Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story this week is an in-depth examination of China’s state-owned tobacco monopoly by Andrew Martin. China National produces 2.5 trillion cigarettes a year, and provides 7% of government revenue. In 2012, its own revenue outweighed Apple’s. The government has taken increasingly serious measures to reduce smoking, which kills an estimated one million Chinese a year, but the conflict of interest is evident: “For all practical purposes,” Martin writes, “China National and its regulator are the same entity.”

In terms of [global] market share, China National is bigger than its next five competitors combined; its growing sales have accounted for a net increase in global production, even as volume at its competitors has fallen. While Marlboro remains the most popular cigarette in the world, China National boasts 7 of the top 10 brands, including Red Pagoda Mountain and Double Happiness. In all, the company made 43 out of every 100 cigarettes in the world last year, according to Euromonitor International. Despite its size, China National is little known outside of China: Almost all its cigarettes are sold in the country, where it has no real competition.

A conglomerate on the order of the old Gulf + Western, China National runs more than 160 cigarette brands, manufactured in about 100 factories across the country, and uses its earnings to invest in banks, luxury hotels, a hydroelectric plant, a golf course, and even drugmakers. Most of its money goes to its owner, the Chinese government; the tobacco industry accounts for about 7 percent of the state’s revenue each year, and China National controls as much as 98 percent of the market. All told, the industry in China employs more than 500,000 Chinese. They are among roughly 20 million people who get some income from tobacco, including members of 1.3 million farming households and workers at 5 million retailers, according to government figures. The extent to which the government is interlocked with the fortunes of China National might best be described by the company’s presence in schools. Slogans over the entrances to sponsored elementary schools read, “Genius comes from hard work. Tobacco helps you become talented.” [Source]

Such sponsorship should now be a thing of the past. In January, the Ministry of Health issued a ban on smoking and tobacco advertising in schools, as well as the sale of tobacco products by school canteens.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cigarettes, public health, tobacco, tobacco industry
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Amid China’s ongoing crackdown on terrorism in Xinjiang, launched last May in effort to combat increasing violence in the region and elsewhere in China, authorities have rolled out policies limiting Islamic dress and custom; while officials blame homegrown religious extremism and influence from the islamic militants abroad for inciting violence, critics of central policies limiting religious freedom warn that they will only “increase inter-ethnic tension and enhance the prospects for societal turmoil.” Radio Free Asia’s Shohret Hoshur reports that shop and restaurant owners in a village in Hotan, Xinjiang have now been ordered to sell and prominently display alcohol and cigarettes (intoxicants are explicitly discouraged by Islamic doctrine) or else face closure:

Last week, authorities in Laskuy township, in Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian) prefecture’s Hotan county, issued an announcement in the town seat of Aktash village that “all restaurants and supermarkets in our village should place five different brands of alcohol and cigarettes in their shops before [May 1, 2015].”

[…] Signed by the Aktash village Party Committee of Laskuy township, the notice stated that the order had been handed down “from the top echelons of [China’s ruling Communist Party], in order to provide greater convenience to the public.”

Perhat Rozi, chairman of the Political Law Committee of Laskuy township’s party leadership, refused to comment on the announcement, but Aktash village party committee secretary Adil Sulayman told RFA’s Uyghur Service that the new policy was part of an effort to undermine Islam in the area.

“We have a campaign to weaken religion here and this is part of that campaign,” he said.

“Since 2012, people have stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes through their businesses. Even those who benefitted financially from the practice have given it up because they fear public scorn. That is why [the order was issued].”

[…] Sulayman said authorities in Xinjiang—where China has launched a series of “strike hard” campaigns in the name of fighting separatism and terrorism—viewed non-smoking Muslim Uyghurs as adhering to “a form of religious extremism.” [Source]

A recent report on how religious restriction in Elishku (Shache in Chinese), Xinjiang may have stoked a deadly confrontation last year noted that one of many looped public announcements declared “quitting drinking and smoking, or refusing to drink with friends” as a telltale mark of a religious extremist. Headscarves and beards have also been targeted by officials as signs of religious extremism, and Uyghurs have received jail sentences for refusing to shave or remove veils. In coverage of the new village directive for The Washington Post, Simon Denyer relays commentary from Chinese ethnic policy expert James Leibold on the counterproductivity of these types of policies:

James Leibold, an expert on China’s ethnic policies at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, said Chinese officials were “often flailing around in the dark” when tackling extremism. An acute lack of understanding leads them to focus on visible, but imprecise, perceptions of radicalism such as long beards, veils and sobriety, he said.

