China's immovable smoking addiction

By all accounts, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave up an atrocious smoking habit some fifteen years ago. His country, though, is making zero - or rather negative - progress on his attempts to reduce China's awful addiction to smoking.

Over the last twenty years, smoking in the rest of the world has fallen by a respectable 26%; in China, over that period, it increased by 39%. China now accounts for nearly half of the global total of cigarettes smoked, some 2.4 trillion every year. While the percentage of smokers in China has fallen a bit, as fewer young people take up the habit, overall cigarette sales have continued an inexorable rise.

Part of the problem is that cigarettes are ridiculously cheap in China - at around $3 a pack on average, they are about a third of the price of smokes in the USA and Canada. China ratified WHO's tobacco control treaty in 2005, but has never really implemented its strictest provisions. Unlike the graphic health warnings on North American and European cigarettes, Chinese cigarettes have a simple, unobtrusive text warning, all but lost among the patriotic symbols that adorn the cigarette packs produced by the China National Tobacco Corp (CNTC), a vast state-owned monopoly and the world's largest producer of cigarettes. 

Indeed, the CNTC is the main problem. Generating annual profits of $244 billion last year, the CNTC alone contributes an eye-popping 7% of China's tax income each year, about the same as what it spends on defence. (Roughly half of the sales revenue of each cigarette flows into government coffers.) The company has also been called on to help out with specific strategic priorities, like financially shoring up one of China's biggest banks, funding national semi-conductor investment, etc. In short, it has made itself economically indispensable, and accumulated a lot of political influence in the process. 

It's also alarmingly corrupt: seven former top administrators of the CNTC have been arrested on corruption charges in the last seven years. It has successfully blocked a concerted national push for an indoor smoking ban, and even official studies have concluded that the state monopoly has actively interfered in national and local attempts to rein in smoking. It's influence is, obviously, even more marked in tobacco-growing regions like Kunming and Changde, where tobacco taxes can account for more than half of the city's budget. 

There are local "tobacco bureaus" that actively work to water down even modest anti-smoking initiatives. In one city, the local health commission proposed a system of smoke-free public areas, but the local tobacco bureau managed to ensure it did not apply to restaurants and bars, and even tried to limit the smoke-free designation in schools to elementary and middle schools only.

We think of President Xi as ruling China with a rod of iron, but even his attempts to reduce the country's smoking addiction have met with the immovable object of the powerful smoking lobby.