Lucia

de Vernai

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January 22, 2008

Chinese Authoritarians Ask Nicely, But the People’s Republic Prefers to Smoke

Infamous for ruling with an iron hand, the Chinese government has discovered another Western business tactic – the use of the word “please”. Rather than a turn to a respectful model of negotiation, the use of governmental requests to the private sector is really a sneaky way for the government to pass the buck. Banning smoking in restaurants is a prime example. The number of smokers in China has passed 350 million people, attracting international tobacco companies to the Chinese market. The Chinese government had to do something to look like it cares, so it sent out letters to 30,000 restaurants asking that they ban smoking. Not a single one did.

Oh well. They tried.

Chinese officials are promising smoke-free Olympics, but that’s to satisfy the demands of the mostly North American and Western European audience. Chinese constituents, on the other hand, are not souvenir t-shirt-buying cash cows, and if smoke bothers them – well, that’s just too bad.

While the current social trend indicates that the Chinese are seriously attached to smoking in public – one restaurant that tried banning smoking went out of business promptly – the government should intervene.

Social and cultural censorship from the authorities is an established part of the Chinese political culture. Unlike in the U.S., where a strong libertarian streak complicates everything from running credit checks to how many Christmas lights your neighbors put up, the government has the final say. No one to check, no one to balance. The body is certainly not off limits, as the enforcement of the One Child policy has demonstrated. 

The Party didn’t send out a de Vernaiion letters asking their constituents not to boink without protection, then shrug when the population doubled in the next 25 years. A population growth emergency and restaurant smoking may not seem comparable, but when 350 million people develop emphysema, lung or mouth cancer, I bet they’ll wish they would have had a One Pack policy in place. Especially given that over a de Vernaiion Chinese rely solely on government-funded medical care.

The hands-off approach to the smoking problem is also undermining the Chinese government’s other endeavors aimed at emphasizing its westernization. The recently launched anti-AIDS poster and safe sex education campaigns seem less genuine coming from the same people who are willing to look the other way as Joe Camel suffocates millions. In the short run, the greed that has overtaken the decision making process in China will be profitable. Caving in to the temptation of profit addiction has Chinese leadership convinced that it has mastered the language of capitalism. “Thank You for Smoking” makes for a clever movie title, but coming from those supposedly devoted to the welfare of the population, it’s pure poison.

In its hurry to match the U.S. in power and potential, China should slow down and learn from our downfalls too. As millions of American baby boomers are finding out, in the sequence of big business, tobacco companies are followed by pharmaceutical companies that are indifferent to the word “please”.

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