Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Jason McLure and Jude Chan.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, brought to you by The China Project. Subscribe to the China Project to get the early release ad-free version of this podcast every week and, of course, you also get your daily newsletter — the Daily Dispatch — simply the best way there is really to stay informed about China. And on top of all that, you’ve got access to all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It is a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
If you like this podcast, you will love our NEXTChina event on November 2nd in New York with a special VIP evening featuring a live Sinica Podcast on November 1st. It’s going to be a night and a day of the most interesting and informative discussions on China that you will hear this year — and great networking opportunities as well. Please come introduce yourself to me, to the whole China Project team. Jeremy will be there. Barry van Wyk will be in town, which is a rare treat, as will our Beijing-based editor, Anthony Tao. It’s going to be amazing.
One of the things that really struck me when I moved back to the United States from China after 20 years living in Beijing was how few people in the United States smoke cigarettes anymore. It is a huge change. Going back to China, as I did often before the pandemic anyway, it was just as astonishing just how incredibly prevalent smoking remains in China. According to the World Bank, between 2000 and 2020, the rate of tobacco use among adults globally actually fell from 34% to 23%. But in China, it only declined from 27% to 26%. Had China’s actual use of tobacco declined at rates comparable to the rest of the world from 2005 to 2020, you would have had 80 million fewer people in the country who would be hooked on nicotine today.
Today we revisit the issue of tobacco use in China. Five years ago, in July of 2018, Jeremy and I spoke with Matthew Kohrman about his book on China and tobacco — Poisonous Pandas. I hadn’t really thought much about the issue until reading a fascinating investigative report that just came out in the second week of September. It was led by a reporter from a new not-for-profit investigative news outlet called The Examination, in collaboration with three guest contributors from other media outlets, Der Spiegel and Initium Media.
The reporting was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. The project, which you can and should read on the Pulitzer Center’s website, is called “Smoking for the State. Its main piece is titled How China Became Addicted to Its Tobacco Monopoly.” It’s really quite eye-opening because it focuses, as the article’s title suggests, on the role of China National Tobacco Corporation, also known as the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, and which we will be calling China Tobacco in our conversation today. Joining me to talk about the piece are two of the journalists who worked on it. Jason McLure is a correspondent with The Examination. This new publication was actually among their very first pieces if not, in fact, its first. Jason previously taught at the storied Journalism School at the University of Missouri in Columbia and was a reporter for Reuters. Jason McLure, welcome to Sinica.
Jason McLure: Hey, thanks so much, Kaiser. Real pleasure to be here with you.
Kaiser: Pleasure to finally meet you. Also joining is Jude Chan, a reporter with Singapore-based Initium Media or 端傳媒 [Duān chuánméi]. Jason and another co-author did a lot of the China-based reporting for this story. I’m looking forward very much to hearing about the reporting that you did, Jude. So, Jude, welcome to Sinica, and thank you for staying up late to chat with us about tobacco.
Jude Chan: Hi everyone. Hi, Kaiser. It’s really an honor to be here.
Kaiser: Honored to have you. Jason, before we go on, I’m hoping that you or Jude could give us an intro to the other two people who worked on this piece and talk a little bit about their contribution to it.
Jason: Yeah, thanks so much. We were really lucky to work with a great team of reporters on this project. And this is a project that took a number of months. I started working on this back in January. So, this is really an article that we’ve been working on and off on for eight or nine months. I really want to thank The Examination and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for helping to fund that. There aren’t many news organizations that can support reporters to do this kind of deep reporting, and I was lucky to have some great collaborators. Jude is obviously one of them from Initium Media. Also, Christoph Giesen of Der Spiegel. He’s Der Spiegel’s China correspondent. He’s lived in China for seven years. He’s worked with other German news agencies there as well. Really a decorated reporter who knows his way around China well, and he’s got a great staff of news assistants that work with him as well.
The other person I would credit is my colleague, Manyun Zou, who is a Chinese journalist living here in the U.S. now, who also is just a remarkable researcher, a remarkable reporter, and certainly I would never have been able to tackle a project like this without the input of these really well-sourced and knowledgeable collaborators.
Kaiser: Yeah, fantastic. Well, we all know about Der Spiegel. Jude, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about Initium Media. I don’t know much about it except that it’s Singapore-based. So, are you Singaporean?
Jude: No, I used to work for a Chinese-language media in mainland China, and I have been covering public health issues since 2016. For Initium, I’m working as a freelancer. I got an opportunity to work with Bosnian journalists, Chinese ventilators during the pandemic. This was the first time I cooperated with Initium. This project with Jason is the second time for collaborative journalism for me.
Kaiser: Oh, fantastic. Great. Jason, naturally, I’m very curious to learn more about The Examination and your bit, which really is also about health, specifically, as I think you told me, the commercial determinants of health.
Jason: Yeah. The Examination just launched in September. Several of the founding editors came from the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism — a really well-known investigative nonprofit that helped organize and do the reporting of the Panama Papers investigation and some other related global investigations of where the global elite rich people hide their money offshore and evade taxes. That was a sort of a mammoth undertaking that involved collaborations with dozens of different news organizations. So, that’s where several of our founders came from. My background is a little different, but the idea behind The Examination is to bring some accountability and investigative reporting to the industries that profit by making products that really affect the health of millions and millions of people.
Of course, a key bit for that is tobacco because tobacco is perhaps the most glaring example of a highly profitable industry that damages the health of millions of people a year. The WHO puts the figure of tobacco-related deaths at 8 million people a year, more than 8 million. If you think about that, and you compare it with the number of people who die in war or from a host of other diseases or illegal drugs, tobacco really is a much larger societal problem by a long stretch in many respects. We don’t just focus on tobacco, but also there are a number of other industries, including big food and the food industry. Of course, we know that obesity, particularly in the West and the United States, is a huge problem, really nearly rivaling tobacco with respect to how many people’s health it affects and the deaths that it causes, as well as standard polluting industries that contaminate our water, our air, and so on, and lead to thousands of deaths.
