). Catering to the working class audience, Wu’s Society created short stories, jokes, ballads, doggerels and cartoons, approaching the problem of smoking from a more pragmatic angle. For instance, smoking was bad because cigarette butts could accidentally set off fires (p.134). A humorous anecdote told by these anti-cigarette activists involved a man smoking in a public toilet to get rid of the bad smell. He dropped his cigarette, and when he tried to pick it up, his wallet fell into the toilet and all his paper bills were lost (or at least, covered in shit) (p.137).

Wu Tingfang’s anti-cigarette activities, as Wennan Liu shows, did seem to have some impact in and beyond Shanghai. Many of the members of Wu’s society were also members of other civic groups, professional and native place associations, and they circulated anti-cigarette rhetoric across the country (pp.114-116). Anti-cigarette organisations sprang up in Hangzhou, Suzhou and other places in Jiangsu and Zhejiang (p.117), and anecdotal evidence suggested that in Shanghai the “campaign indeed changed the trend of cigarette-smoking in a short period of time” (p.116). Liu argues that “the 1911 Revolution had no direct relationship to the anti-cigarette campaign, but the two events were connected in underlying ways” (p.138). They both involved “the enlightened social elite who self-consciously shouldered the responsibility for social progress and local self-government” as the driving force, as well as being embedded in the burgeoning civil society, “the new urban environment of late Qing Shanghai” (p.139). Wu’s campaign was “part of the whole trend of local activism and social mobilisation led by the local social elite” and it vividly illustrated the “great variety, breadth, and vitality of the local initiative of social reform and local self-government, which eventually led to the swift and effective support of the Shanghai elites in response to the breakout of the revolution in Wuhan” (p.140).

Chapters 3 and 4 were respectively entitled “Cigarettes in the Central Design of the New Life Movement, 1934-1935” (pp.144-189) and “Anti-Cigarette Campaign in Zhejiang: Local Implementation and Variations, 1934-1935” (pp.190-248). Wennan Liu closely examines the large-scale anti-cigarette campaigns in the New Life Movement (Xin shenghuo yundong 新生活運動) in 1934. Simply put, the New Life Movement was “a programme of social reform launched by Chiang Kai-shek in Nanchang with the stated aim of transforming apathetic and ‘uncivilised’ Chinese people into moral, patriotic, and modern citizens” (p.144). Cigarette-smoking was identified as one of the degenerate habits to be eliminated, along with a host of other behaviours, such as spitting, jumping queues, eating or urinating in the streets, living in filthy surroundings, not washing regularly, not buttoning up one’s clothing properly, and so forth. Chiang Kai-shek believed that the essential Confucian moral values, namely propriety (li 禮), righteousness (yi 義), integrity (lian 廉), and sense of shame (chi 恥) should be anchored in everyday life and internalised by the individual. And “for the first time, cigarette-smoking [became] discouraged by the government. ‘Don’t smoke cigarettes (zhiyan wuxi 紙煙勿吸)’ was listed with ‘Opium-smoking is prohibited (yapian bingjue 鴉片摒絕)’ in the New Life Movement’s guidebook for commoners” (p.144).

Surveying the official documents of the New Life Movement, Wennan Liu discovers three arguments against cigarette-smoking: “The first dimension was cigarette-smoking per se, which was perceived as addictive, harmful to both health and morality, just like opium and drinking alcohol. The second was cigarettes as a commodity, an unnecessary consumption in social interaction and daily life and thus a waste of money […] [T]he third reason was new and not so obvious: smoking cigarettes while walking on the streets was an undesirable social practice that contaminated public space and disturbed civic order” (p.160). But the anti-cigarette instructions were in fact “vague and contradictory” (p.165). The rather strong emphasis placed on not smoking in the streets “might have confused people by implying that smoking was acceptable as long as it was not done in public” (p.166). This ambiguity in Chiang Kai-shek’s direction led to problems in implementation at a nationwide level. The leader of the civilian government, Wang Jingwei 汪精衛 (1883-1944), was explicitly opposed to using coercive force, and was unwilling, or at least did not see it practical, to devote police resources to monitor people’s behaviour to that close a level. Wang Jingwei was resistant to Chiang’s intention to extend the ruling power of the state to individuals’ daily lives, and “emphasised public consensus and legislation as a means to establish a new civil order, while Chiang [Kai-shek] insisted on an elitist approach in which social elites served as models for the rest of society” (p.171).

