On December 12, 2009, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in Shanghai voted to pass the “Measure to Prohibit Smoking in Public Spaces in Shanghai.” The measure, which went into effect on March 1st, 2010, expanded the scope of anti-smoking prohibitions in Shanghai’s public spaces and delineated punishments for repeat offenders.  

In 2009, the Chinese Anti-Smoking Association sent an open letter entitled: “Regarding the Comprehensive Prohibition of Public Spending on Tobacco Products” to the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), advising them to curtail such spending at once.

Links between deadly diseases and tobacco have been common knowledge for decades. However, data reveals that tobacco related illnesses have now become China’s no.1 killer, which may come as a surprise to some. As a nation with the world’s largest appetite for smoking, China faces a major health crisis. As millions of people face certain death in China over the next few decades, one man at Tsinghua University is trying his utmost to drill this fact into the mindset of lawmakers and to urge for immediate action.

China’s biggest killer has a name

According to a recent warning by Hu An'gang (胡鞍钢), who is the director of the Center for China Study, (CCS) at Tsinghua University, a professor at that university and a member of the expert committee on China’s national development plan, tobacco has become the greatest threat to the health of the Chinese people, and the tobacco industry now poses a greater health hazard than any other industry in the country. Professor Hu has ardently advised that China transform its current passively enforced tobacco prohibitions into actively enforced ones, and change its vague anti-smoking measures into laws that are both clear and rigidly enforced.

At the “Tobacco Taxes and Tobacco Control Research Conference,” jointly hosted by Tsinghua University’s School of Public Administration, Harvard University’s School of Public Health and the Ministry of Finance’s Institute of Fiscal Science, Hu Angang cited data purporting that in the year 2000, one million people in China died of tobacco related illnesses, exceeding the combined total of all deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis, traffic accidents and suicides, totaling 12% of all deaths nationally that year. If the rate of tobacco use in China does not change, the number of tobacco-related deaths will reach two million in 2025 and three million in 2050. One-third of smokers will die from tobacco-related causes, and the average life expectancy of smokers is 15 years shorter than that of non-smokers.

According to research, the overall cost to Chinese society due to smoking was 300 billion RMB, however tobacco companies were found to pay only 240 billion RMB in taxes. In 2007, it was documented that each year 100,000 people in China die from second-hand smoke alone. According to the “Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic” released by the World Health Organization in 2009, 17 countries now enforce comprehensive anti-smoking legislation, 12 countries prohibit smoking within seven to eight different types of public space, 48 countries prohibit in three to five types of public space, 115 prohibit it in two types of such spaces, and 65 countries have no national-level anti-smoking measures whatsoever. With zero anti-smoking laws enforced on a national scale, China belongs to this class of countries.

The measures needed for saving lives

According to Hu An'gang, the protection of public health and safety is one of the fundamental services required of a government, and he recommended that a clear goal toward controlling tobacco use should be adopted as part of the 12/5 plan. As part of this goal, he recommended the adoption of clear measures to indicate anti-smoking progress, and urged that the “No Smoking in Public Places” law be swiftly passed.

Hu An'gang further advised that the 12/5 comprehensive tobacco prohibition plan be implemented on multiple levels: from an economic and industrial angle, the tobacco industry should have its development restricted; toward improving the health of the people, indicators of increased progress toward tobacco restriction should be written into the national plan; toward strengthening public health and safety, prohibitions against smoking should also be written into the national plan. On this basis, it is hoped that China will transform from the world’s largest tobacco industry and consumer into the most actively anti-smoking nation.

 

Source: china.huanqiu.com

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Keywords: tobacco china anti-smoking measures China smoking ban china