NEW CHANNELS: With the media landscape shifting, tobacco companies in China have found new ways to market their products online or through social networking platforms (GONG LEI)

In a typical case, the China Tobacco Shandong Industrial Co. Ltd. set up a microblog for its Taishan cigarette brand on Weibo, China's answer to twitter, to routinely promote its products and corporate social responsibility events. The account has attracted more than 120,000 followers.

More important, microblog promotions with words, pictures and video help attract young people by exposing them to tobacco-related information, Li added.

Yu Xiuyan, a public health researcher at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said that the online tobacco marketing has obviously violated the FCTC, and should be banned.

According to Yu, the tobacco industry's advertising through social media and other online activities particularly targets the young, especially teenagers.

Wang Ke'an, Director of the ThinkTank Research Center, calls for legal revisions to better match the current situation and meet conditions of the FCTC.

More severe penalties for breaches of tobacco advertising rules should also be introduced, said Wang.

An ongoing campaign

According to a report issued by the Chinese CDC in late May, China ranks 13th among 14 developing countries in terms of anti-smoking efforts and measures.

The countries involved include Thailand, Uruguay, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, India and Turkey.

China is only ahead of Russia on the list, which considers efforts to ban tobacco advertising, sponsorship and promotion, tobacco tax rates and retail prices, warning labels on cigarette packages and smoking bans in public places, said Yang Gonghuan, Deputy Director of the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control (CATC) and a professor of public health at the Peking Union Medial College.

Data used in the analysis are from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey produced in 2010 by the Chinese CDC, the U.S. CDC and the WHO.

Despite the survey not ranking countries directly, further analysis could easily lead to China lagging far behind not only developed economies, such as Canada, Australia and European Union states, but also low- and middle-income countries on the implementation of tobacco control, said Xu Guihua, Director of the CATC.

"China did particularly poorly in warnings on cigarette packs and tobacco taxation, according to Yang.

Jiang Yuan, Deputy Director of the National Office of Tobacco Control, said that the prevalence of tobacco use in China is shown in side effects such as people having strokes at younger ages and a steady increase in the number of children with asthma.

"Without effective control of tobacco use, by 2030 the incidence of chronic diseases will increase dramatically, like a tsunami," she said.

However, Yang also expressed her concern about the government's reluctance to control tobacco as it relies heavily on the tobacco industry as a major tax contributor.

Tobacco taxation collected in 2011 totaled 600 billion yuan ($96.31 billion), accounting for 6 percent of the overall national tax revenue that year. In places such as Yunnan, Hunan and Guizhou provinces, where the tobacco industry is a major source of government finance, profits from tobacco can account for up to 70 percent of local revenue, official figures show.

China is also one of the few markets in the world that has state-owned monopolies running tobacco production and trade.

"Such a mechanism can hardly help China's progress in tobacco control," Yang said.

In December 2012, the China Tobacco Control Program (2012-15) was released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which leads the country's tobacco control mission, after more than two years of deliberation. It mentions expanding the size of warning labels on cigarette packs and the use of colors to warn buyers but stopped short of recommending packs carry graphic warning images, such as skeletons and damaged lungs, which have proved very effective in discouraging smoking overseas.

Despite this, China needs stronger political commitment to curb a smoking epidemic in the country, Xu said.

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