But in this specific area, these industries, they tend not to be reported heavily because the way that they affect people’s health isn’t terribly dramatic. If you are a smoker, you can smoke for decades and decades before you develop the chronic diseases that may end your life ultimately. Because of the nature of these commercial determinants of health industries, how they affect our health, they tend not to have the dramatic impact of lots of other news events like terrorism or pandemics, and so forth.
Kaiser: Jason, you said that the WHO puts the number of people who die annually, globally, from tobacco at 8 million. Let’s try and get our heads around some of the important numbers in China. How big is the overall size of the industry in China, and how much of the revenues actually flow to the state monopoly, China Tobacco?
Jason: That’s a good question. Let’s start with just the public health aspects of this first. China is, by far, the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco. Each year around the globe, there’s almost 6 trillion, or rather more like 5.8 trillion cigarettes are produced globally. It may be a little bit lower than that. China basically consumes about half the world’s output now of cigarettes. So, about 20% of the world’s population smokes half the world’s cigarettes.
Kaiser: Wow.
Jason: So, when you talk about tobacco as a global health problem, you can’t talk about it without talking about China. Because there’s more than 2.4 trillion cigarettes consumed each year in China, right? That is more than the next 67 countries combined.
Kaiser: My god. Yeah.
Jason: Right? If you took India, Indonesia, the United States, Germany, Japan, Brazil, etc., all the way until you got to the 67th largest cigarette consuming, or 68th actually. So the next 67 countries combined is equivalent to how many are consumed in China each year.
Kaiser: That’s nuts. That’s just bananas.
Jason: It is. It’s a really dramatic statistic. Then when you look at the health problems this causes, we don’t have quite as precise data on that in China. We don’t have the data on that. Very conservative estimates are that more than a million people in China die each year from tobacco-related diseases. At the upper end, there are some other estimates that put the figure as high as 2.7 million. It’s likely the figure from the researchers we’ve talked to is between 1 and 2 million. If you do the math, China smokes almost half the world’s cigarettes, but you’re like, “Well, wait a minute. There’s more than 8 million people that die from tobacco-related diseases. If it’s one to 2 million deaths, it’s probably 25% or less of the diseases.” Part of the reason for that is that China, until fairly recently, had a relatively young population compared with other countries. Really it’s just now that the effects of all the cigarettes that are being consumed there are starting to play out across their healthcare system, across mortality statistics.
Kaiser: Guys, your piece really focuses on the power of the state monopoly of China Tobacco, the STMA, or the tobacco monopoly bureau. How big is it? Is its size something that one can simply ascertain from public records, publicly available revenue reports, stuff like that, or is it something that requires the kind of forensic investigative work that you guys specialize in? Give me a sense for how hard it is to report on an organization like this, and then maybe a sense of how it’s structured and how it’s run.
Jude: I think in China, it’s a monopoly system. Basically, we have only one company, and it does everything from tobacco farming to distribution, to selling, to retailing, and also it has many other businesses like controlling the biggest advertising company in Yunnan Province. I think it also has a lot of branches in 19 provinces. And now it’s going to be bigger because of the taxation policy.
Kaiser: Can you explain what the taxation policy is? How is that changing?
Jude: It’s a little bit complicated because it used to be that the excise tax in China is going to be changed again, because we used to put a lot of emphasis on the manufacturing process. So, the government gets a lot of money from producing cigarettes. But now the government is turning the taxation process to retail. It’s kind of encouraging every province to sell more cigarettes so that they can get more money. And this is also good for the monopoly because in this way, they can reduce the inner competition between provinces and put more emphasis on producing cigarettes in Yunnan Province and selling in Shanghai. For them, it’s a benefit, this taxation policy.
Kaiser: Right. So, this tax policy that perhaps somebody thought would be shifting the tax burden onto consumers, and therefore, maybe, disincentivizing them from consuming more cigarettes, is actually going to have the perverse effect of increasing cigarette consumption because it incentivizes producers to be more aggressive in marketing and distributing. Jason, maybe you can go back to what I was asking earlier about the difficulty in reporting. I mean, Jude just described a very large organization with subsidiaries in most of China’s 30-odd provinces. What are we looking at here in terms of the opacity of that organization?
Jason: That’s a great question actually, because for me, as an outsider, as a foreigner who hadn’t done a lot of reporting related to China previously, I was surprised, in some respects, at how much of our reporting was really based on records that are public within China. As we mentioned, China Tobacco, the state-run monopoly, it’s a government agency. In many ways, a lot of what they do is public, or at least is quasi-public. And we can talk a lot more about that. In other respects, there are some challenges because it’s very difficult to just even talk to officials who work for the company as a foreigner, as an independent reporter. They don’t publish detailed financial reports as large public companies would elsewhere.
But if I can just back up a little bit, I can give you a really brief history of the company, which I think illustrates some of the problems that China faces today. In the early 20th century, it was really British American Tobacco that moved into China and started producing cigarettes there and really developed China’s cigarette markets. Then at the time of the Chinese Civil War, the communists ultimately took control of these cigarette factories, and they were slowly nationalized in the 1950s. I know those of your listeners that listened to your podcast with Matthew Kohrman, who’s an outstanding scholar and has done really detailed work along with some collaborators, wrote a great book on the history of this company called Poisonous Pandas. So, in the 1950s, basically all these cigarette factories in different parts of China were nationalized by the Communist Party.
But largely, they remained under provincial control. Each provincial government and provincial Communist Party had influence over the operations of each cigarette factory. In many ways, there was sort of a competitive market within China between these different government-owned cigarette factories. You’d have cigarette factories in Shanghai that would compete with cigarette factories elsewhere. Provincial governments would do things like block cigarettes from coming into Beijing from Yunnan because they didn’t want competition with their local factory. So, in many ways, there was this chaotic provincial government-run cigarette market in China through the ’60s, ’70s. Then into the early eighties, under Deng Xiaoping, Deng, of course, was very outward-looking, and he saw that this wasn’t a smart way to run the tobacco industry. Particularly, I think he saw that perhaps down the road, China would be competing much more with international companies.