The result is often “crude forms of ethno-cultural profiling,” Leibold said.

“These sorts of mechanistic and reactive policies only serve to inflame ethno-national tension without addressing the root causes of religious extremism, while further alienating the mainstream Uighur community, making them feel increasingly unwelcome within a hostile, Han-dominated society,” he wrote in an e-mail. […] [Source]

U.S.-government funded RFA is often the first organization to report news from Xinjiang, where authorities exercise strict control over the media narrative by limiting journalists access and issuing censorship directives on regional developments. Early this year, The Washington Post’s Denyer reported that relatives of RFA’s Shohret Hoshur, the D.C.-based journalist who filed the above report, have for years faced harassment. Last weekend, Shorhet Hoshur reported that six Uyghurs were killed and two others captured after fleeing while allegedly planning a terrorist attack in Hotan last month:

During the incident, which occurred on April 19, in Suk village, Lengger township, Keriye county (in Chinese, Yutian) of Hotan (Hetian) prefecture, a state security teamed surrounded a house where Uyghurs they suspected of being terrorists were hiding, sources from the area said. Six people died when an explosion went off inside the house, while two others escaped.

[…] When RFA’s Uyghur Service contacted the police department in Keriye County this week, an officer confirmed the incident by saying, “Are you asking about the incident that occurred in Suk village of Lengger township?…Yes, I know about that, but you have to call a higher authority for details about it.”

Police had blocked all the roads around the house and confiscated the cell phones of witnesses to the incident before the explosion occurred, sources said.

[…] The authorities said the men had bombs on their bodies, but didn’t specify whether they had committed suicide or if police had exploded the devices, he said.

When the villagers asked police how the suspects died, authorities told them it was none of their business because it was a police matter, the former village chief said. […] [Source]

Also see a recent report from Reuters on Ju Anqi’s “Poet on a Business Trip,” and how the award-winning film, shot a decade ago but only released last year due to a production dispute, now behaves as a “powerful record of a more peaceful time” in the tightly-controlled region.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alcohol, cigarettes, ethnic minority, Hotan, religious freedom, terrorism, tobacco, Uyghurs, Xinjiang, Xinjiang violence
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

From the Globe and Mail:

Here’s some exciting medical news from the Chinese government: Smoking is great for your health.

Cigarettes, according to China’s tobacco authorities, are an excellent way to prevent ulcers.

They also reduce the risk of Parkinson’s disease, relieve schizophrenia, boost your brain cells, speed up your thinking, improve your reactions and increase your working efficiency…

Welcome to the bizarre parallel universe of China’s state-owned tobacco monopoly, the world’s most successful cigarette-marketing agency.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cigarettes, smoking, tobacco
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

A number of recent articles have focused on China’s increasingly formidable appetite for imported luxury goods. The Economist gives an overview:

Sales of luxury goods are exploding, despite a hefty tax on importing them. A new report by CLSA, a broker, forecasts that overall consumption in China (including boring everyday items) will rise by 11% annually over the next five years. That is very fast. But sales of luxury goods will grow more than twice as quickly, reckons CLSA: by 25% a year. No other category comes close. Even spending on education, a Chinese obsession, is projected to grow by “only” 16% annually.

China is already the largest market for Louis Vuitton, a maker of surprisingly expensive handbags, accounting for 15% of its global sales. Within three years, reckons Aaron Fischer, the report’s author, China’s domestic market for bling will be bigger than Japan’s. By 2020 it will account for 19% of global demand for luxuries (see chart). And that is only half the story ….