The debate concerning the New Life Movement at the highest level also led to confusion in enforcing anti-cigarette policies on the local level. Most provincial and municipal governments in big cities such as Nanchang, Nanjing, Shanghai, Changsha and Hangzhou focussed on eliminating cigarette-smoking in the streets (p.173). In some places, however, local associations involved in promoting the New Life Movement entered bath halls, restaurants, and even homes to force people to give up smoking. Some local committees ordered tobacconists to close up their business, confiscated and burnt all of their stock, or boycotted foreign brands of cigarettes — all of which were deemed illegal by the Nationalist regime (p.174). The Zhejiang provincial government pushed for a nationwide ban of cigarettes and in October 1934, announced a new regulation that “the people of Zhejiang should not smoke cigarettes, peddlers should not sell cigarettes, and merchants should not import cigarettes into the province” (p.179). The Ministries of Finance, Industry, and Internal Affairs had to intervene and vetoed the adoption of the proposal on the account that taxation on tobacco was a major source of state revenue, that the production of cigarettes had already become a crucial industry involving farmers and workers across China, and that the government ought to concentrate solely on anti-opium campaigns (pp.178-187).

Why were the Zhejiang officials so zealous with cigarette-smoking? Chapter 4 explores this in greater detail (pp.190-248). Wennan Liu’s research shows that Zhejiang became the nation centre for the production of tobacco leaves for pipes in the mid-Qing. The immense popularity of cigarettes produced by British-American Tobacco, from around the 1910s onwards, gradually squeezed out traditional local products. The global financial crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s decimated demand for Zhejiang’s tea and silkworm cocoons in the international market. This, combined with the severe drought in the province in summer 1934, contributed to a “major recession in the local economy of Zhejiang” (p.201) and the so-called “bankruptcy of the countryside” (nongcun pochan 農村破產) (p.202). When the New Life Movement was launched, Zhejiang “government officials and [Kuomintang] cadres deliberately chose cigarette-smoking as the focus […] out of various directives […] issued by the central government” (p.197). The Zhejiang anti-cigarette rhetoric took on a strongly nationalist and economic favour, while Chiang Kai-shek’s vision of an orderly and disciplined society was de-emphasised.

The targeting of foreign brand cigarettes created diplomatic problems. When a local boycott of foreign cigarettes in Wenzhou in 1934, British-American Tobacco requested the intervention of the highest level of government. Likewise, in 1935, another boycott in Haimen prompted the British Ambassador Sir Alexander Cadogan (1884-1968) to complain directly to Chiang Kai-shek, who warned the Zhejiang provincial leader that such boycotts were illegal (pp.219-220). Wennan Liu provides micro-studies on Wenzhou and Haimen, concluding that the “local officials in Zhejiang found cigarette-smoking a convenient scapegoat to explain the deteriorating local economy” (p.245). Liu further argues:

On the one hand, the local anti-cigarette initiatives challenged the simple “top-down” model of a party-state under the control of the totalitarian leaders. [They] show that the central government had no effective way to control local affairs […] The provincial and county governments thus had enough flexibility to interpret orders from the central government according to their own agendas, and reported only what favoured local interests. On the other hand, the central government still had nominal authority and functioned as the source of legitimacy in local conflicts in the Nationalist regime. The New Life Movement thus provided a rhetorical trope that local governments needed to endorse in order to legitimize and facilitate their local operations. (p.247)