And that having little factories and all these dozens of different provinces and cities run by local officials, the result wasn’t going to be a very modern well-run industry. So, that’s when China Tobacco was created, in the early 1980s, to centralize control over all these dozens of little cigarette factories that existed across China. That’s really when the industry began to be modernized and rationalized in many respects. Now, what’s interesting is that at the same time this cigarette monopoly was set up, shortly thereafter, Deng created something that you referenced earlier, the State Tobacco Monopoly agency, the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, which was meant to be the regulator and oversee all aspects of the tobacco industry in China. Jude was mentioning earlier that the China Tobacco, for example, determines the price that farmers get paid for their tobacco crop.
Its tentacles across this industry are really much deeper and wider than that. They control all aspects of the supply chain. If you want truck tobacco in China, you need a license from the State Tobacco Monopoly. If you want to retail tobacco in China, you need a license from the State Tobacco Monopoly. Now, what’s interesting is that the commercial arm of the company, the guys who are basically overseeing the cigarette factories, running the cigarette factories, they’re the same guys who are also the regulators of this industry. And this is where the dynamic in China gets really interesting, and this is really the central thrust of our story – that it’s the cigarette company that regulates itself. And this has caused a whole bunch of problems when it comes to public health. Because, clearly, if you’re making money selling cigarettes, you don’t have any interest to take steps to reduce your sale of cigarettes, if that makes sense. The fact that this is all nested within the same company is just an enormous conflict of interest that really hasn’t been resolved to this day.
Kaiser: It does make sense, and it also makes absolutely no sense. It’s like there was this great quote from Ray Yip, who used to be a senior person in China with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he said it’s like a soccer match where China tobacco is both a player and the referee, and that really drives you home. Like you said, your work, this piece focuses very much on the fact that China Tobacco, this mega tobacco merchant is also the regulator. I’m sure that there’ll be a lot of people who will hear this and just be, “What? Did I hear that right?” I mean, total disbelief. How can moral hazard on that scale be allowed to persist with something especially that’s as lethal as tobacco?
Would I be correct to say that, at least in its own understanding, China Tobacco doesn’t think of itself as the regulator? I mean, it would say, “No, the regulator is the health administrator, the regulator is the state council. We police the industry, but we don’t set…” I mean, for example, it wasn’t the China Tobacco Monopoly Bureau that decided we are going to put warnings on labels, right? So, in what sense do you really mean, just really specifically, is China Tobacco, this biggest producer, actually, also the regulator?
Jude: I can say one thing. During the negotiation of FCTC, the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, in the draft, used to say that it’s the State Health Administration who controls the labor warning, but the China Tobacco who participated in the negotiation suggested they change this term to ‘State Administration.’ In this way, they can control the warning label in China. In the end, it succeeded in controlling this policy because the health administration doesn’t have the right to change the label on cigarette packets. It’s the STMA who decides everything. So, this is the part of the FCTC, the health Administration could do nothing.
Kaiser: Am I to understand correctly, just so I get this right, the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration was participating in the negotiations with this UN body about this treaty?
Jude: Yes.
Kaiser: It’s like having arms merchants at an arms negotiation, it seems like.
Jude: Yes. Especially at the beginning, it was trying to control the Chinese delegation, they’re very active. They set up a research group and also participated in the negotiation.
Kaiser: When you talk about how they were able to enforce their will to wield really significant influence over other participants in those negotiations or other governmental agencies, I want to understand how it actually wields that influence because China doesn’t have anything that we would understand as a parliament or a legislative body. There aren’t ‘lobbyist organizations’ as we understand them. So, how does it coopt high-ranking officials? Is this like flat-out corruption? How does it step clear of the anti-corruption efforts that have been underway for over a decade now since Xi Jinping came into office? I want to understand the mechanism of influence here.
Jason: Well, I can jump in on that.
Kaiser: Sure.
Jason: I’ll just touch on briefly what you were asking earlier about this distinction between the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration and China Tobacco. Within China, there’s essentially no distinction. The different terms are used sort of in the context of whether people are talking about regulation or the commercial activities of the company. But it’s understood to be one and the same thing. The general manager, the equivalent of the CEO, Zhang Jianmin, of China Tobacco, he’s the director of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration. Now, this is a little bit different in the sense that he’s a government official. My understanding is that he holds the same rank as sort of a deputy governor on the provincial level, right? In fact, we did a lot of reporting about how China Tobacco shapes health policies within China.
He said that when the head of China Tobacco comes and meets with the mayor of a city, say a city is trying to pass a ban on indoor smoking, it’s like a boss talking to his employee in many respects because he literally outranks a city mayor within the formal hierarchy. But in a lot of ways, this really understates the power of this company because, as we discuss in our piece, in 2022, the company earned 1.44 trillion RMB. That’s $213 billion for the Chinese state. That’s 7% of all of China’s government revenues. It’s a figure that’s equivalent to China’s official defense budget.
Kaiser: Wow.
Jason: This gives them a huge amount of power within the government, even relative to other ministers. The minister of health, for example, is much weaker within the government compared with, say, the general manager of China Tobacco. I think one of the things that magnifies their influence is that within China’s government, China Tobacco is part of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, one of the so-called super ministries within the Chinese government that is one of the handful of the most powerful industries, and is able to exert great influence over the government through the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as well. But its influence, it’s not a new thing. In fact, dating back 20, 30 years ago, China is a lower middle-income country in many respects.
Now, of course, 30, 40 years ago, China was much poorer. It was much more dependent then on tobacco revenues to support the state, even than it is today. The figure was probably more like 10%, 15%, or more in terms of how much money the central government got from selling tobacco. In many ways, a lot of its influence comes from its historical significance that it’s something of a sacred cow within the government. And we can really see that influence. From our reporting in the 1990s under Jiang Zemin, who, as you know, was trying to open China to the outside world in many respects, he decided to host a major international conference on tobacco control in China. And this was in 1997. As part of our reporting, we were able to obtain a letter from China Tobacco to the State Council, to Jiang Zemin, to other important players and the government basically warning them to keep in mind that China Tobacco is the government’s single largest earner in the context of this tobacco control conference.
