At 10p a go, the cigarette-grabbing game appeals to all budgets. With pictures of Mickey Mouse and English-language songs featuring Winnie-the-Pooh, the arcade-style machines outside some Beijing supermarkets also appeal to children and young women.
“We don’t let kids play by themselves, but some parents let their kids play for them,” a shopkeeper in Maquanying, a Beijing suburb, said. “Playing” involves manoeuvring a mechanical arm to pick up a packet of cigarettes.
Accepted as cheap, harmless fun by shoppers, the machines remind Chinese health officials and tobacco control experts of the scale of the challenge to wean the world’s top tobacco producer and consumer off an addiction that kills more than a million citizens a year.
“This is very scary,” Xiaofeng Liang, the deputy director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said after seeing pictures of the game. “Tobacco companies use various ways to attract kids’ interest — Winnie-the-Pooh is often on Chinese TV. The advertising laws are not detailed enough to ban this. Attracting children and women is an old practice by tobacco firms, and in the West as well.” Judith Mackay, a tobacco control expert based in Hong Kong, said: “It’s appalling, absolutely appalling, one of the worst examples I’ve ever seen. It’s a flagrant example of circumventing the spirit of the law.”
Ms Mackay and other anti-smoking activists have noted a change in official Chinese attitudes over the past two years under President Xi’s leadership. They believe that the tide is turning against the state-run tobacco industry’s role in society and the economy.
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On Monday the disease control centre joined the World Health Organisation and the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project to call for Beijing to pass a national smoke-free law as quickly as possible. Beijing’s own smoke-free law, which has been enforced in the city’s public places since June, has been a success.
The WHO said that 740 million non-smokers in China, including 182 million children, were exposed to second-hand smoke at least once a day, and about 100,000 Chinese died each year from second-hand smoke.
The draft national law, which is already with the state council, China’s cabinet, may not be formally passed until 2017, Dr Liang said. In several provinces, “most of their revenue comes from cigarettes, so they will complain to the central government and that delays change,” he said. “To make a national level law is not easy.”
Chinese cigarettes remain cheap, despite a tax rise last year, and use traditional, attractive designs on their packets that do not bear any of the graphic images employed in many other countries.
After three decades working on these issues, Ms Mackay said: “I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been, with the proviso that there’s still a long way to go, and it’s going to be a struggle.”