If you include the baubles Chinese people buy outside China, the nation’s share of the global luxury market will triple, to 44%, by 2020, predicts CLSA. The wealth of China’s upper-middle class has reached an inflection point, reckons Mr Fischer. They have everything they need. Now they want a load of stuff they don’t need, too.

The article goes on to describe various similarities and differences between China’s luxury consumers and their counterparts elsewhere. Age is a striking difference: the average Chinese millionaire is 39, versus an average of 54 abroad, while Forbes reports that the average Ferrari buyer in China is 32, as opposed to 47 in North America.

Ferrari’s “prancing horses” are not the only ones being imported. From the Wall Street Journal:

According to the China Horse Industry Association, a government organization established to develop China’s equine sector, the country imported more than 1,300 horses in 2010, compared to about 300 five years ago. The total value of horses imported into China ran into the tens of millions of dollars last year, the association said. A handful of polo clubs have also cropped up around the country in recent years, including the Tang club in Beijing, the Nine Dragons Hill Polo Club an hour from Shanghai, and the Goldin Metropolitan club ….

[While] China’s fledgling equestrian sector has a long way to go to catch up with other countries, there’s plenty of confidence from some of those who are leading the charge. Li Ning, a former information technology industry executive, owns two riding facilities in Beijing, with annual membership fees of more than 44,000 yuan at both locations. Since he opened them in 2007, membership has been growing between 30% to 50% annually, he said. In 2010, 300 new riders joined the clubs, which collectively have 2,200 members, Mr. Li said.

Mr. Li declined to disclose whether his clubs are making money yet. Though he has never actually mounted a horse himself, Mr. Li has been to Spain and Hungary on horse-buying sprees and says he has spent 1.8 million yuan on non-Chinese breeds.

“When I started [five years ago,] some people really did not get it,” Mr. Li said while watching a dozen or so riders practice in the arena on a farm he owns in Shunyi, an affluent district in Beijing. “Now they call me a visionary or something.”

Naturally, one requires refreshment after a hard game of snow polo. Wine imports, too, are soaring. From Forbes:

Discerning drinkers around the globe, who either are looking for better taste or better value than they were used to. And, in several countries, more people being introduced to fine wine. The big example of all these trends is China, whose import thirst lights up the charts. Overall consumption rose by 25% 2002-2009. Meantime, China’s domestic production is flat (and, with some exceptions, undistinguished) owing to various limitations including water.

If you’re making wine for profit, you’d better know where you’re going to sell it. So far, the Chinese have opted for French at the high end and Australian and Chilean at more popular prices, with Argentina coming around the bend. The U.S. export there has doubled lately, although from a small base. For all those lovely California producers, it’s going to take more than a reasonable US$-Rmb exchange rate to change the fundamental picture.

And with the wine, perhaps, a Cuban cigar. From The Guardian:

Demand from China’s expanding economic elite has sparked optimism in an industry that risked being extinguished by recession and anti-smoking laws around the world ….

Marketing manager for Casa de Tobaco, which arranges cigar-related events, Wang added: “In China, the people who smoke cigars are the upper class, the elite, or people who have come back from overseas.

“After people [who smoke] get rich, they want something nicer, something more upscale, something different. A cigar becomes their best choice. And in China, the number of people who become very rich is getting bigger and bigger.”

China is left with a trade deficit in high-end alcohol, however, as its own luxury beverages struggle abroad. From the Financial Times:

The China Daily reports that a 375-mililiter bottle of 53-degree Flying Moutai (the brand’s best-selling product) sold at a Chinese supermarket in the US for $82.99 (550 yuan). In China, the price for the same amount reached 1,050 yuan, according to the newspaper.

The price difference is caused by an imbalance in market demand. Sales numbers of Moutai in foreign markets are not very impressive.