They go on to warn people in how they talk about tobacco control. And mind you, this is back in 1997, and while academics and people in civil society can freely share their opinions on the harms of tobacco, they say government officials should be very careful in what they say. As we spoke with a noted tobacco control advocate, Judith Mackay, who is a Hong Kong-based tobacco control advocate who’s worked in China for a number of years. She said, when Jiang Zemin opened that conference, his opening speech was so sort of lukewarm and tepid on this issue of smoking. She said, you wouldn’t have known it was a tobacco-controlled conference.
Kaiser: Wow. I wanted to follow up on this. You’ve talked a little bit about the people on the other side, the people who work in advocacy. You’ve talked about how Jiang Zemin said that civil society groups should be able to say what they want, but ultimately, they’re going to run up against this hard reality. Let’s talk about the landscape in terms of anti-smoking advocacy. In my years in China, especially after 2010, I saw quite a bit of effort, publicly at least, to try to curb smoking, or at least I thought I saw that. The advocates used to be quite outspoken. I thought about China Tobacco’s role in the government too. Before we get into what’s gone wrong and why anti-smoking advocates are now losing ground, let’s talk about what they had managed to do in the first place. Jude, maybe give me a sense of what sorts of organizations are working against tobacco’s widespread use. What are the existing rules about smoking? Are there, for example, bans on certain types of advertising? Is there mandatory language on packaging? Are there rules about selling to minors? Are there bans on public transportation? Things like that. Where are we right now, Jude, in terms of advocacy and its successes to date?
Jude: I think the Tobacco Control community in China has succeeded a lot in legislation, especially in big cities. They have done a lot of campaigns on promoting public awareness in tobacco. But compared to the Tobacco Control movement in the U.S., I think the community here, they constricted their movement in public health. As I know, in the U.S., public and tobacco control was part of the Civil Rights Movement. So basically it’s a human rights issue. In China, the community mainly consists of public health experts and NGOs. The number of those communities, those organizations are very limited. You can count on one hand. And also, now they lack funding. They mainly get money from other countries, organizations. I also think they face a lot of pressure from the tobacco industry because they are scared of the tobacco company because the company said that they represent other countries’ benefits, like they’re trying to sell more cigarettes from the U.S., and also they’re representing the western ideology, such things.
Kaiser: That’s interesting. And that’s one of many approaches that are taken. Part of the landscape that we’re talking about is cultural. I think that anyone who’s been, for example, to a wedding in China will remember how there will be, at the reception, boxes of cigarettes, even packs of cigarettes in front of every place. It’s pretty crazy. People gift cigarettes all the time. There are all sorts of status markers associated with the brand that you smoke, the cigarettes that you give and the cigarettes that you receive. Jude, can you talk a little bit about the role that cigarettes have in Chinese culture and Chinese business culture in particular? We’ll get to an example of how that is sometimes used as a defense by China tobacco as well. I’m also wondering why it’s so gendered, why it is that male smoking is so prevalent compared to females in China, and whether that is similar to other countries, or is this particular to China? So, let’s start with the general smoking culture in China.
Jude: I think smoking is still very popular in China. If you attend a wedding ceremony, you can see smoking, cigarettes from Double Happiness, this brand, will be put on the table, and guests could have a cigarette during the feast. Maybe you won’t find this scene in Shanghai because of the legislation. It’s prohibited. But you’ll probably find it in Yunnan or in Sichuan, in the southwest part of China. When I visited Yunnan to do research in tobacco farming, I saw the local farmers who exchange cigarettes every time they meet in the villages. It’s a way for them to make friends or show their politeness and friendliness. Regarding the gender discrepancy, I think it has something to do with gender equality in China. If a man smoked, you wouldn’t think it’s bad behavior. Sometimes you would think it’s really cool or shows masculinity. But if a woman smoked, she would face criticism from the public. Because the public will think that women smoking is immoral. That’s the difference. The women in China generally face more constraints.
Kaiser: Do you find, Jason, that looking at other countries around the world that’s similar, that maybe you see a correlation between disparities in smoking between male and female, and the degree of sexism prevalent in society?
Jason: I don’t know whether I would make that precise linkage between sexism and gender differences in terms of smoking rates. But it’s certainly a cultural-based issue. If you look around, the kind of numbers that we see in terms of China’s smoking rates are reflective in other countries in East Asia. For example, in China, about half of men, age 15 and over, smoke. When it comes to women, it’s more like 2%. So, there’s a huge difference. But that’s not unlike the smoking rates in South Korea, or Japan, or Southeast Asia. In fact, in the Arab world, there’s a much more clear overt taboo on women’s smoking. Women’s smoking is identified in some ways with being sort of loose morals or indicating sexual availability. There are more overt taboos there.
I don’t think I could speak to the extent that exists within China or East Asia in the way that Jude could. But certainly in some other countries, if you look at Western Europe and France, women’s smoking rates are virtually identical to male smoking rates. So, in other cultural contexts, I think women’s smoking is associated with independence or sophistication. A lot of these positive attributes that people may have with smoking, like, “Oh, I’m cosmopolitan now if I’m smoking,” these are things that the tobacco industry has very much fermented and tried to capitalize on. But one of the interesting aspects of this story is that within China, that’s not really the case as much. China Tobacco does have some brands that are focused and marketed at women, but they certainly haven’t been as aggressive in marketing to women as the transnational tobacco companies have.
In fact, an interesting case study is that of Hong Kong, which has very different smoking rates than mainland China. From my understanding from reporting this piece, a lot of this has to do with Hong Kong’s different government and historical institutions. In Hong Kong, most of the cigarettes that you see sold do come from the Western tobacco companies. Marlboros or other Western brands are much more common. But one of the things that happened in Hong Kong is that when the Western tobacco companies moved in several decades ago, they began, very aggressively, marketing cigarettes to women there. If you think of Virginia Slims and some of the brands that Philip Morris and others had that were clearly targeted and clearly marketed to women. One of the sources that I was talking to about this mentioned that this marketing, this really aggressive marketing of cigarettes to women actually engendered a backlash in Hong Kong that was beneficial to the Tobacco Control Movement to public health officials.
