Every Year Smoking Kill Million People

China is the largest grower and consumer of tobacco in the world. According to World Health Organization, in China smoking kills million people every year. In general China is considered to be a land of cheap and plentiful cigarettes. In China smoking is a part of being a man, that’s why six of every ten men smoke.

In fact, male smoking is so widespread that one of every three smokers in the world today is a Chinese man.

Not surprisingly then, every lunch hour of every working day, you can see outside the entrance of a Beijing downtown office tower a lot of men who lighting up.

In China cigarettes are cheap – as little as 35 cents per pack – and plentiful. Annually China manufactures more than 2 trillion cigarettes, consuming more than 99 percent of them themselves.

"The peak of the disease usually follows about 30 years after the peak of consumption," explains Dr. Sarah England, a Canadian scientist who works on tobacco-related issues for the World Health Organization in Beijing.

This week, Chinese health officials came together with WHO representatives in Beijing to review strategies aimed at tackling the problem. It's all part of a multi-year plan to make China healthier.

China ratified the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2005, promising to reduce citizens' demands for tobacco in stages. Already it has banned smoking in primary and high schools, and prohibited tobacco advertising on television and radio as well as in newspapers and magazines.Next year, labeling cigarettes with big, bold warnings covering 30 to 50 percent of packaging will become mandatory. And by 2011 China will ban indoor smoking countrywide.

But still, obstacles remain. First, the agency is a huge money-maker, earning an estimated $35 billion per year. Second, its leadership has shown outright resistance – even warning of a national nicotine fit.

"We take the health dangers of smoking very seriously," Zhang Baozhan, the deputy chief of the tobacco agency, conceded on Chinese state television last year.But that's not all. There are also troubling signs that China's tobacco administration has been working at cross purposes with the health ministry's stated goals – trying to expand markets rather than diminish them.

While a strong Chinese social taboo against women smoking has kept the overall percentage of female smokers to just 2.6 percent of all women, "ladies' cigarettes" have begun to appear on the market with increasing frequency.

One, called "Low Side Stream Lady," comes in a pink container resembling a perfume box and boasts "super slim" and "rose flavor" cigarettes.The back of the pack also features a message: "This special product was created by Cigaronne as an appreciation to all women in style, because you deserve the best." England noted that the age of new smokers is also dipping with children as young as 10 starting to smoke.

Under the WHO convention, China promises to raise taxes in an effort to discourage smoking. Experts said that should help the most price-sensitive smokers, the young and the poor especially, to get off tobacco if they can.

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