Overall, Chapters 3 and 4 enrich our understanding of the inner workings of the New Life Movement. As Wennan Liu points out, “the older generation [of scholarship] has tended to emphasise the political ramifications of the New Life Movement.” For Arif Dirlik, the movement represented a “‘modern counterrevolution’ to strengthen totalitarianism, rather than ‘anti-revolutionary conservatism’” (Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution” in Journal of Asian Studies, 34 (1975), p.975 quoted in Liu p.145). For Lloyd Eastman, the New Life Movement, “disguised by Confucian tenets, was actually a Fascist movement to elevate Chiang as the absolute national leader, mimicking Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy” (pp.144-145, see Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927-1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). William Kirby regarded the New Life Movement as an unsuccessful imitation of the Fascist movement in Germany (Kirby, Germany and Republican China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), and Frederic Wakeman argues that “Chiang Kai-shek mixed ‘fascist military discipline” with ‘the classic Neo-Confucian view of community hierarchy and lineage solidarity’ in this movement, and that the Nationalists were unable or unwilling ‘to create a true mass movement’, which was a major difference from European Fascism and might also have contributed to the weakness of the New Life Movement” (Wakeman, “A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism” in The China Quarterly, 150 (1997), pp.425-428 quoted in Liu p.146).

Wennan Liu, on the other hand, aligns herself with more recent scholarship by Robert Culp, Karl Gerth and Federica Ferlanti in considering the New Life Movement not just as an ideological exercise in consolidating Chiang’s own power, but also as a means of establishing particular modes of governance and management of the population by investigating the implementation of policies at more local levels. (See: Culp, “Rethinking Governmentality: Training, Cultivation, and Cultural Citizenship in Nationalist China” in Journal of Asian Studies, 65 (2006), pp.529-548; Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2004; Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province, 1934-1938” in Modern Asian Studies, 44 (2010), pp961-1000.)

Wennan Liu concludes (pp.249-266) that the anti-cigarette campaigns “served the function of a manageable trope”. Social and political agendas with more significance “needed a trope small and concrete enough to implement and articulate” (p.251). On the other hand, “the flexibility and versatility of the anti-cigarette agenda displayed in these campaigns illustrate the importance of people’s daily life in the apparatus of informal social control” (p.252). Wennan Liu’s research can clearly move into many new and exciting directions. A comparison of anti-cigarette campaigns around the world, for example, the Nazi anti-smoking movement in the late 1930s and early 1940s, or campaigns in Soviet Russia, Japan, the wider Chinese East Asia, as well as United States and Britain will be tremendously illuminating. Much of this material — including posters and pamphlets — is available through the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. There is also scope for investigations on public health policies and anti-smoking campaigns during the communist and post-socialist periods (as Wennan Liu points out on pp.260-266). As this review was written, the CEO of Baidu Robin Li and Microsoft founder Bill Gates launched an anti-smoking initiative in Beijing; their “Alliance for Healthy China” are calling on the Chinese to pay greater attention to the harmful effects of second-hand smoke. Anti-smoking campaigns continue to be a hugely topical subject. Naturally, much research remains to be done on the history of mass persuasion and mobilisation in China and elsewhere. Regardless of what approach Wennan Liu takes in her future publications, her fruitful work demands the attention of not just China specialists but historians in many other fields.

Leon Antonio Rocha
D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Needham Research Institute, and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
LAR29@cam.ac.uk

Primary Sources

The British-American Tobacco Company Archives, Library of Business History, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
Chiang Kai-shek Papers, Academia Historica, Taiwan
Chiang Kai-shek Diary, Hoover Archives, Stanford University
Collection of Materials on the History of the Tobacco Industry in China (Zhongguo yan ye shi hui bian 中國煙業史匯典), edited by Yang Guo’an 楊國安. Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe 光明日報出版社, 2002.
Various newspapers from the Republican period, including: Dagong bao 大公報, Dongnan ribao 東南日報, Jiangxi guomin ribao 江西國民日報, Shen bao 申報, Shi bao 時報, Zhejiang shangbao 浙江商報, Zhongwai ribao 中外日報, The North China Herald.