Because they were able to cast the tobacco companies that were doing this as foreigners who were disrupting culture and causing problems. And so the Tobacco Control Movement was actually able to capitalize on this. And the story isn’t quite this simple, but Hong Kong has had tremendous success in limiting smoking rates and reducing smoking in part because of this one factor.
Kaiser: It’s interesting how in Hong Kong, you have anti-smoking advocates co opting nationalism. And in China, in Mainland China, it’s quite the opposite.
Jude: In China, two years ago, the House Ministry tried to do something for female smoking. So, in their year plan, they were trying to curb the female smoking prevalence, but then the Chinese feminists denied such behavior because they knew that in China, the female prevalence is only 2%. So, they thought this was a strategy from the tobacco company.
Kaiser: Much of your work focuses on really, really fascinating examples of the ways in which China Tobacco has prevailed over these efforts by municipalities, by cities to ban smoking indoors, for example. I think a lot of this seems to flow from the city of Chongqing. You opened with that and you made the argument that basically, after they defeated the indoor smoking ban in Chongqing, we saw no other Chinese cities able to pass bans on indoor smoking. So, let’s start with Chongqing. Can you talk about how China Tobacco was able to stop that law from passing in Chongqing? Jude, I know you worked on this, so it’d be interesting to hear.
Jude: It was back in 2019. I was told by the activist that focused on Chongqing’s legislation that Chongqing was going to change their plan for smoke-free legislation. Then we did some investigation in Chongqing, and we saw that even in hospitals, there are cigarettes. People are smoking.
Kaiser: Oh God.
Jude: We used a PM 2.5 machine to test whether the air quality is good or bad. In the toilet of this hospital, the figure was really high. Also in the railway station, people are just smoking indoors and in the crowds. So, I think the situation of secondhand smoke is really bad in Chongqing. And the 32 million people in Chongqing really deserve a law to protect them. Then maybe a year later, before the law came out, we found out that the president of STMA visited Chongqing, and he talked to the party chief and also the mayor in Chongqing.
Kaiser: Chen Min’er was…
Jude: Yes. Actually, there are two levels. Chen Min’er was the 副国级 [fù guó jí], pretty really high in the Party. And Zhang Jianmin is only 副部级 [fù bù jí]. They have two standards. Though that shows Zhang Jianmin, the STMA, they have really strong power in politics. We didn’t know what they talked about, but I think everyone guessed that one of the topics was about the legislation in Chongqing. After that, Chongqing failed to get a smoke-free legislation, and after that, the other cities would apply Chongqing’s experience. This case only increased the power of the tobacco industry, and it really influenced the Tobacco Control Movement in China in a profound way.
Jason: If I could just add to that, I think this is a good question and a key moment in our story that we’re talking about. Passing indoor smoking bans was a fundamental part of the WHO Anti-Tobacco Treaty that China signed in 2003. Under that treaty, China’s supposed to pass a national ban and ban smoking in all indoor public places — in restaurants, in hotels, in karaoke clubs, in bowling alleys, in schools, and hospitals. What we saw is that China failed to pass this indoor smoking ban. And we can come back to how that failed at the national level. But by 2016, 2017, right? 12, 13 years after the treaty took effect, China hasn’t passed this national smoking law, but we have seen some major cities pass smoking bans of their own that outlaw smoking in restaurants, in hotels — Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and so forth.
The Tobacco Control Community, the public health community, has really got some momentum in doing this. They say, “Okay, we’re not going to get this law at the national level, but we can do this piece by piece.” What’s really important about Chongqing is that it’s a huge city. And it’s one of just four cities where the city government reports directly to Beijing. There’s about 32 million people in Chongqing. And so there’s this big fight about Chongqing that all happens behind closed doors. The Chongqing City Government wants to pass this law. They have a draft law that does exactly this. Lo and behold, just as Jude was saying, the general manager of China Tobacco shows up, he meets with the head of Chongqing’s Communist Party and the mayor, almost immediately afterwards, the law is changed to allow indoor smoking. And because Chongqing is such an important city, this city is used as a precedent again and again and again in the years that follow to essentially block these laws. Other city governments use it as their own excuse not to pass indoor smoking bans.
Kaiser: In fact, China Tobacco seems to punish people who fail to put enough pressure on the local government to squash these indoor smoking bans. For example, you guys talk about how in Xining City, the prudential capital of Qinghai Province, the local boss of the Xining China Tobacco office was sacked after he didn’t successfully oppose the indoor smoking ban. Is that correct?
Jude: Yes. We got this anecdote from quite a lot of members of the community in China. They all know this thing. And I think it’s not just Xining. After Chongqing, every city, when they try to do a legislation in smoke-free indoor bannings, smoking indoors, they’ll have to talk with the STMA. STMA will send their staff to talk to influence other departments directly because the staff of STMA, they feel pressure as well. Because if they do nothing, they will get sacked.
Kaiser: One other city that you looked at, and I think it was really kind of illuminating about what China Tobacco’s playbook has been like, in your piece, Jude, you talk about this letter that was written to officials in June of this year in a town called Jieshou, which I think is in Anhui. They were considering an indoor ban, and the line of argument in this letter that you laid out went something like, “This ban would hurt China’s business culture.” Basically, it was an argument from this kind of economic development perspective. What else was in that letter, Jude? And how did you get a hold of something like that?
Jude: Yes. I think this letter was really precious because usually, we couldn’t find such documents very easily. And this is a really good showcase of how the tobacco industry is trying to influence the Tobacco Control Movement. For me, the most interesting part of the letter was that Chinese tobacco is trying to apply the Chinese constitution. Because in the legislation in Jieshou, they’re trying to put forward an idea of smoking control in your family. And the tobacco industry, they apply the constitution as family is free from the power, the public power. So, we shouldn’t put forward a smoke-free family. In China, the constitution is never applied in a court, but they apply the constitution to influence.