The FT’s Jamil Anderlini offers some indication of why foreigners aren’t so keen on the stuff:

Moutai, the fiery official liquor for state banquets since the Communist revolution, has been variously described by foreign dignitaries as “liquid razor blades” and “smelling like a barnyard and tasting like turpentine”.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: imports, luxury goods, tobacco, wine
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

South China Morning Post’s Patrick Boehler reports a “bleak” new update to a study on China’s powerful and growing tobacco industry by Cheng Li at the Brookings Institution:

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 industry really cannot be reformed,” [Li] 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. [Source]

The paper’s executive summary at Brookings describes tobacco use in China as “the country’s single most serious public health problem,” but the field is crowded.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: public health, smoking, tobacco, tobacco industry, Yunnan
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Over the weekend, experts at the annual North-South Lung Cancer Summit in Beijing warned that China could have more than 1 million lung cancer patients by 2025. Despite mounting concern about health hazards from air pollution, however, smoking was identified as the primary culprit. From the South China Morning Post:

Experts at the forum blamed the prevalent smoking in China as the main contributor of the mounting lung cancer rate. The official Xinhua news agency has reported earlier that 87 per cent of lung cancer deaths were caused by smoking or second-hand smoke.

China is by far the world’s largest tobacco consumer and producer. It has a smoking population of 350 million, more than the entire population of the United States. Some 1.7 trillion cigarettes are made in China every year, according to the Beijing Times.

Experts warned smoking-related deaths could hit two million by 2025 if no concrete efforts were made to step up control of smoking, and that number could jump to three million by 2050.

“Consuming tobacco is the main cause of lung cancer. But 40 per cent of all lung cancer is preventable,” Zhao was quoted as saying. [Source]

China already has more lung cancer patients than any other country, though as of 2008 its overall cancer rate was slightly below the world average, and well below those of most developed nations. Still, the experts argued that China should be doing more to curb tobacco use, according to The Global Times:

“This ‘possibility’ will turn into fact in the future,” Song Ruilin, president of China Pharmaceutical Industry Research and Development Association and forum participant, told the Global Times.

China still needs strict efforts to strengthen tobacco control. In some areas of the country, tobacco is regarded as a key commercial industry and some local governments regard smoking as a personal issue rather than a public issue, Song said.

Currently, China produces 1.7 trillion cigarettes each year, 2.5 more times than the US, according to the Beijing Times. [Source]

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: air pollution, Beijing, lung cancer, smoking, tobacco
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Looking to a recent report by the Research Center for Health Development [zh], the Global Times reports that tobacco production in China has nearly doubled since Beijing signed on to the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control a decade ago:

Cigarette production in China has almost doubled since the nation signed a landmark international agreement to curb tobacco, meaning that the nation is only paying lip service to tobacco control legislation, according to a new report.

The report, Tobacco Control in China from A Civil Society Perspective 2013, compiled and released by the Beijing-based Thinktank Research Center for Health Development, found that about 2.175 trillion cigarettes were produced in the 12 months to October.

In 2002, before China signed the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2003, cigarette production was 1.75 trillion, but it rose to 2.58 trillion annually by 2012.

[…] In a 2012 WHO assessment report, China was only awarded two of a possible 16 points for its smoking ban in public places, namely schools and hospitals, while its curb on tobacco advertising won no credits. [Source]

In 2009, China raised the tax on tobacco products, and in 2011 a nationwide ban on smoking in public places went into effect, though enforcement remains weak. China’s tobacco industry makes large contributions to central and provincial government revenues, and has been known to fund primary schools. The massive industry presents a serious hurdle to curbing smoking in a country that produces more that 40% of the world’s cigarettes, and is home to over 300 million (25% of the world’s) smokers.

Another recent report from the Global Times notes that changes in the behavior of government officials could be instrumental in changing the nation’s attitude on smoking:

The anti-smoking advocacy group ThinkTank has urged Chinese government officials to take the lead to curb smoking in the world’s largest cigarette market.

Officials should not consume tobacco products purchased with government funds or accept any tobacco gifts, and they should refrain from smoking in public, according to ThinkTank’s annual report released on Tuesday.

[…] In a country where luxury cigarettes have become a common currency for bribery, ThinkTank’s latest anti-smoking appeals have proven very pertinent.

