CHINA

For thousands of years, cannabis has been an integral part of Chinese industry and medicine - cannabis use has been recorded for longer than in any other culture. Currently, it is illegal in the form of a narcotic drug, although the hemp industry is legal and growing rapidly. Chinese companies have also shown surprising speed in obtaining patents for cannabis in recent years.

History of cannabis in China

Cannabis has been cultivated in China for at least 6,000 years. The early Neolithic farming communities planted it, along with millet, sorghum, beans and rice, as one of their main crops, and used seeds and fibres to make food products, paper, oil, textiles, ropes and medicines.

Over the centuries, various respected Chinese pharmacopoeias have included long treatises on the many benefits of cannabis and hemp seeds, leaves and flowers. According to legend, Emperor Shen Nung (2700 B.C.E.) discovered the medicinal uses of cannabis and many other plants; around 500 B.C., this ancient popular tradition was compiled and used as the basis for Pen T'sao Ching, one of China's first largely influential pharmacopoeias.

Since the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the government has been actively investigating the cultivation and use of cannabis in China. For decades, hundreds of studies have been conducted on the properties of different seed and fibre varieties and their potential in industry and food production. However, since the 1990s, the Government has also been actively involved in the eradication of cannabis plantations in many areas of rural China.

Cultural use of cannabis

Travelers report that fewer and fewer plants are being seen growing and cannabis has become more difficult to obtain since the government began cracking down in the 1990s. Despite this, cannabis continues to be cultivated and used in the traditional way in much of rural China. The seeds are roasted or eaten raw as an aperitif, especially in Yunnan Province, a traditional centre of cultivation; the fibres are further processed into textiles, rope and paper.

Cannabis is known as ma or da ma ("great" hemp) in China, while female flowers are known as ma fen (aromatic hemp branch) and seeds as ma zi or huo ma ren.

The medical use of cannabis is not established in traditional Chinese medicine, although there are several herbal preparations available that use cleansed seeds-especially in remedies for stomach pain and indigestion. Traditional medicine uses cannabis and herbal remedies in general to a much greater extent; in fact, cannabis is considered one of the fifty key herbs in Chinese herbal medicine.

Cannabis cultivation in China

Cannabis grows wild in many parts of China, and although plants found in northern latitudes are generally low in cannabinoids and unpleasant to smoke, those found in southern regions may be of greater interest to recreational users. In these areas, the crop is mainly intended for personal consumption, although farmers are often persuaded to give up part of their harvest if it is handled properly.

The town of Dali in the south-western province of Yunnan is known as a centre for cannabis cultivation. Yunnan province as a whole is known for the large amount of wild cannabis that can be found growing along the roads, next to houses and in gardens. Although there are other areas where cannabis cultivation is widespread, the city of Dali is particularly famous throughout China for having a culture of cannabis use.

Xinjiang is an area where cannabis cultivation is also very common. Interestingly, it has been reported that most of the cannabis produced in Xinjiang is processed into hashish, a tradition maintained by the ethnic group of the Uighurs (a Turkish group originating in Central and East Asia) who make up about 60 per cent of the population of the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang. A region with a Muslim majority, where traditional hashish production has apparently evolved while techniques have been exported from other parts of the Islamic world.

Because demand for cannabis is low, supply networks operate proportionally on a small scale: growers often grow for personal consumption or for the supply of a small circle of local customers, and distributors in urban areas also work on a small scale and either sell to small circles of expatriates or local smokers, or meet the needs of tourists visiting the more disorganized streets. Street distributors" often have low quality products available; to find superior qualities, it is often better to ask friends or acquaintances for good contact.

There are many foreign distributors in urban areas, often citizens of Africa, Arab countries or Southeast Asia. Africans, in particular, are linked both to street trafficking and to the export of cannabis and hashish in China; in recent years, there have been several "clean-up" operations, along with one or two relevant arrests.

Cannabis-related arrests and convictions

In China, it is possible to receive the death penalty for possession of only five kilograms or more of cannabis. Chinese authorities are believed to execute hundreds of people every year-more than the rest of the world combined. Thousands of long-term custodial sentences - from five years to life imprisonment - are handed down.

Although relatively low in comparison with other drugs, there is a demand for cannabis; coupled with the high price it can reach in large cities, all of this encourages some to try trafficking cannabis in the country. In 2010, a Nigerian man was arrested at Beijing airport with about 87 kg of cannabis in his possession-the largest raid that year.

