Women lead China’s push to cut smoking

BEIJING – Nearly every day in China, women go to work in smoke-filled offices, exposed to the fumes of cigarettes smoked mainly by male colleagues. After work is over, many go home to breathe secondhand smoke created by husbands or other family members.

China is known as the Smoking Dragon, but its addiction to tobacco isn’t shared between the sexes. According to the most recent national survey, 288 million men smoked regularly in China in 2010, compared with 13 million women.

Lately, the women are striking back. Last fall, China’s State Council proposed the nation’s toughest restrictions yet on indoor smoking and the marketing of tobacco. The announcement was a major victory for China’s tobacco-control movement, which includes several women who’ve been on the front lines for decades.

“This is a very important step,” said Yang Gonghuan, an epidemiologist who’s been documenting tobacco’s toll on Chinese public health since the 1980s. “It is very difficult to push for these kinds of changes on a national level. … It has taken many, many years.”

Although China is known for its smog and other environment problems, no public health issue poses more of a threat than tobacco. An estimated 1 million Chinese die each year from lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases.

China’s health commissioner, Li Bin, has been outspoken in seeking a national indoor-smoking ban. Li sits on the State Council, a top-level panel that drafted the restrictions unveiled in November. Two of her key deputies are women.

Among academics, Yang is known for her extensive research into tobacco use and disease trends. Brookings Institution researcher Cheng Li said Yang “has played a crucial role in China’s anti-smoking campaign,” particularly by co-authoring an influential 2011 report that documented the health effects.

Chinese have smoked tobacco for centuries, and up until the early 1900s women regularly could be seen with men puffing on pipes. But with the advent of cigarettes, Chinese intellectuals and foreign missionaries started frowning on women who smoked. According to Carol Benedict’s book “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010,” society started to describe female smokers as “modern women,” a label also given to the promiscuous and unpatriotic.

As a result, women quit smoking, even as Chinese leaders such Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping smoked openly in public.

China is the world’s biggest consumer of tobacco. It’s also the largest manufacturer, producing more than 2.3 trillion cigarettes yearly, nearly half the world’s total.

China National Tobacco Corp. – an arm of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration – controls nearly all the cigarette brands sold.

Thus, one arm of the government, the Health Ministry, tries to restrict tobacco use and warn of its dangers, while other government agencies benefit from tobacco’s profits and tax revenues, which totaled nearly $120 billion in 2012, about 6 percent of government revenues.