China Lights Up Tobacco Concerns Health Experts Convene In Land Central To Industry’s Fortunes

More than a thousand health experts converge on Beijing this week for an international conference on smoking - while China itself tries to decide what to do about cigarettes.

For the first time, the 10th International Conference on Smoking and Health is being held in a developing country, where critics say tobacco companies are marketing furiously to make up for stagnating sales in the United States and Europe.

“China’s anti-smoking forces will learn a lot from their overseas counterparts,” Han Changlin, deputy secretary-general of the meeting, told the official Xinhua news agency.

The conference comes at a time when China - home to one-third of the world’s smokers - is deeply split over smoking. The habit accounts for 10 percent of government’s revenues, yet according to health officials, costs more than that in smoking-related diseases and fires.

The Ministry of Health says smoking-related diseases and fires cost $7.8 billion in 1993, compared with tobacco revenues of $4.9 billion.

Premier Li Peng says selling cigarettes is immoral, but with the help of foreign partners, the state-owned China National Tobacco Corp. - the largest in the world - has boosted its exports to $650 million a year.

Holding the conference in Beijing is a personal coup for Li, the most prominent anti-smoking activist in a country where puffing on a butt is the closest thing to a national pastime.

An estimated 70 percent of Chinese men smoke. Fewer than 10 percent of women smoke, but that figure is rising. In some areas, as many as 40 percent of children aged 13-18 smoke, according to official statistics.

In an attempt to scare smokers into quitting, the government publicizes the dangers of tobacco relentlessly.

“China will have 2 million people who die from smoking-related illness annually by the year 2025,” Xinhua quoted Minister of Health Chen Minzhang as saying.

The government has banned smoking in buses, planes, trains and public buildings. Communist Party officials may no longer chain smoke their way through meetings at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Cigarette packs carry health warnings, and print and broadcast advertising is banned. Restaurants and stores in Beijing were ordered in July to remove hundreds of awnings, posters and other cigarette advertisements.

Despite such activism, smoking rates have not dropped, and the government clearly has mixed feelings about tobacco.

The government could close China National Tobacco Corp. - but only at a tremendous short-term cost. The company, which makes 1.7 trillion cigarettes a year - three times the U.S. total - also provides 500,000 jobs. In the southern tobacco-producing provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou, taxes on the industry pay for half the provincial budget.

“They have a lot of tobacco farmers and tobacco workers, and now they realize tobacco is harmful,” said Dr. Judith MacKay, a Hong Kong-based anti-smoking campaigner. “It’s a dilemma faced by every government.”

Instead of cutting back, CNTC is modernizing its operations and becoming an exporter, partly in response to growing foreign competition since China opened its market in 1992 under U.S. pressure.

Today, foreign tobacco makers - including Philip Morris Cos., British American Tobacco Co., Japan Tobacco Corp. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. - account for 4 percent of official sales.

Eager for access to their technology and skills, CNTC has set up joint ventures with all of the major foreign tobacco companies, starting with R.J. Reynolds in 1988.

MacKay said the attitude of CNTC, which once acknowledged smoking was unhealthy and talked freely to health workers, changed after it got involved with foreign tobacco companies.

“They’re not meeting with health officials, they’re not cooperating,” he said.

Philip Morris did not respond to repeated requests for interviews or information about the agreement. CNTC referred questions to its spokesman, but said he was out of the country until September.