At least two officials in east China’s Jiangsu Province have been fired and then punished for corruption in past years after pictures of them smoking luxury cigarettes appeared on the internet.

[…]”More needs to be done to prevent government officials from accepting luxury cigarettes as bribes,” said Xu Guihua, deputy director of the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control. [Source]

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cigarettes, government officials, lung cancer, public health, smoking, smoking control, tobacco, tobacco industry, world health organization
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

As one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of tobacco, China has seen a twofold increase in cigarette production over the last decade. With a looming public health crisis predicted with more than one million lung cancer patients by 2025, Chinese authorities are beginning to look for ways to curb smoking. From China Real Time:

Within the next year, China’s legislators will accelerate efforts to enact a national regulation banning smoking in public places in China, said Yang Jie, deputy director of Tobacco Control Office for the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, at a news briefing on tobacco-related health problems in China. Mr. Yang said China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, is currently planning the regulation and it is expected to be enacted next year.

[…] The statement follows the release of a book by China’s Central Party School, an elite Chinese Communist Party think tank, in recent months urging officials to shake up China’s tobacco monopoly, which is responsible for tobacco production and sales and has the freedom to donate to schools and sell cigarette cartons without pictures of black lungs for warnings. Its authors call for higher tobacco taxes, halting government financing to tobacco companies and encouraging them to find alternative business models.

[…] But changing the current system won’t be easy. Beijing has said long said it is determined to tackle the country’s smoking problem, but so far has had little success. Cigarettes remain cheap, with many available for less than $1 a pack. The World Health Organization recommended last year that China triple its tobacco tax to 70% to discourage young would-be smokers from buying. [Source]

Read more about smoking and the tobacco industry in China, via CDT.

© cindyliuwenxin for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cigarettes, government officials, lung cancer, public health, smoking, smoking control, tobacco, tobacco industry
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Xinhua reports that China’s State Council and the Party’s Central Committee have banned government officials from smoking in public alongside efforts from authorities to enact a national public smoking ban.

According to a circular from the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council, officials are not allowed to smoke in schools, hospitals, sports venues, public transport vehicles, or any other venues where smoking is banned.

Government functionaries are prohibited from using public funds to buy cigarettes, nor are they permitted to smoke or offer cigarettes when performing official duties, the circular notes.

[…] The sale of tobacco products and advertisements will no longer be allowed in Party and government offices. Prominent notices of smoking bans must be displayed in meeting rooms, reception offices, passageways, cafeterias and rest rooms. [Source]

The ban on smoking will end “a decades-old tradition” that had been embraced by bureaucrats and top leaders, including Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. From The Atlantic:

In a tell-all biography, Mao’s personal physician wrote that the leader responded with a joke when he criticized Mao’s chain smoking, saying “Smoking is also a deep-breathing exercise, don’t you think?”

Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, another chain smoker, loved expensive Panda cigarettes, and often proffered them to visiting dignitaries. Here he speaks with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, while preparing to light up:

[…] China’s current generation of top leaders, though, are a marked contrast to their predecessors ones: none of the current members of the Central Politburo Standing Committee, the all-powerful seven-man group that runs the country, are smokers. President Xi Jinping’s wife is a vocal anti-smoking campaigner. [Source]

China’s tobacco industry is heavily state-owned, with sales accounting for a substantial portion of annual government tax revenue. Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

Each year China’s tobacco industry produces more than 2.3 trillion cigarettes—40 percent of the world’s total—and is “one of the largest sources of tax revenue for the Chinese government,” as Brooking Senior Fellow Cheng Li wrote last year in a report (pdf) entitled The Political Mapping of China’s Tobacco Industry and Anti-Smoking Campaign. Li estimated that over the past decade, China’s tobacco industry “has consistently contributed 7-10 percent of total annual central government revenues.” By his calculations, that amounted to $95.2 billion in 2011.

