China's deadly smoking laws

One of society's greatest achievements in my adult lifetime has been the swing against cigarette smoking.There is a long way to go, and it disgusts me that the peddlers of this addictive, pernicious and often lethal product always seem to find ways of getting at the young and impressionable, hooking them before they have enough sense and awareness of their own mortality to say "no".Still, as I say, the change in attitudes has been a monumental one, the start of what I hope is a generational snowball, and a cause for optimism.Then I look at China. To say that China is the world's tobacco capital is an understatement.The Chinese smoke over two trillion cigarettes a year.It naturally follows that China is also the lung cancer capital of the world.Lung cancer deaths have skyrocketed by over 450 per cent in the past few decades, partly a sign of the nation's newfound wealth.Three in five men still smoke, and lung cancer is now the number one cause of death.Around one million Chinese die of tobacco-related illness every year.I'm sorry to keep banging on about China - this is the last I'll mention it for a while - but the sheer scale of everything about the place, good and bad, lingers in my mind following the Olympic Games.Compared with Australia, there are two major differences about cigarettes in China - they are cheap and legally advertised. What chance does that give youngsters?I saw packets of 20 on sale around Beijing for two yuan - that's less than 40 cents.Until recently even athletes promoted cigarettes, including China's world champion hurdler Liu Xiang, who now wishes - too late, alas - that he hadn't.Tobacco companies even have their logos on kids' clothing. In one province, primary schools receive free packed lunches along with jackets bearing the brand logo.Smoking is not even banned in most Chinese hospitals.One of the big problems, of course, is that cigarette taxes contribute a massive amount to Chinese government revenue.Governments who really have the welfare of their people at heart should be more concerned about human wellbeing.But can you imagine any Australian government cheerfully giving up, say, the gold that flows from things like tobacco, alcohol and gambling?China's anti-smoking lobby is still in its infancy.It has a huge job on its hands, and I congratulate it on its campaign featuring the Marlboro man confiding to one of his macho cowboy mates: "Bob, I've got cancer."Now here's the strange thing.Given all of the above, I scarcely saw a single person smoking during the three weeks I was in Beijing for the Olympics.Why? It was banned, along with spitting, which by all accounts is another national sport in China.All 37 Olympic sites, schools, hospitals, government offices and Beijing's 66,000 taxis were smoke-free zones, and what's more the population complied with the state decree.This, I hasten to add, was not an anti-smoking measure as much as an anti-pollution measure, along with forcing a million cars off the roads and shutting down heavy industry for a month.The Communist Party wanted to impress the West more than it wanted to improve the health of its own citizens.