In 1934, the United States of America…

World opium production has declined from 41,624 tons in 1907 to an estimated 16,653 tons by 1934.

The state monopolies of Southeast Asia, afraid that smuggling from their remote tribal highlands will undercut high official prices, do everything possible to discourage local opium production.

Because India supplies their monopolies with low-cost opium, governments have no reason to encourage local cultivation.

The U.S. Treasury attaché in Shanghai in 1934, just three years after the League of Nations had imposed restrictions on the manufacture of heroin in Europe, notes a sudden shift of the traffic in narcotics from Europe to the Orient

According to his report, after the annual harvest in the southwestern highlands at least eighteen thousand tons of Sichuan and ten thousand tons of Yunnan opium passes through the major river ports downriver to Shanghai.

He reports that China's Opium King is Green Gang leader Tu Yueh-shen, whose close relations with the Nationalist regime makes his cartel a major force in the Yangtze River opium trade that dominates China's drug traffic.

The US withdraws Marines and ground troops from China in 1934.

A British-Saudi diplomatic controversy begins in 1934 over the eastern boundary of Saudi Arabia with the sheikdom of Abu Dhabi.

Following the failure to work with the Congress, Jinnah, who had embraced separate electorates and the exclusive right of the League to represent Muslims, has been converted to the idea that Muslims need a separate state to protect their rights.

Jinnah has come to believe that Muslims and Hindus are distinct nations, with unbridgeable differences—a view later known as the Two Nation Theory.

Jinnah declares that a united India would lead to the marginalization of Muslims, and eventually civil war between Hindus and Muslims.

This change of view may have occurred through his correspondence with Iqbal, who was close to Jinnah.

In 1934, Jinnah returns to the leadership of the Muslim League after a period of residence in London, but finds it divided and without a sense of mission.

He sets about restoring a sense of purpose to Muslims, and emphasizes the Two Nations Theory.

Austrian artist, poet and playwright Oskar Kokoschka, best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, and deemed a degenerate by the Nazis, flees Austria in 1934 for Prague.

Here, his name is adopted by the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund, founded by other expatriate artists, although he declines to otherwise participate.

During the Leipzig Trial, several German aviators who had been trained in secret in the Soviet Union had been arrested.

They had been released when, after secret negotiations, the Bulgarian communists Dimitrov, Vasili Tanev and Blagoi Popov tried in Leipzig are allowed to leave for the Soviet Union.

Dmitrov has settled in Moscow, where he is awarded Soviet citizenship.

The massive popularity he enjoys make him an asset of Joseph Stalin's regime, and Dimitrov is appointed General Secretary of the Comintern from 1934.

A succession of decrees eliminates Jews from their positions in the professions; their purge from the German bureaucracy is by now virtually complete.

Hungarian composer and pianist Bela Bartók bases his dissonant, elegant melodies on Hungarian folk music.

He had begun composing the Miraculous Mandarin, a sordid modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder, in 1918, but it had not been performed until 1926 because of its sexual content.

He had written his third and fourth string quartets in 1927–28.

The String Quartet No.

5 (1934) is written in somewhat more traditional style.

The Bank of England under the governorship of Montague Norman from 1920, has undergone significant change.

In 1931 the United Kingdom had permanently abandoned the gold standard, at which point the bank's foreign exchange and gold reserves had been transferred to the British Treasury.

Norman is a close friend of the German Central Bank president Hjalmar Schacht and the godfather to one of Schacht's grandchildren.

Both are members of the Anglo-German Fellowship and the Bank for International Settlements.

Montgue allegedly arranges for Hitler’s support by London's financial sector to build his influence against the Bolsheviks in Germany in 1934.