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China places 5 percent tax on chopsticks

(Los Angeles Times)
Updated: 2006-03-27 08:44

Beijing last week slapped a 5 percent tax on disposable chopsticks, dealing what many Chinese say was a powerful gut punch. In cafes here Thursday, people dropped their chopsticks and had a lot to say against the new tax. Some said it could end a 5,000-year-old tradition.

The tax will be imposed on chopstick manufacturers, which say they will make consumers pay higher prices.

"I think it's ridiculous," Gordon Wu, an advertising executive, said during lunch at a central Shanghai restaurant, where he had just snapped apart two 8-inch splints of shaved wood to eat a bowl of braised pork over rice.

The tax won't drain many pocketbooks; a penny buys bunches of chopsticks. That's why the government thinks it's a good way to save the nation's vanishing forests, one chopstick at a time. China carves up 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year. That means certain death for 25 million full-grown poplar and birch trees.

And that's why environmentalists love the tax.

"How many trees will we cut just for chopsticks?" asked Liang Congjie, who carries reusable wooden chopsticks with him.

Other Asian nations have whittled away at the problem in other ways. South Korea ordered many restaurants to stop using disposable chopsticks. They switched to metal ones. Japan imports them from China.

Over the years, the Chinese have vigorously defended against attacks on chopsticks - such as when Western researchers claimed that the wooden utensils caused arthritis. But state-owned media, which blamed China's growing wealth for runaway chopstick production, recently suggested the Chinese dispose of chopsticks altogether and eat with their fingers.