<strong>China''s Anti-Smoking Campaign Faces ''up-hill battle'' Against Powerful Industry</strong>

Source from:  South China Morning Post News 09/16/2013

Thirty years after China decided to establish its tobacco monopoly administration, anti-smoking campaigners are fighting an increasingly "uphill battle" against a powerful industry, according to Li Cheng, author of a study on the industry.

"The turning point has not arrived yet in China," he said. "They refuse to see the costs" of having a growing number of smokers in China.

A total of 300 million people, one in two men and 2.4 per cent of women, in China smoke, according to data by the World Health Organisation. While the overall percentage of China's population who are smokers has fallen slightly from 26.8 per cent to 25.3 per cent over the last decade, increased prosperity has led to more intense smoking habits.

The average number of cigarettes smoked by a Chinese citizen per day increased from 3.7 in 2003 to 5.3 last year, according to data by Euromonitor International.

Li, director of research and a senior fellow at the John L Thornton China Centre at the Washington DC-based Brookings Institution think tank, released a bleak update of his study on the industry and the anti-smoking campaign earlier this week.

"The industry really cannot be reformed," he said, explaining that it made too great a contribution to central and local government coffers to be easily discarded. "Somewhere between seven to 10 per cent of state revenue comes from tobacco," he estimated. In Yunnan, tobacco contributes almost half of the provincial government's revenue, Li estimates.

One way to change the industry was to push manufacturers to diversify away from tobacco, said Li. Hongta Group, the maker of China's most popular cigarette brand Hongtashan, made at least 40 per cent of its income from industries other than cigarettes, said Li.

Local governments could also look at other sources of revenue such as tourism or tea, he suggested.

The crux was that the tobacco monopoly administrators fought against diversification, he said. "You see the tension between the companies and the tobacco industry bureaus."

Since the State Council promulgated the monopolisation of the tobacco industry in September 1983, the global market share of China National Tobacco Corporation has ballooned to 41.3 per cent, dwarfing competitors. Two out of three cigarettes sold in Asia are CNTC products. The company rakes in more than 320 million yuan (HK$393 million) in profits every day on cigarette sales, according to figures released for the first time last month.

While Li says awareness of smoking-related diseases is increasing among public health workers, journalists and lawyers; their advocacy is no match for the industry.

In a survey earlier this year by the Ministry of Health across four provinces, only 1.4 per cent of restaurants and hotels had obligatory anti-smoking signs.

The ministry surveyed hundreds of hotels and restaurants in Shandong, Gansu, Xinjiang and Heilongjiang provinces over the past year and found that only 1.4 per cent of them had anti-smoking signs, despite a national ban on smoking in indoor public places since 2011. Enditem