Moreover, the tobacco industry has friends in high places—among them, Li Keming, who is both deputy director of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration and Premier Li Keqiang’s younger brother. State-run tobacco farms and cigarette factories are also significant employers in many Chinese cities. [Source]

Nonetheless, the ban appears to represent a significant effort on the part of the state to curb smoking in a country known to be the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco. From The Wall Street Journal:

New rules signal that the drive to stamp out tobacco is “an endorsement from the top,” said Judith Mackay, a Hong Kong-based senior adviser to the World Lung Foundation, a health organization. “It’s a sea change,” she said.

[…] Health experts have been urging China to curb smoking as deaths mount and medical costs rise. China is the world’s largest consumer and producer of tobacco, home to more than 300 million smokers and 43% of the world’s cigarette production, according to the American Cancer Society and the World Lung Foundation. Tobacco is also a leading cause of death in China, causing 1.2 million deaths annually and expected to cause 3.5 million deaths annually by 2030, the groups said. [Source]

Meanwhile, 29 Shanghai hospitals have been blacklisted by authorities for failing to control smoking on their premises. From Shanghai Daily:

Those blacklisted include three well-known maternity hospitals, one leading pediatric hospital and some big hospitals. The list was put up on the official microblog of local health authority and the city government yesterday.

The authorities faulted the hospitals for lack of no-smoking signs, especially on the stairs, elevators, corridors and restrooms, and a lack of staff to deal with people smoking on the premises.

Patients’ families were found smoking outside surgery rooms and some hospitals had staff smoking inside their offices. Designated smoking areas were also an area of concern.

Some hospitals had indoor smoking areas while others allowed people to smoke outdoors but  were too close to people. [Source]

© cindyliuwenxin for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cigarettes, government officials, hospitals, lung cancer, public health, smoking, smoking control, tobacco, tobacco industry
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

China’s tobacco industry produces 40% of the world’s cigarettes, and the country is home to 25% of the world’s smokers. As China’s tobacco production has nearly doubled over the past decade, the government has in recent years been making efforts to curb smoking: in 2009, China raised the tax on tobacco products, and in 2011 a nationwide ban on smoking in public places went into effect—though enforcement remains weak. Since public health experts warned that China could have more than a million lung cancer patients by 2025 last November, the government has signaled a renewed commitment to fighting tobacco use, and officials are now banned from smoking in public, putting to rest a “decades-old tradition.” In another move to discourage smoking, the Ministry of Education has enacted a new ban. Reuters reports:

China has banned smoking in schools, state media reported on Wednesday, the latest step in a government drive to kick the country’s pervasive tobacco habit.

[…] The latest ban, imposed by the Ministry of Education, covers kindergartens, elementary and middle schools, and vocational schools. Universities must set up smoking areas and forbid lighting up in academic buildings.

Anti-tobacco efforts have been hampered by the country’s powerful tobacco monopoly, health campaigners say, which pays hundreds of billions of yuan in taxes every year.

[…] Schools can no longer seek sponsorship from cigarette brands or post tobacco advertisements on campus, the ministry said in a notice.

School principals must enforce the ban by installing smoke alarms or surveillance cameras to spot offenders. School canteens must also stop selling tobacco.

Schools that do not crack down properly will be punished, the ministry said. [Source]

China’s massive tobacco industry makes large tax contributions to central and local governments. Tobacco companies have also been known to sponsor schools.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ministry of Education, schools, smoking, smoking control, tobacco, tobacco industry
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

At Bloomberg Christina Larson reports on the dramatic rise of cancer in China:

A recent report from the World Health Organization shows an alarming rise in the number of cancer cases diagnosed worldwide, with developing countries particularly hard-hit. “As a consequence of growing and aging populations,” WHO noted in a statement, “developing countries are disproportionately affected.” According to the World Cancer Report 2014, each year 14 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed globally and 8.2 million people die annually from cancer. China, which is home to roughly a fifth of the world’s population, accounts for 27 percent of global cancer deaths.

