No moral monopoly

The official China Youth Daily (CYD) has called for a change to the monopoly tobacco system operating in China, according to a story in The China Daily.
The story reported that the China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC) had urged its local branches to try their best to fulfil the annual sales objective of 47.5 million cases of cigarettes, or 2.38 trillion cigarettes, by the end of next month.
But the CNTC’s urgings were opposed by the CYD, which reported that the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control had said it was contrary to the Healthy China 2030 plan and the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, to which China was a signatory country, for a state-owned tobacco enterprise to set an annual sales objective.
The CYD said that it should be relatively easy for China to reduce tobacco use, since tobacco was under state control.
But this was not happening. The size of China’s smoking population had remained unchanged or had increased slightly in the recent past. And annual sales of cigarettes had risen fast since 2016 when they fell to 47 million cases from a historical high of 51 million cases in 2014.
China was said to have 350 million smokers, or 31 percent of the world’s total, and about 740 million ‘second-hand smokers’. Diseases related to smoking caused the deaths of 1.36 million smokers each year, and the deaths of 10,000 ‘second-hand smokers’.
The CYD said that the Healthy China 2030 plan vowed to reduce the size of the country’s smoker population, but given the ‘tobacco corporation’s deployment and growth momentum’ (its net profit in 2016 was 1.08 trillion yuan [$156 billion] or 28 times that of Alibaba), the goal of downsizing the smoking population was mission impossible unless there was a drastic change in how it operated.
‘For example, cigarette packs in China do not bear anti-smoking photos to dissuade people from smoking, and the price of cigarettes is markedly lower in China than in many other countries,’ CYD said. ‘Trying to prevent smoking in public places, even though it is banned, is often greeted with fierce reactions from smokers. And smoking-cessation treatment remains expensive in even public hospitals.
‘Unless there is a change to the monopoly tobacco system, smoking control will remain an uphill struggle.’