THE NEW YOTK TIMES:
China’s tobacco monopoly has become so financially vital to the government that even its powerful leader has failed to curb the country’s smoking habit.
On a warm spring day in 2012, Xi Jinping, then China’s vice president, met with Bill Gates in Beijing. As the men were walking out of the meeting room, the conversation turned to smoking in a country that consumes nearly half the world’s cigarettes.
Mr. Xi, a former smoker, said he felt much better after quitting years earlier and described tobacco use as a serious problem for China, recalled Dr. Ray Yip, then head of the Gates Foundation in China. Mr. Xi, who would become president the next year, promised to “do something about tobacco,” Dr. Yip said.
Days later, Mr. Gates appeared at an
antismoking event with Peng Liyuan, the Chinese leader’s wife and a celebrity singer. Both wore red shirts emblazoned with an antismoking slogan.
Yet in the 14 years since, as Mr. Xi has become China’s most dominant leader in decades, Beijing has made only slow progress curbing tobacco use or enacting a national indoor smoking ban. While cigarette sales have fallen across much of the world, China has moved in the opposite direction.
Cigarette consumption in China
rose 39 percent from 2003 to 2023, even as it fell 26 percent in the rest of the world. The 2.4 trillion cigarettes sold in China each year account for nearly half the global total, according to a report by a nongovernmental organization founded by former officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The percentage of smokers has declined over the last 13 years, as fewer young people smoke, but cigarette sales have steadily grown. Cigarettes prices are low: A pack costs about $3 on average, roughly one-third the price in the United States.
The failure to slow cigarette sales is a measure of the clout wielded by China’s State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, which both regulates the industry and operates the country’s dominant cigarette maker, the China National Tobacco Corporation.
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Joy Dong | Reporting from Hong Kong | Wednesday, May 27, 2026
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