Voices
End cigar gifts' cultural chokehold
By Brad Webber (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-22 08:09
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For millions of Chinese people, Spring Festival presents are the stuff of memories, mere ashes.
The penchant for gifting loved ones, friends and business associates with cigarettes was highlighted in a survey, ahead of the holiday, of 1,200 people by the Jiangsu provincial center for disease control and prevention. It found more than half of the people it contacted had planned to buy cigarettes as presents, even as a higher percentage acknowledged the health risks of smoking.
One woman told China Daily writer Shan Juan that she usually buys her chain-smoking father two cartons of premium smokes for the holiday., even as she asks him to cut down.
Imagine the peals of delight from dear old dad, who through his wheezing musters the appearance of surprise year in and year out. "Oh, you shouldn't have!"
That's right, she shouldn't have.
Now those festival favors are spent, gone in a puff, and the makers of Zhongnanhai, Hongtashan, Panda, Double Happiness and Chunghwa thank you very much for smoking. Reassuring to them, Chinese consumers lap the brands up as gifts and burn through 1.7 trillion coffin nails every year.
You can't filter, unfilter or ultraslim the numbers: China's 350 million puffers - 4 million account for 30 percent of global cigarette consumption. Like the fog in a Stephen King book, cigarette smoke in the country, where nearly one in three people light up on a daily basis, is inescapable.
I'm hardly militaristic on the topic. Cigar or pipe smoke in small portions doesn't bother me much and I've passively caught a whiff or two of the demon weed while covering the Grateful Dead. But for some reason, cigarette smoke is particularly noxious and I strive, stride away even, to avoid it.
On my daily walk along a corridor - I call it ashtray alley - through a canyon of apartment blocks I do a tobacco-avoidance tango. I'll spot an offender, cancer stick dangling from his mouth. Sidestep, right turn, it rarely works well for me; the wily smoker is incapable of walking a straight line. My maneuvering, ultimately, is pointless as I take in the putrid stench.
The more combative of the anti-smoking groups would tell me I've just inhaled thousands of chemical compounds, most of them toxic, but who's counting? My nose twitches, tears well and my throat feels as if it's been rasped with sandpaper.
As crummy as I feel, China's citizens are the ones who pay the highest price.
The government collects about 450 billion yuan ($64.3 billion) in taxes annually thanks to the perverse symbiotic relationship: The State effectively manufactures the cigarettes and fills its coffers with the profits and taxes from their sales.
Smoking-related diseases kill about 673,000 million Chinese people annually, according to the health authorities, whose attempts to stem the tide of smokers - printing anti-smoking posters, for example - are feeble.
In the US, the anti-tobacco forces wage an incessant war. For decades, displays of smokers' blackened lungs pickled in formaldehyde have been a staple of primary school health classes.
Public puffing is largely banned and punitive health insurance costs (many policies won't cover smokers and some companies even refuse employment to them) create a very cold climate indeed for smokers.
Then there are those taxes, which can triple or quadruple the price of a pack of cigarettes to upward of $13, compared with the 10 yuan ($1.46) cost of an equivalent pack in China.
University of California, Berkeley professor Teh-wei Hu, in a paper released in October, said that a one-yuan tax increase on a pack of cigarettes would cause 630,000 Chinese to quit smoking and generate 129 billion yuan in tax revenue. Unless the government does something, 2 million people per year will die by 2020, double the current figure, Hu warns.
With smoking such an integral part of the social fabric - think platters with cigarettes at the dinner table - things won't change anytime soon.
An American newspaper columnist wrote of a tendency of giving cigarettes at Christmas time in the US during the 1950s. Giving such a gift now would be akin to telling the recipient to drop dead.
With good fortune and a little effort by the government to clear the air, literally, about the perils of puffing, let's hope that future Spring Festival gifts will trend healthier.
There's always the gift of life: Fruitcake.