Kaiser: Interesting. Jason, you just now looked at 2016, 2017 as the period where the tide seems to have turned to all these promising early initiatives, and they seem to have faltered. What is it that you think happened to bring about this change?
Jason: Yeah, this is a good question. The span of time that The Examination and our colleagues looked at is really about the last 25 years within China and trying to document China tobacco’s influence. That included the time period in the early 2000s when this bigger international treaty was being negotiated. Then we saw that after China signed that treaty promising to do all this stuff to control tobacco, almost none of it happened for a period of about seven, eight, nine years. Tobacco industry grew very fast in the years immediately after China signed this tobacco control treaty. Then there was a change in leadership in China. In 2013, Xi Jinping became president. And tobacco control was an issue that he wanted to work on. So in this period, 2013 to 2016, we did see that China took a number of fairly significant steps to control tobacco. We saw that there were bans in major cities, there was an increase in cigarette taxes, which is probably the simplest, most straightforward way to reduce smoking.
Kaiser: I remember in the public sort of propaganda effort, we had Peng Liyuan and Xi Jinping, I think, was actually there at some of the events. Xi did stuff with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I remember I got in a little bit of trouble because Baidu, the company I was working for at the time, was actually participating in this. Our CEO went and attended. And he took a picture with Bill Gates wearing an anti-smoking shirt. He’s a militant anti-smoker. But our CFO, who I worked for, was actually on the board of Philip Morris. And one astute observer put that together. What are you going to do? I mean, nothing I could really do to weasel out of that.
Jason: Yeah, that’s interesting… I’m sorry, go ahead.
Kaiser: No, but at that time, it seems like there was real momentum, right?
Jason: Yeah. So, there was a lot of momentum. We can talk maybe just a little bit about Xi and his interest in this issue before we get to the question that you initially asked. We do know that Xi Jinping was a smoker himself. From the sources we’ve read, we understand he started smoking actually during the Cultural Revolution when he was sent to a rural part of China to do work as a form of reeducation. But we understand that he did quit smoking in the early 1990s around the time that he married his second wife, Peng Liyuan, who you mentioned. She, herself, became an ambassador for the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control and sort of a public spokesperson starting in about 2009. At the same time, both Xi and Yao Ming, the famous basketball player, became sort of anti-smoking spokespeople at that time.
There’s some indication that she may have done this as Xi’s behest because he thought that this was an issue, he wanted to be out front on. Of course, Peng herself was already a celebrity in China and was very well known. But then we see, you mentioned this meeting between Peng and Bill Gates in 2012. They’re photographed together wearing these bright red t-shirts with anti-smoking messages on them. This is during a visit of Bill Gates to Beijing. And they’re both holding out their hands like the stop signal. This photograph of Bill Gates, who, of course, is well known within China, is ultimately used as part of a Tobacco Control campaign by anti-smoking groups on the subway. There are posters made of it so on and so forth for about a year. Then interestingly, according to our reporting, the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control gets a phone call from the health minister who orders this poster be taken down.
They’re told that it’s demeaning to the first lady to have her in a Tobacco Control campaign. There were some other comedians and actors whose photos were also used. It suggested this is sort of a loss of face for the first lady to be featured in this way. But it’s a strange-sounding campaign. We don’t know exactly what the genesis was or why the first lady was pulled from this in 2013, but we do know that in spite of this, she did push some significant Tobacco Control measures in his first few years in office. I talked about city wide smoking bans and cigarette taxes may be the most significant thing, and Jude can speak to this as well, was an order that officials should no longer smoke in public. That they shouldn’t appear on television, they shouldn’t be in public meetings, smoking.
This is really seen as a message coming from the top because it’s coming both from the state council and from the Party itself. That it is no longer okay to do this. So there’s a lot of momentum going into this 2016, 2017 period, and then things start to change. What appears to happen is that China Tobacco becomes much more aggressive in pushing back on other parts of the government, on other parts of civil society that are advocating for tobacco control. They become much more effective in their messaging and much more say directive to local officials who are interested in passing smoking bans that they shouldn’t be doing this. A lot of our piece focuses on the issue of smoking bans in China and this big fight within the Chinese government as to whether or not those should be passed.
But actually, there’s many other methods of tobacco control. Essentially, by this period, China Tobacco had basically sealed off most of these. There was one cigarette tax increase. That’s the only one essentially that’s happened in over 20 years in China. There’s cigarette warning labels, as Jude mentioned. Those are written and designed by China Tobacco itself, by the same people who are selling you cigarettes are designing and writing the cigarette labels. So, as you can imagine, those cigarette labels are not terribly descriptive. They’re not graphic. In fact, in many cases, they blend right in with the beautiful packaging of Chinese cigarettes. There are all these other ranges of ways that smoking can be reduced, but really, there’s this focus by the public health community on smoking bans because they feel like that’s really the only element that they can influence. And then starting in 2016, 2017, moving into 2018, momentum on that really stops. There really hasn’t been much good news for the Tobacco Control Community over the last five years.
Kaiser: Jude, has the new generation of younger people coming up, have they gotten more interested in the fight, less interested in the fight? My sense is that they’ve gotten pretty quiet. I don’t hear it a lot. Is this just the power of China Tobacco or do you think that there has been sort of a sense that they’ve already been defeated?
Jude: In big cities like Shanghai, Beijing, we could see that the smoking prevalence is decreasing, and the younger generations wouldn’t like to be smokers like their fathers. But in rural areas, it’s a different picture. The younger generation there thinks smoking is still very cool. So, it’s different between rural and the city. And I think smoking, Tobacco Control in China is not a core issue even in the public health community. It’s not in the center of the public health issues. I think that’s why the Tobacco Control Community is feeling anxious because they don’t have much energy.
Kaiser: I understand, yeah. There’s also been a lot of negative examples. Jude, in your piece, you talk about a researcher named Xie Jianping, who became a member of the very prestigious Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2011, largely because he had done work looking at the claims of so-called light or low tar cigarettes that were being sold.
