China has declared a national ban on smoking in select public places effective on May 1st, 2011. The ban is part of China’s effort to fulfill the WHO-supported Framework Convention on Tobacco Control treaty they’d signed in November 2003, which included a pledge to ban smoking in all public places by January 9th, 2011.
Dr. Sarah England, head of the WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative in China, says that the new smoking ban will cover a much broader range of venues than in previous guidelines. The previous guidelines included movie theaters, concert halls, libraries, and malls; the new bans will now add hotels, restaurants, cafes, bars, salons, parks, museums, and other indoor public spaces to the list. Tobacco will no longer be sold in vending machines, and no-smoking signs will be displayed in public areas where smoking is banned. New regulations also ask owners and managers of those restricted venues to have staff members discourage smoking when they see it.
Although people like Dr. England acknowledge these steps as important in moving the China toward a national smoke-free policy, they’re also expressing serious concerns and doubts as to the regulations’ practical efficacy. The current definition of “public places” still does not include factories, government offices or other workplaces, and while there are threats of fines up to 30,000 yuan ($4,600) for “certain” violations, a comprehensive and specific penalty policy has yet to be defined. Past attempts to ban smoking have proven almost completely ineffective: thousands of smokers regularly lit up in front of “No Smoking” signs at Shanghai’s World Expo and Beijing’s 2008 Olympics, and in a city like Shanghai with roughly 20 million people — many of them smokers — only five people were penalized for smoking. And aside from those two special events, smokers in China have made it a regular habit to ignore no-smoking signs displayed in front no-smoking areas from hospitals to waiting rooms to elevators.
Part of the problem is how deeply engrained smoking is woven into the social and economic landscape of modern Chinese culture. One third of China’s population smokes; that’s a total of 350 million smokers, which makes up a third of all the world’s smokers – and the number of new smokers in China is only increasing with each new year. Home to the largest tobacco company in the world, China is also the world’s biggest cigarette manufacturer, selling one third of all the cigarette products in the world. The China National Tobacco Corporation alone produced up to 2.3 trillion cigarettes in 2009. This means that cigarettes serve as a significant source of revenue for the Chinese government, and indeed, in 2009, China’s tobacco industry generated roughly RMB 513 billion (US $77 billion) in taxes and revenue, which made up more than 7.5% of the central government’s total revenue that year.
Still, with a reported 1.2 million Chinese people dying from tobacco-related deaths every year – a number that is predicted to grow to 3.5 million by 2030 - China’s health officials argue that medical costs for health issues will soon surpass the revenues from tobacco by up to 20%. “Even if it’s not stringently enforced in the beginning, having a law is an important place to start,” said We Yiqun, deputy director of the Think Tank Research Center for Health Development.