It calls itself Asia's World City, and it wanted to be Asia's first smoke-free city too -- a beacon of healthy living to its chain-smoking neighbors including China.
But Hong Kong's efforts to impose a total smoking ban extending to all offices, restaurants and bars by the middle of this year have backfired badly after an unexpectedly ferocious backlash from the restaurant and bar industry.
A dogged campaign to press home the claim that a smoking ban will cost 100,000 jobs in the territory as well as driving away heavy-smoking tourists from China who make up the bulk of its visitors have sent the government into retreat.
Health Secretary York Chow (周一嶽) announced last month that the ban will be delayed until next January and that nightclubs and mahjong parlors will stay exempt until 2009.
Now, in a new round of debate over the anti-smoking legislation, owners of bars and karaoke lounges are seeking to push back further the deadline by which they will be forced by law to tell smokers to stub it out.
Eric Wong of the Hong Kong Bars and Karaoke Rights group said current laws were already doing enough to restrict smoking with offices, cinemas, public venues and taxis all banning smoking.
"Non-smokers can stay away from entertainment venues," he said. "No one is pointing a gun at their head and forcing them to inhale second-hand cigarette smoke."
The government's climb-down in the face of such unfashionable arguments has bemused anti-tobacco campaigners who believed they had a firm convert in Hong Kong, where one in six people smoke and the World Health Organization estimates that 16 people a day die from tobacco-related illness.
From being a pioneer in the region, Hong Kong now risks seeing itself fall behind other countries and territories in its efforts to restrict the number of places where cigarette smoking is allowed, warned Judith Mackay, director of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control.
"Hong Kong has already been on an exceedingly slow path to introducing smoking bans in the workplace and restaurants for the last quarter of a century," she said. "Further delays are unacceptable in terms of public health."
There are indications that the people want to see tougher controls on smoking brought in sooner rather than later. A survey by the Democratic Party this month found most people wanted the law extended to people lining-up in public places and using elevators as well as all indoor public places.
However, Hong Kong's economy was almost single-handedly pulled out of the doldrums by a massive influx of visitors from China. More than 10 million a year now visit the territory since the easing of cross-border travel restrictions in 2003.
China has more smokers than anywhere else in the world -- 60 percent of all men smoke and there an estimated 350 million smokers among the population of 1.3 billion -- and if smoking is banned, many of them might stop crossing the border to spend their money in Hong Kong.
The restaurant and bar lobby has successfully exploited the fears of people that to ban smoking would plunge the city into another recession like the one that nearly halved house prices and sent unemployment as high as 8 percent between 1998 and 2003.
Memories of that bleak downturn are fresh in people's minds and when the legislator representing the catering industry presents the specter of 100,000 job losses as a result of the legislation, the pressure on the government to retreat has been strong.
The government -- sceptical of the notion that a smoking ban will cause mass job losses -- is now belatedly seeking to defuse the argument by commissioning an independent survey to assess the real economic impact of smoking.
Chow wants people to consider other smoking-related costs.
"The economic loss caused by second-hand smoke is far greater than the financial loss caused by the smoking ban, because society will be burdened with a heavy medical cost," he said.
As the arguments smoulder on, however, the effort to bring in a total cigarette ban in Hong Kong ahead of everyone else in Asia has lost its way behind an impenetrable smokescreen of rhetoric.
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