In 2009, another Nigerian was sentenced to death, allegedly for supplying only 6 kg of cannabis to local distributors in Guangdong. This man, Osonwa Okey Noberts, is believed to be currently in pretrial detention awaiting execution. In 2009, police seized and destroyed six tons of heroin, opium and hemp in the westernmost reaches of Xinjiang province, which had been smuggled across the border into Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Recreational Cannabis in China

Recreational cultivation of cannabis in China is not widespread, due to the lack of availability of high-quality strains and the severity of the laws. However, the most potent varieties of the substance are grown in Yunnan and Xinjiang, and are usually grown in the form of rolled cigarettes.

Hashish is smuggled out of Afghanistan and Pakistan into large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and imported grass from Africa, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam is also found relatively frequently. High quality cannabis can also be obtained from Burmese communities (Myanmar) living near the border in the southern province of Yunnan.

Police begin cracking down on cannabis

Cannabis remains the most common "street drug" in China, although authorities are increasingly demonising its use. According to the facts observed, cannabis use has only become a problem in the last two or three decades, whereas before it was generally ignored by law enforcement officers who either did not know what it was or were happy to smoke it themselves.

Chinese local authorities are now actively collecting information on cannabis smokers and on small-scale networks that have begun to be formed. In line with the uptake of online shopping in China, cannabis is increasingly being sold through online forums and trading platforms that allow anonymous transactions to take place; however, these sites are also monitored and it is questionable whether they are safer.

The current trade in cannabis
China has become more and more important as an access point for world traffic in the last thirty years or so, following the opening of the borders to foreign trade and tourism in the 1980s. However, drugs such as opium, MDMA, methamphetamine and cocaine are much more popular among the urban youth demographic group that constitutes the bulk of demand; cannabis is considered an outdated, rural-associated activity that has little social appeal.

Buying cannabis - do's and don'ts

Tourists from rural areas often have the opportunity to find cannabis for sale, and asking around in boarding houses and cafés often pays off over time, as long as the searches are conducted discreetly. The quality is generally low and prices usually reflect this (10 RMB /1.22 € for a handful of up to thirty grams, depending on the circumstances). Foreign travelers should be careful not to overcharge them; however, in places where there are few options for buyers, high prices cannot be avoided.

In urban areas, where the police are most present, caution is advised, as the flagrant use of cannabis can attract attention, and is punishable by imprisonment and even deportation. However, public use of cannabis has only become unacceptable in recent years, as authorities struggle to control urban areas that are rapidly changing as foreign trade and tourism increase; there are still many urban areas in China where smoking is openly smoked without negative attention.

It seems that it is possible to buy cannabis or hashish relatively easily in large cities like Shanghai, either through expatriate smokers or through "those who offer more than just a massage" on the street and other tourist attractions. The prices in urban areas are usually much higher (10-100 RMB /2,22-15,20 $ per gram), but the quality is usually proportionally higher, so it is more common to find imported hashish and high quality marijuana.

The Chinese hemp industry

The centre of the legal hemp industry is undoubtedly China. By far the world's largest producer of hemp, it exports raw hemp and processed hemp products??to everyone, especially to Europe and North America. Most of the hemp grown is produced in Shandong and Yunnan.

A campaign has now been launched to increase the amount of land devoted to cotton cultivation, which will reduce dependence on cotton and bring much-needed labour to the underemployed rural labour force. Communist Party officials have stated that the measure could lift up to three million rural producers out of poverty, and double the annual income from about RMB2,000 ($292.72) to more than 4,000 yuan ($525.44).

In 2009, a new hemp fibre processing plant was built in Dai Autonomous Prefecture in South Yunnan. The factory, owned by China Hemp Industrial Holding Investment Co Ltd., has an annual capacity of 2,000 tons. The Chinese government has stated that by 2020, more cultivation bases will be built in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Gansu and Anhui provinces.

What awaits cannabis in China?

It is common knowledge that Chinese companies hold 309 of the 606 global patents currently registered with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Add this to the ongoing campaign to modernize and expand the hemp industry, and it appears that China's longstanding relationship with cannabis is far from over.

It is important to document both history and recent developments in all countries where the war on drugs is taking place-for this reason, organizations such as the Hash Marijuana & Hemp Museum in Amsterdam are critical as they seek to gather as much data as possible from a variety of reliable sources in order to provide the most accurate, up-to-date and objective information on the current global situation.