Not long after China's most famous smoker, Deng Xiaoping, was cremated, the government has banned all smoking on public transport.
Beginning May 1, China's 350 million smokers will be prevented from lighting up in railway carriages, aircraft, ships, buses, subways, taxis, ticket halls or waiting rooms. Offenders will be fined up to $6.China's smoking legions consume an estimated 1.6 trillion cigarettes a year - 30 percent of the world's total. The ban is another step in China's efforts to curb a national pandemic that claims millions of lives a year from cancer and heart disease.
According to a 1995 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, cancer rates in China are increasing at 4.5 percent a year, and lung cancer alone could kill 900,000 people by 2025.
Deng, who lived to 92 and gave up smoking in his final years, died of Parkinson's disease and respiratory failure. China's old-guard revolutionaries like Deng and Mao Tse-tung were addicted to cigarettes, but there are few smokers among the younger generation of leaders.
Premier Li Peng, who suffers from heart problems, is at the forefront of the campaign to cut consumption - a ban on smoking in Beijing's government offices was imposed a year ago - but his cash-strapped government relies heavily on cigarette excise duty. Cigarettes are the treasury's largest source of revenue, generating about $9.6 billion a year in taxes and sales.
Some Chinese people spend up to 60 percent of personal income and 17 percent of household income on cigarettes, according to the study reported in JAMA. Some 67 percent of adult males are smokers, compared to 2 percent of women.
China has been slow to recognize the harmful effects of smoking, but the health costs are now being calculated and insurance companies are charging lower premiums for nonsmokers.
The number of smokers in China is increasing by about 2 percent a year, while rates in the developed world are falling by about 1 percent. International tobacco companies are targeting China as a huge potential market.
Dist. by Scripps Howard News Service.