Beauty And The Beast: The Health Lobby And China's Big Tobacco

Source from:  Financial Times (uk) 08/24/2010

There is Big Tobacco and then, in China, there is very, very Big Tobacco. The China National Tobacco Corp is the world's largest cigarette maker. According to the Tobacco Atlas, published by the American Cancer Society and World Lung Foundation, CNTC controls 32 per cent of the global cigarette market - almost as much as the No 2 and 3 companies, Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco, combined. Surprisingly, the global public health lobby has come a long way in China. Judith Mackay, a Hong Kong-based doctor, remembers attending a 1987 meeting about tobacco and its health effects that had to be held in a drab second-tier city rather than Beijing, the capital, because the subject was deemed to be too sensitive. State-owned CNTC has long been a major taxpayer and employer. More encouragingly from that period, Mackay remembers an early conversation with a senior CNTC executive who told her: "We're just a government department. If everyone stops smoking I'll just go work for a different government department." Twenty-odd years later anti-tobacco campaigners have plenty of Chinese government allies, who are all too well aware of the long-term economic costs of smoking. But over that period the Chinese tobacco industry's ambitions - and sophistication - have also grown. Appearing alongside Dr Mackay at the launch of the Tobacco Atlas' first Chinese edition, Yang Gonghuan, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, rued the ability of China's tobacco monopoly to skirt health-warning guidelines and recruit a new generation of smokers, especially women. "Sometimes they are the government, sometimes they are a company," Yang said of her wily state-owned adversary. Global population growth alone should ensure the overall number of smokers does not decline until 2040 at the earliest. As Mackay ruefully puts it: "There will not be a single Chinese tobacco farmer out of business in my lifetime. I guarantee it." Enditem