Lung cancer is the most common form of cancer worldwide. In 2012, more than a third of deaths globally from lung cancer happened in China, which produces 40 percent of the world’s cigarettes and where increasing public concern about toxic urban smog have created a market for home air-pollution filters in large cities such as Beijing. Late last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a campaign to crack down on officials smoking in public, hoping to set a healthier public example. Also last fall, China’s State Council released an ambitious Action Plan for Air Pollution Prevention and Control; whether it will have a significant impact remains to be seen. [Source]

Tom Phillips adds in The Telegraph that “millions of lives will be unnecessarily lost to soaring rates of respiratory disease and lung cancer unless the Chinese government takes determined action against air pollution”:

Bai Chunxue, the head of respiratory medicine at Shanghai’s Zhongshan Hospital, said that while smoking was still the main culprit for skyrocketing rates of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the dangerously high level of air pollution was taking an increasingly devastating toll on Chinese lungs.

“If air pollution is not reduced we will have more and more respiratory disease, including lung cancer, COPD, asthma and even pneumonia and also heart disease, coronary heart disease,” warned Dr Bai, who is also chairman of the Chinese Alliance against Lung Cancer and the director and founder of the Shanghai Respiratory Research Institute.

He singled out the level of fine dust particles with a diameter of 2.5 micrometres or less – known as PM2.5 – as especially dangerous because of their impact on both respiratory and cardiovascular systems. [Source]

See more on air pollution, and on recent efforts to stem smoking, the failure of previous attempts, and the substantial obstacles to success, via CDT.

© nornell for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: air pollution, cancer, lung cancer, PM2.5, public health, smoking, tobacco
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story this week is an in-depth examination of China’s state-owned tobacco monopoly by Andrew Martin. China National produces 2.5 trillion cigarettes a year, and provides 7% of government revenue. In 2012, its own revenue outweighed Apple’s. The government has taken increasingly serious measures to reduce smoking, which kills an estimated one million Chinese a year, but the conflict of interest is evident: “For all practical purposes,” Martin writes, “China National and its regulator are the same entity.”

In terms of [global] market share, China National is bigger than its next five competitors combined; its growing sales have accounted for a net increase in global production, even as volume at its competitors has fallen. While Marlboro remains the most popular cigarette in the world, China National boasts 7 of the top 10 brands, including Red Pagoda Mountain and Double Happiness. In all, the company made 43 out of every 100 cigarettes in the world last year, according to Euromonitor International. Despite its size, China National is little known outside of China: Almost all its cigarettes are sold in the country, where it has no real competition.

A conglomerate on the order of the old Gulf + Western, China National runs more than 160 cigarette brands, manufactured in about 100 factories across the country, and uses its earnings to invest in banks, luxury hotels, a hydroelectric plant, a golf course, and even drugmakers. Most of its money goes to its owner, the Chinese government; the tobacco industry accounts for about 7 percent of the state’s revenue each year, and China National controls as much as 98 percent of the market. All told, the industry in China employs more than 500,000 Chinese. They are among roughly 20 million people who get some income from tobacco, including members of 1.3 million farming households and workers at 5 million retailers, according to government figures. The extent to which the government is interlocked with the fortunes of China National might best be described by the company’s presence in schools. Slogans over the entrances to sponsored elementary schools read, “Genius comes from hard work. Tobacco helps you become talented.” [Source]

Such sponsorship should now be a thing of the past. In January, the Ministry of Health issued a ban on smoking and tobacco advertising in schools, as well as the sale of tobacco products by school canteens.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cigarettes, public health, tobacco, tobacco industry
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Amid China’s ongoing crackdown on terrorism in Xinjiang, launched last May in effort to combat increasing violence in the region and elsewhere in China, authorities have rolled out policies limiting Islamic dress and custom; while officials blame homegrown religious extremism and influence from the islamic militants abroad for inciting violence, critics of central policies limiting religious freedom warn that they will only “increase inter-ethnic tension and enhance the prospects for societal turmoil.” Radio Free Asia’s Shohret Hoshur reports that shop and restaurant owners in a village in Hotan, Xinjiang have now been ordered to sell and prominently display alcohol and cigarettes (intoxicants are explicitly discouraged by Islamic doctrine) or else face closure:

Last week, authorities in Laskuy township, in Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian) prefecture’s Hotan county, issued an announcement in the town seat of Aktash village that “all restaurants and supermarkets in our village should place five different brands of alcohol and cigarettes in their shops before [May 1, 2015].”

[…] Signed by the Aktash village Party Committee of Laskuy township, the notice stated that the order had been handed down “from the top echelons of [China’s ruling Communist Party], in order to provide greater convenience to the public.”

Perhat Rozi, chairman of the Political Law Committee of Laskuy township’s party leadership, refused to comment on the announcement, but Aktash village party committee secretary Adil Sulayman told RFA’s Uyghur Service that the new policy was part of an effort to undermine Islam in the area.

“We have a campaign to weaken religion here and this is part of that campaign,” he said.

“Since 2012, people have stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes through their businesses. Even those who benefitted financially from the practice have given it up because they fear public scorn. That is why [the order was issued].”

[…] Sulayman said authorities in Xinjiang—where China has launched a series of “strike hard” campaigns in the name of fighting separatism and terrorism—viewed non-smoking Muslim Uyghurs as adhering to “a form of religious extremism.” [Source]

A recent report on how religious restriction in Elishku (Shache in Chinese), Xinjiang may have stoked a deadly confrontation last year noted that one of many looped public announcements declared “quitting drinking and smoking, or refusing to drink with friends” as a telltale mark of a religious extremist. Headscarves and beards have also been targeted by officials as signs of religious extremism, and Uyghurs have received jail sentences for refusing to shave or remove veils. In coverage of the new village directive for The Washington Post, Simon Denyer relays commentary from Chinese ethnic policy expert James Leibold on the counterproductivity of these types of policies:

James Leibold, an expert on China’s ethnic policies at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, said Chinese officials were “often flailing around in the dark” when tackling extremism. An acute lack of understanding leads them to focus on visible, but imprecise, perceptions of radicalism such as long beards, veils and sobriety, he said.

The result is often “crude forms of ethno-cultural profiling,” Leibold said.

“These sorts of mechanistic and reactive policies only serve to inflame ethno-national tension without addressing the root causes of religious extremism, while further alienating the mainstream Uighur community, making them feel increasingly unwelcome within a hostile, Han-dominated society,” he wrote in an e-mail. […] [Source]

U.S.-government funded RFA is often the first organization to report news from Xinjiang, where authorities exercise strict control over the media narrative by limiting journalists access and issuing censorship directives on regional developments. Early this year, The Washington Post’s Denyer reported that relatives of RFA’s Shohret Hoshur, the D.C.-based journalist who filed the above report, have for years faced harassment. Last weekend, Shorhet Hoshur reported that six Uyghurs were killed and two others captured after fleeing while allegedly planning a terrorist attack in Hotan last month:

During the incident, which occurred on April 19, in Suk village, Lengger township, Keriye county (in Chinese, Yutian) of Hotan (Hetian) prefecture, a state security teamed surrounded a house where Uyghurs they suspected of being terrorists were hiding, sources from the area said. Six people died when an explosion went off inside the house, while two others escaped.

[…] When RFA’s Uyghur Service contacted the police department in Keriye County this week, an officer confirmed the incident by saying, “Are you asking about the incident that occurred in Suk village of Lengger township?…Yes, I know about that, but you have to call a higher authority for details about it.”

Police had blocked all the roads around the house and confiscated the cell phones of witnesses to the incident before the explosion occurred, sources said.

[…] The authorities said the men had bombs on their bodies, but didn’t specify whether they had committed suicide or if police had exploded the devices, he said.

When the villagers asked police how the suspects died, authorities told them it was none of their business because it was a police matter, the former village chief said. […] [Source]

Also see a recent report from Reuters on Ju Anqi’s “Poet on a Business Trip,” and how the award-winning film, shot a decade ago but only released last year due to a production dispute, now behaves as a “powerful record of a more peaceful time” in the tightly-controlled region.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alcohol, cigarettes, ethnic minority, Hotan, religious freedom, terrorism, tobacco, Uyghurs, Xinjiang, Xinjiang violence
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall