Ban on smoking in public places an uphill task

I was getting a haircut at a barbershop in my Shanghai neighborhood on Monday when another customer, having just finished his grooming session, sat down on a nearby couch and lit a cigarette about four meters away from me.

It was an immediate nuisance, coming just one day after World No Tobacco Day. In recent weeks, I have visited the Shanghai No. 10 People's Hospital at least five times to see a relative, and while there, I saw some smokers openly lighting up their cigarettes at the stairways.

And this is Shanghai, a city widely regarded as having some of the strictest anti-smoking regulations in the country.

Under Shanghai rules, smoking is prohibited not only in most indoor public spaces, but also at outdoor bus stops and major tourist attractions such as the Bund, Yuyuan Garden, Xintiandi and Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall.

The situation in most other Chinese cities is even worse. Southwest China's Yunnan province, the largest tobacco-producing region in the country, is one such place.

During a two-month driving tour across the province late last year, I found that smoking in public places was a far bigger problem.

So far, China's National People's Congress has not enacted a national law that bans smoking in public places. Most rules and regulations relating to smoking restrictions are made by local governments.

The health hazards of smoking are widely known. The World Health Organization states that tobacco use is a major risk factor for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, over 20 different types of cancer, and many other debilitating health conditions.

Every year, more than 7 million people die from tobacco use across the world. That includes some 1 million deaths in China out of about 300 million smokers, by far the largest number in the world. The WHO also warns that secondhand smoke exposure contributes to serious health problems, and is estimated to cause over 1.6 million deaths worldwide every year.

In China, cigarette packages carry only text-based warnings of health hazards, but graphic warnings, which are mandatory in many other countries, are still not required.

According to the WHO, health warnings on tobacco packages, especially those that combine text and images, are among the most cost-effective and powerful tools for increasing public awareness of the dangers of tobacco use and reducing tobacco consumption.

The graphic designs used on cigarette packages in some countries are indeed grotesque, featuring images such as blackened and cancerous lungs, rotten teeth, and patients in hospital beds on ventilators.

There is strong public sentiment against smoking in Shanghai. According to the 2025 Shanghai Public Place Tobacco Control white paper released in March this year by the Shanghai Patriotic Health Campaign Committee, 98.2 percent of Shanghai residents support a full ban on indoor smoking.

China Daily reported on Wednesday that a coalition of 16 public health, tobacco control, and environmental protection groups has called for a nationwide smoking ban on all conventional trains and railway platforms, arguing that partial restrictions are no longer sufficient to protect passengers from second-hand smoke.

China has achieved phenomenal progress in its social and economic transformation over the past several decades. Yet, the battle to eliminate smoking in public places and reduce the number of smokers in the country still needs more efforts.

The author is a China Daily columnist.

chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn