The number of deaths caused by smoking in China is set increase by more than 40 per cent during the next 20 years despite a crusade against tobacco by President Xi’s wife.
Over the past decade Peng Liyuan has been at the forefront of Beijing’s efforts to reverse smoking rates. She told US scientists during a visit to Seattle in 2015: “In my own family there are three smokers. I really hope they can find a better way to quit smoking.”
A new report in the journal Tobacco Control has predicted that smoking-related mortality in China will rise by 44 per cent by 2040. The country is the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco and has more than 300 million smokers — nearly a third of the world’s total, according to the World Health Organisation.
Researchers gave warning that China’s smoking epidemic began up to four decades later than in the West, meaning that the peak in the number of lung cancer deaths is yet to come. This is despite the overall number of deaths from smoking falling in recent years.
In the US smoking rates peaked in the 1950s among men and 1960s among women, but the peak in lung cancer deaths came in the 1990s for men and 2000s for women.
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Today more than a quarter of China’s population over the age of 15 are smokers and more than half of adult men use tobacco. About one million people die in the country each year from diseases caused by tobacco use. In its latest report on the harm of tobacco use China’s national health commission said that the number of tobacco-related deaths could rise to two million a year by 2030 and three million by 2050.
He Jie, one of the country’s top oncologists, has said that cancer has become the main cause of death in China and that a quarter of cancer deaths are related to smoking. He said that lung cancer was the most common type of cancer among the Chinese, with 42.7 per cent of lung cancer cases blamed on smoking.
“Let’s take action to control tobacco use and effectively curb the rising tendencies of cancer burdens,” he said, according to China News, a state news service. Beijing has set a goal of lowering the percentage of smokers over the age of 15 to one fifth by 2030.
Experts argue that the biggest obstacle comes from the government, which monopolises the tobacco trade and profits from it handsomely. China Tobacco, a state-owned regulator and manufacturer of tobacco products, is the country’s largest taxpayer.
Critics say that there is a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the interest of the tobacco industry and public health policy, and that the government cannot sell tobacco and ban smoking at the same time.
