In China’s smoke-wreathered public spaces, smoking restrictions are lax at best.
By Chen Junyu
When China signed the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) five years ago, the country formally agreed to outlaw smoking in all indoor workplaces, indoor public spaces and public transportation hubs by January 9, 2011.
However, judging by the dense clouds of smoke that linger throughout many of the country’s restaurants, train stations and parlors, such restrictions have been far from successful.
Of course, implementing tobacco restrictions in a country home to 350 million smokers was never going to be easy. But with an estimated 556 million passive adult smokers, some argue the need has never been greater.
Growth and Profits
An analysis report on the domestic tobacco industry by the China Economic Information Network revealed that China produced over 1,233 billion cigarettes in the first half of 2010, a 3.63 percent increase on the previous year.
“It shows that tobacco restrictions are going nowhere,” Yang Gonghuan told NewsChina. Yang, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention has been engaged in the anti-smoking battle for five years, yet despite her best efforts, she remains firmly on the losing side.
The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration has crafted an ambitious five-year strategy, with plans to develop 10 leading-brand tobacco enterprises with a total annual output of 29 million boxes (50 cartons per box) of cigarettes.
The rapid growth of the tobacco industry has resulted in increased taxes, which has become a significant contributor to State coffers. In the first half of 2010, the industry made a total profit of 325.3 billion yuan (US48bn), an increase of 17.32 percent year-on-year, turning over 223.6 billion yuan (US33bn) in tax, a near 35 percent rise from the previous year.
Wei Jun (alias), an employee at a successful county-level tobacco company in Hunan Province, revealed to NewsChina that his company last year made a profit of 180 million yuan (US26m), and paid 110 million yuan (US16m) in tax to the local government, accounting for 17.6 percent of the annual revenue of the county.
“The State [tobacco] administration raises the local tobacco sales target every year. We have to look sharp about meeting the quota allotted to us. So, who cares about smoking control?” he said.
Confusing Areas of Responsibility
In signing the FCTC, the Chinese government made a promise to place eye-catching warning signs, similar to the Surgeon General’s Warning in the US, across all tobacco packaging. However, nearly all packages of Chinese tobacco products currently display pleasing pictures, with the warning sign rendered as inconspicuous as possible.
At the third FCTC parties conference held in 2008, Chinese tobacco packaging was widely questioned, but the Chinese delegation argued that the pleasing landscapes featured on the packages served as an icon of Chinese history and culture, and it would be “an affront and disrespect to the public” if graphic images of infected mouths and lungs were used to show health risks. Such a contentious stance won the Chinese delegation the “Dirty Ashtray” prize at the conference for “preferring nice tobacco packaging to public health.”
Yang has devoted herself to the study of tobacco-related diseases. Her research has found that nearly 1.2 million Chinese die of tobacco-related diseases each year, making up 12 percent of the total annual deaths, exceeding the sum total of deaths caused by AIDS, tuberculosis, traffic accidents and suicide.
