New Antismoking Signs Are Almost Visible Through the Haze (2)

Peter Wu

13 March 2012

At wedding parties, the bride often passes out Double Happiness brand cigarettes to guests, a tradition meant to enhance her fertility. Mourners at Chinese funerals are generously plied with smokes, and a handful burned at the grave site is meant to satisfy the craving of the deceased.

When the police pull over a driver for a traffic infraction, a pack of cigarettes, not registration papers, is often the first thing pulled from the glove compartment. And during tough business negotiations, a round of smoking is an invaluable lubricant for a logjam.

“Cigarettes have an extra value in China that helps improve many social interactions,” said Tang Weichang, a researcher at the China Tobacco Museum in Shanghai , a pro-smoking institution financed by China ’s tobacco industry.

Smoking here is largely a male pastime — more than 60 percent of all men smoke compared with 3 percent of women — and declining a cigarette is sometimes taken as an insult. Guo Fei, a nonsmoker whose family-owned restaurant is largely smoke free, said he would often accept a proffered cigarette and later throw it away. “To reject a cigarette would make them lose face,” he said.

The nation’s lukewarm efforts to curb smoking are complicated by the government’s control over the tobacco industry, which provides about $31 billion in taxes each year, about 8 percent of the government’s revenue.

China produces a third of the world’s tobacco, with more than 400 domestic brands offered at Beijing ’s ubiquitous tobacco shops. During a debate over antismoking measures last year, Zhang Baozhen, a vice director of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, warned that “without cigarettes the country’s stability will be affected.”

Earlier this year, Beijing officials announced a ban on smoking in bars, restaurants, karaoke lounges and massage parlors, but that proposal, opposed by business interests, quickly died. The new law only encourages eating and drinking establishments to set aside nonsmoking areas; few restaurants have obliged.

It does not help that cigarettes are extremely cheap. Some of the more popular brands, like Big Harvest, Little Panda and Yellow Pagoda, cost less than 50 cents a pack. With less than 5 percent of the market, foreign brands like Marlboro and Camel have made little headway.

At Block 8, a fashionable Beijing nightclub, cigarettes dangled from the lips of half the patrons. (The other half seemed to be taking a break from smoking, their cigarette packs set out before them.) Emma Cheung, 32, a magazine fashion editor, said smoking made her thin and fueled her creativity. She said that she would support a ban on smoking indoors, but that she would not quit until co-workers did. “Yes, I’m addicted, but so is everyone else at the office,” she said. “If we didn’t smoke, I don’t know how we would get anything done.”

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