Jude: Before 2013, there was an event in China, Xie Jianping was going to be elected as a high-level academician in 中国工程院 [Zhōngguó Gōngchéng Yuàn] (Chinese Academy of Engineering). And it’s not the community which funded this news, but somebody, a volunteer, and he said, “Why is a member from the tobacco industry going to be a high-level academician in China? That’s really questionable.” Then the community, the Tobacco Control Community, tried everything they could to change that, to prevent that from happening. Also, the former vice minister of the Health Department, who also talked in public, tried to prevent that from happening. But in the end, the community failed, and Xie Jianping is still very active in tobacco control. Also one thing Xie Jianping has done is that years ago, maybe 10 years ago, he wrote a paper suggesting that the STMA should control the e-cigarettes industry in China. And that really happened in 2021.
The STMA, they controlled the e-cigarettes in China. Now, the e-cigarettes producers have to sell their e-cigarettes to the Chinese tobacco, and then the Chinese tobacco will sell those e-cigarettes to the public.
Kaiser: Wow. So, let me get this right. My understanding was that China tobacco did not have a big market share in e-cigarettes prior to 2021. It was on the suggestion of this guy, Xie Jianping, who has now basically helped to hand control of the vaping market entirely to China Tobacco, is that right?
Jude: Because before 2021 in China, it was not clear which department should control, supervise the e-cigarettes industry. And Xie Jianping was a representative of the tobacco industry. So, he suggested for a longer time that the Chinese Tobacco company, the STMA, the state monopoly, should be the supervisor of the e-cigarettes industry. And after about 10 years, this suggestion came true and STMA is controlling e-cigarettes companies. Chinese Tobacco doesn’t produce e-cigarettes domestically. So, they just step inside the e-cigarettes industry and get money and actually do nothing. Although they have totally prohibited flavored e-cigarettes in China because they think that will introduce more younger smokers to become e-cigarettes users.
Kaiser: Right. Same thinking is in America, right?
Jude: Yeah. But actually, they don’t change their policy of flavoring conventional cigarettes. There are still a lot of conventional cigarettes with flavors being sold in Chinese markets.
Kaiser: Wow. Fascinating.
Jason: This is a really interesting issue that Jude raises because China Tobacco has made the sale of these low tar-reduced harm cigarettes, really, its core business strategy. It’s important to be clear about this. This is something that the Western tobacco companies did starting in the 1960s, when the first science emerged that smoking causes lung cancer, obviously, there was a lot of public concern about this. And the way that tobacco companies responded was saying, “We’re going to make the cigarettes less harmful for you. We’re going to start making low tar cigarettes. We’re going to start making light cigarettes.” Right? Those of us of a certain age, of course, can all easily remember a time when you could buy Marlboro lights or Camel Lights in the U.S. You can’t do that anymore. And the reason why is that after this went on for decades and decades, essentially public health researchers realized that these camel lights or Marlboro lights, those cigarettes, in fact, these low-tar cigarettes, the harms that they cause are just as great as regular filtered cigarettes.
The reasons for this are a little complicated, but basically it’s about the way they measured the tar content in a cigarette. The way that the cigarette industry did it was they had robots smoking the cigarettes in the same way, and then they would measure the amount of carcinogens and harmful chemicals in the smoke. But people don’t smoke cigarettes in the same way that robots do, people are after nicotine. So, they would suck harder on the light cigarettes, they would inhale the smoke deeper into their lungs, and oftentimes, this could cause more deadly forms of lung cancer. So, this whole project of low-tar cigarettes was really shown to be, essentially, a lie. And the cigarette companies, as later emerged as a result of lawsuits in the U.S., knew this. They knew this, and eventually they were forced to change course.
In China, that is not the case. To this day, the sale of low tar cigarettes, the sale of cigarettes that China Tobacco markets as being less harmful to the public, that’s their core business strategy in a lot of ways. Jude talked about flavorings. It’s common to see China tobacco cigarettes flavored with Chinese medicinal herbs like ginseng or caterpillar fungus.
Kaiser: Zhongnanhai, a very popular brand.
Jason: Right. Or the way they market, you mentioned Zhongnanhai, one of the ways they market cigarettes is they have like the number five displayed very prominently on them. And that’s a reference to the tar content and accuse the smoker, “Oh, there’s only five milligrams of tar, this cigarette. It’s not as harmful to me as another one, right?” So, they’re not making very overt claims, but the messaging is still there for the cigarette consumer. And so what was so controversial about this episode involving the tobacco academician is that one of China Tobacco’s own scientists, one of the guys who’s trying to research ways to make these so-called low-tar cigarettes, was elected to one of the most prestigious scientific academies in China. And of course, other scientists in the academy are just horrified by this. There’s this huge public outcry around his election to this.
He’s criticized widely in state media. There’s even an editorial by state media saying, “This guy doesn’t belong. The science he does, it’s not helpful science. He’s trying to sell people cigarettes that give them cancer.” So, there’s just a huge public outcry. He’s allowed to remain in the academy. As Jude mentions, he writes this paper about e-cigarettes that turns out to be very prescient and how China tobacco needs to regulate them. But one of the things to take away from that episode, I think, that’s important is that at that time — 2011, 2012, 2013 — there could be a really public discussion about this issue. This guy, he’s still in the academy, but he was publicly shamed, essentially, by others in the media, by other people in civil society, criticizing him in a way that I don’t think would be possible today in China because the media is not able to criticize somebody who’s part of the government in that way as they are.
Civil society tobacco control groups, clearly, don’t feel as free to criticize. And even on an issue, most of us wouldn’t think of this as being a political issue, but, of course, it is in some senses, but the restrictions on civil society have really reached to the Tobacco Control groups. I think, particularly over the last five years, this is the core reason why China Tobacco has been so ascended. Not only are they part of the government, not only are they in the room when the decisions about tobacco control are being made, other people who are arguing the other side have seen their voices greatly diminish both in the public sphere and behind closed doors.
Jude: Yes.
Kaiser: Wow.
