SHANCHONG, China - China offers made your iPhone, your Nikes and, chances are, the lighting on your Christmas tree. Right now, it wants to grow your cannabis.

Two of China’s 34 regions are quietly leading a boom in cultivating cannabis to create cannabidiol, or CBD, the non-intoxicating substance that has been a customer health and beauty craze in the United States and beyond.

They are doing this despite the fact that cannabidiol is not authorized for consumption in China, a country with some of the strictest drug-enforcement policies in the world.

“It has huge potential,” said Tan Xin, the chairman of Hanma Purchase Group, which in 2017 became the first organization to receive authorization to extract cannabidiol here in southern China. The chemical is marketed abroad - in natural oils, sprays and balms as treatment for insomnia, acne and even diseases like diabetes and multiple sclerosis. (The science, so far, is not conclusive.)

The movement to legalize the mind-altering sort of cannabis has practically no potential for emerging in China. But the easing of the plant’s stigma in THE UNITED STATES has produced global demand for medicinal items - especially for cannabidiol - that companies in China are rushing to fill.

Hanma’s subsidiary in Shanchong, a village in a remote valley west of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, cultivates a lot more than 1,600 acres of hemp, the variety of cannabis that is also used in rope, paper and fabrics. From the crop, it extracts cannabidiol in essential oil and crystal form at a gleaming factory it opened two years back, in a limited zone next to a weapons manufacturer.

“It is extremely good for people’s health,” Tian Wei, general manager of the subsidiary, Hempsoul, said during an interview at the factory, which was punctuated by test gunfire from the manufacturer next door.

“China might have become alert to this factor a little bit late, but there will definitely be opportunities in the future,” Mr. Tian said.

China has, actually, cultivated cannabis for a large number of years - for textiles, for hemp seeds and oil and even, according to some, for traditional medication.

The Divine Farmer’s Common of Materia Medica, a text from the first or second century, attributed curative powers to cannabis, its seeds and its leaves for a variety of ailments.

“Prolonged consumption frees the spirit light and lightens the body,” it said, according to a translation cited in an article in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology.

The People’s Republic of China, following its founding in 1949, took a hard line on illegal medicines, and cultivating and using marijuana are strictly forbidden to this day, with traffickers facing the death penalty in acute cases.

After signing the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1985, China went even more. It banned all cultivation of hemp - which had always been grown in Yunnan, a mountainous province that borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam and is usually among China’s poorest. Farmers created hemp to make rope and textiles and China acquired banned it though it provides only trace amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the mind-altering substance found in marijuana.

At a news meeting in Beijing last month, Liu Yuejin, deputy director of the National Narcotics Control Commission, said the momentum toward legalization far away meant the Chinese authorities would ”more strictly fortify the guidance of commercial cannabis.”

The Hempsoul factory has a large number of closed-circuit cameras that stream videos directly to the provincial public security bureau.

China relented on industrial hemp only this year 2010, allowing Yunnan to resume production. Hemp then was utilized principally for textiles, like the uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army, but soon the merchandise expanded.

The growing industry has taken much-needed investment to Yunnan. The moderate, springlike climate is certainly exemplary for growing cannabis, and a farmer can gain the same as $300 an acre for this, a lot more than for flax or rapeseed, Mr. Tian of Hempsoul stated.

Hempsoul is among four businesses in Yunnan which have received licenses to process hemp for cannabidiol, putting more than 36,000 acres under cultivation. Right now others are joining the rush.

In February, the province granted a license to three subsidiaries of Conba Group, a pharmaceutical company based in Zhejiang Province. A company based in the city of Qingdao, Huaren Pharmaceutical, said recently it was applying for permission to develop hemp in greenhouses, which already line the landscape around Kunming.

Other regions have taken notice, too. In 2017, Heilongjiang, a province along China’s northeastern border with Russia, joined up with Yunnan in allowing cannabis cultivation. Jilin, the province nearby, said this year that it could also move to do so.

The flurry of announcements sent the companies’ stocks soaring on Chinese exchanges, prompting regulators to part of to restrict trading.

As the health benefits of cannabidiol remain uncertain, the United States Food and Drug Administration this past year approved the first utilization of it as a drug to treat two rare and severe types of epilepsy. Other potential uses are becoming studied.

China permits the sale of hemp seeds and hemp essential oil and the use of CBD in cosmetics, nonetheless it has not yet approved cannabidiol for make use of in food and medicines. Therefore, for now, the bulk of Hempsoul’s product - approximately two tons a year - is normally bound for markets overseas. Mr. Tian stated he thought it was just a matter of time before China, as well, approved the substance for ingestion.

Hanma’s ambitions are global. It offers acquired an extraction plant in Las Vegas, which is expected to begin production quickly, and it plans one in Canada. Mr. Tan, the chairman, said he hoped that China, with the world’s largest marketplace, would follow the lead of the United States, which he called “the best-educated” market for the benefits of cannabis.

“It’s a fresh application, but one which carries forward our custom,” he said, citing the old texts describing its medicinal reasons.

Yang Ming, a scientist with the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Science who is among China’s leading specialists on hemp, said the plant’s seeds were traditionally formed into a ball and used to treat constipation, but the psychotropic characteristics of cannabis were not broadly known by farmers or various other residents.

As China gradually opened up following a Cultural Revolution, nevertheless, foreign people to Yunnan in the past due 1980s and early 1990s discovered a good amount of cannabis growing wild. That, partly, turned the spot right into a destination for backpackers and adventurers searching for a certain sort of experience.

“They would go to the villagers’ cannabis fields, pick the buds and bring them back again to the hotel to dry out and smoke,” Dr. Yang said. “A few of them became deranged and ran around naked after smoking cigarettes it.”

That’s when the authorities intervened. Dr. Yang, originally from Yunnan, was a recent cbd kaufen graduate of the agricultural university in Beijing at that time. He was designated to review cannabis, and he has been doing so since. His avatar on cultural media can be a cannabis leaf.

The academy has been breeding its types of hemp - each which requires approval from the police - to ensure the plant contains significantly less than 0.3 percent of THC, the international standard for cannabis. There are nine varieties today, and Dr. Yang’s group continues to analyze more.

Among the varieties, Yunnan Hemp No. 7, enables the extraction of higher amounts of cannabidiol. While the compound’s use in commercial items continues to be in its infancy, Dr. Yang offers viewed the stigma of its association with marijuana begin to evaporate.

“Other countries,” he said, with pride of parenthood, “really like our CBD.”