Chinese leaders are now banned from smoking in public, using public funds to buy cigarettes, or smoking or offering cigarettes when performing official duties, the Communist Party said in a circular made public December 29, the latest attempt to curb cigarette consumption in a nation of more than 350 million smokers.
Immediately after the invention of the cigarette machine in 1881, James B. Duke (1865—1925) is reported to have leafed through a world atlas to survey the population of foreign countries. Coming to the figure 430,000,000, he exclaimed, “That is where we are going to sell cigarettes.” The country was China, and in 1890 the Dukes exported the first cigarettes to the populous Asian nation.
China’s top leaders took up the practice with gusto. Mao Zedong was often pictured with a cigarette in his hand, as in this often-reproduced 1957 shot of him meeting the all-female Third National Congress of Chinese Communist Youth League, who appear to be vying to offer him a light:
In a tell-all biography, Mao’s personal physician wrote that the leader responded with a joke when he criticized Mao’s chain smoking, saying “Smoking is also a deep-breathing exercise, don’t you think?”
China’s current generation of top leaders, though, are a marked contrast to their predecessors ones: none of the current members of the Central Politburo Standing Committee, the all-powerful seven-man group that runs the country, are smokers. President Xi Jinping’s wife is a vocal anti-smoking campaigner.
Whether the current ban will actually have any effect on smoking rates in China or not is doubtful. An earlier government ban on smoking indoors (which applies to everyone, not just government officials) has been mostly ignored, and while top officials have quit or never started, over half of Chinese men are smokers.
Gang Yang contributed reporting.