Jude: I think a similar thing is happening. Just like Jason said, we could do nothing. For example, these days, when I was reading some academic journals from the industry, they said that they’re going to incorporate some research about the tobacco industry into the National Scientific Funding. Does that make sense? They’re going to plan some research about tobacco at the national level, in the national funding. That’s something the community should be doing, but actually, the community is doing nothing.
Kaiser: Yeah. Depressing. Well, Jude, Jason, thank you so much for taking the time. There is so much more in the amazing piece that you’ve worked on. It’s at the Pulitzer Center. There’s actually a couple of pieces in this series, I want to encourage everyone to read them both, it’s called Smoking for the State. They probably considered puffing for the Party, but went with Smoking for the State. It’s on the Pulitzer Center website. Again, there’s also a shorter version that ran in USA Today, and you can find it all on The Examination’s website as well. We will be sure to put up links for that. Meanwhile, let us move on to recommendations. Just a very quick reminder, first, that our NEXTChina Conference is just about six weeks away. Have you gotten your ticket yet?
If not, then the full-day conference takes place on November 2nd. Includes quite a few guests who frequent Sinica listeners may remember, not only our keynote speaker Yasheng Huang, who I interviewed here about three weeks ago, but also people like Demetri Sevastopulo from the FT, Lingling Wei from the Wall Street Journal. Evan Feigenbaum, who everyone knows here, he’s been on the show many times. And a panel that I am particularly excited about, which will look at the mind of modern China with two of the deepest thinkers I know. We’re going to get really philosophical Iza Ding from Northwestern University and Taisu Zhang from Yale. Night one, the evening of November 1st, we’ll feature a live Sinica taping and a dinner. It’s a VIP event. But please sign up for that as well. Sinica is going to focus on China and the global South, and who better than Eric Olander, who runs the China Global South Project and its podcast, which is part of the Sinica Network? And Maria Repnikova of Georgia Tech, who’s been doing all sorts of really fascinating work on Chinese soft power, focusing on East Africa and especially on Ethiopia. Check that out. You’re not going to want to miss that. Get a VIP ticket. Not only do you get priority seating at any of our speaker sessions and workshops, but also so you can join us on the 1st. Go to www.nextchinaconference.com for more information. All right, folks, I hope to see you there. But let’s move on to recommendations. Jude, what do you have for us? Why don’t you start?
Jude: I would recommend a book named Zhang Chunqiao: 1949 and Beyond. Zhang Chunqiao was the leader of the Chinese Community Party during the Cultural Revolution, and this book tells the story of the Cultural Revolution, this 10-year period, from the perspective of Zhang Chunqiao. It was written by Zheng Zhong, who worked for a Wenhui newspaper in Shanghai. At that time, Zheng Zhong was a house correspondent, just like me. He tells a very, very fascinating story about Zhang Chunqiao and this 10 year period. I picked this book because it’s also a reminder for me that although, as journalists, being in a difficult environment may be our misfortune, it makes our responsibility to document even more important. Sometimes we should just go beyond our personal reporting field to record more of what we experience that is happening. We should be able to view issues from a broader standpoint, I think.
Kaiser: Zhang Chunqiao, for those of you who don’t know who he is, he’s most famous as one of the Gang of Four, along with Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, and, of course, Jiang Qing. I’ve never read that book. Is it in English or is it in…?
Jude: I searched a lot on the internet, but I didn’t find an English version, so I guess it’s not translated.
Kaiser: So, Zhang Chunqiao by Zheng Zhong, formerly of the Wenhui Bao. Very, very good recommendation. Thanks. Excellent, excellent. Jason, what do you have for us?
Jason: My recommendation is going to be a little less intellectual than Jude’s. I am a big fan of this series called Top Boy, which is a British crime drama, originally aired on Channel 4, I think, in the UK. Now it’s part of Netflix. It’s a great crime series, great drama. If you like The Wire, if you like Narcos, it gives you a lot of insight into sort of a different walk of life that people have in London. And it’s a really gripping personal story, I feel. So, my recommendation is Top Boy.
Kaiser: Yeah, I started it, I got one episode in and I got distracted by something else, but that’s a great reminder to go back to it because I really liked it. It was very good. Definitely watch it with the subtitles on.
Jason: That’s right. There are a lot of Jamaican West Indian accents that can be challenging for people who aren’t used to them.
Kaiser: Exactly, yeah. But excellent recommendation. Thanks. All right. Mine is the music of Florence Price, who was an American composer who died in 1953. I was not really familiar with much of her stuff at all until the Philadelphia Orchestra came to town and played a couple of her pieces, including her Symphony No. 3. I was just floored at how beautiful, how moving that third symphony is. I’ve since now gotten, heard her first and her fourth, her second is missing, and all the other available music that is there I would highly recommend the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 2021 recording of her symphonies No. 1, No. 3. They won a Grammy for that. It’s just an exquisite recording and just a beautiful composition. Her story is crazy. I mean, she’s an African American composer doing modern classical music and really weaving in African American music in the same way that Slavic music was weaved in by some of my favorite composers in central and Eastern Europe beginning mid-century, in the 19th century.
But the story of the rediscovery of so much of her music after 2009. So, in 2009, there was this dilapidated house in some rural town, it was called St. Anne or something like that, in Illinois, where she was using this as a summer house. They discovered this gigantic cache of her hitherto unknown works, including one of her symphonies. There was the fourth symphony and two violin concertos and dozens of other really great pieces. Again, I would recommend that you start with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 2021 recording of Symphony 1 and Symphony 3. And boy is it good. It just reminds me that I don’t listen to enough contemporary classical music. Anyway, Jason, Jude — thank you once again. What a fantastic conversation, and congratulations on this excellent piece.
Jason: Thanks so much for having us.
Jude: Yeah, thanks.
Kaiser: A real pleasure in making both your acquaintances. Jude, Jason, I hope you come back, and please keep me apprised of future collaborations and more work that you do on health-related issues in China.
Jason: Will do. Thanks again.
Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on the social media platforms like Xitter or Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all of the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
