smoking

Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong was a lifelong smoker, often photographed with a cigarette; and Deng Xiaoping, architect of China’s post-Mao economic reforms, also was a chainsmoker, but reportedly gave up smoking some years before his death. Today, none of the top leadership smokes in public, and bans on smoking in meeting rooms extend to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Yet smoking still looms large on the social and economic landscape.

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco. The state tobacco monopoly generates approximately 10 per cent of state revenues. Two out of three Chinese adult men smoke, and nationwide there are more than 300 million male smokers and just 20 million female ones, but rates among women as well as youth are rising.

The human toll of smoking is correspondingly huge: approximately 700,000 Chinese die each year of smoking-related illness, and that figure is expected to reach 3 million annually by 2025.

Chinese smokers spend an average of 15 per cent of their income on cigarettes. Foreign cigarettes are priced high due to import taxes and constitute only a small part of Chinese consumption, although smuggling and counterfeiting are widespread. China does not limit imports, but Chinese brands still take 70 per cent of market share. To date, the Chinese government has strictly limited foreign investment in the domestic industry, although China’s admission to the World Trade Organization makes additional concessions to foreign tobacco interests likely in the future, while also giving Chinese tobacco leaves and cigarettes more outlets in the global marketplace. Since the mid 1990s, the national legislature and many localities have placed broad curbs on tobacco advertising as well as restrictions on smoking in public places, but implementation is highly variable.

JUDY POLUMBAUM