Visitors mill around a bright red hilltop pagoda in southwestern China, gazing down at a sprawling cigarette factory whose deadly output has put an otherwise unremarkable city on the map.
China is home to a third of the world’s smokers and tobacco-related diseases are a major cause of death in the country — a trend likely to worsen as its population rapidly ages.
Beijing hopes to dramatically reduce that by the end of the decade, but even the government machine is struggling to achieve that as it clashes with a powerful state tobacco monopoly and local economies reliant on the crop.
Photo AP
That contradiction smolders in Yuxi, Yunnan province, whose nascent tourism businesses and local farmers thrive on its history of cigarette production.
A mostly agricultural area where incomes lag behind the national average, the city has firmly hitched its fortunes to tobacco, which accounted for almost a third of its gross domestic product in the first quarter of last year, according to official figures.
That income helps “pay for our children’s schooling or to build a house,” said farmer Li as her husband ploughed furrows into a hilltop field.
She said her family can earn up to 60,000 yuan (US$8,300) annually from the tobacco harvest, far exceeding other crops with more variable prices.
Tobacco also brings tourists to Yuxi — local firm Hongta, or “red tower,” is one of China’s most prominent cigarette brands.
Named for a centuries-old pagoda painted scarlet after the country’s communist takeover, it is owned by state-run monopoly the China National Tobacco Corporation and offers visitors factory tours, a museum and a tobacco-themed cultural park.
UP IN SMOKE
“Yuxi’s cigarettes are quite famous, so we’ve always wanted to come and have a look,” said a tourist surnamed Dong from the northeastern city of Dalian.
Foreign cigarettes, he said, “don’t put the same demand on quality.”
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco and has more than 300 million smokers, according to the WHO.
As trains pull into stations across China, passengers frequently jump off for a quick cigarette on the platform before continuing their journey.
Indoor smoking bans are loosely enforced and the stench of tobacco smoke is commonplace, from public toilets to taxis and late-night eateries.
Beijing says it aims to reduce the number of smokers from around a quarter of the population to a fifth by 2030.
Progress has been slow. The number of smokers fell just 14 percent between 2010 and 2022, well below the average for richer nations, a study by a Chinese think tank found last year.
Policymakers must also navigate the interests of China Tobacco, which controls virtually all of the domestic production, processing and distribution.
The company has a chokehold on a domestic tobacco sector that last year generated a record 1.6 trillion yuan (US$220 billion) in taxes and profits.
The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, responsible for industry oversight, has been criticized by researchers for being essentially the same organization under a different name.
This means the country’s largest cigarette manufacturer is its own regulator, in what has been decried by public health advocates as a clear conflict of interest and an impediment to effective tobacco controls.
The firm touts its contribution to the economy, but researchers into China’s tobacco market argue that the revenue does not outweigh the health costs.
CHANGING TIMES
A recent study found that the annual economic cost of cigarette smoking in China — estimated at 2.43 trillion yuan in 2020 — was approximately 1.6 times greater than the gains from the industry.
“Stronger tobacco control policies can reduce smoking prevalence without severely harming government revenue,” said Qinghua Nian at the Institute for Global Tobacco Control at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Efforts to curb cigarette consumption at home have coincided with an overseas push from Hongta and other tobacco brands.
The country exported more than US$9 billion in tobacco and tobacco products in 2023, up from less than US$1.5 billion five years prior, according to the UN.
Beneath Yuxi’s looming red pagoda, tourist Dong said smoking was slowly losing its appeal among younger generations.
“As society develops, some things are progressing and it’s better to smoke less,” he said. “My children and grandchildren don’t smoke at all.”
But nearby, a worker surnamed Long watching over tobacco seedlings in a greenhouse at a plant nursery said the crop was still a good way to earn a living.
“Tobacco used to be a couple of yuan per pound, but now it’s a couple of dozen yuan,” the 54-year-old said.
“This critical industry is still a good source of income for farmers.”
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS