Mainland outlines plans to cut smoking, without graphic labels

Mainland authorities have published a plan to reduce the world's largest population of smokers as part of a 2005 treaty, but without implementing recommendations such as warning labels that include photos of rotten teeth and diseased lungs.

They plan to cut the number of smokers to 25 per cent of the population by 2015 from 28.1 per cent in 2010, according to the plan published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology last week, seven years after the country signed the treaty that recommends the graphic warning labels.

The government will "comprehensively" prohibit smoking in public places and ban ads, promotion and sponsorship by tobacco companies, according to the plan. There is no mention of tax rates in the plan.

The mainland has more than 300 million smokers, including half the adult male population, and about 740 million people exposed to second-hand smoke, the ministry said. The tobacco industry accounts for 20 million jobs and contributed 6 per cent of fiscal revenues in 2010, it said.

"The plan carries a heavy smell of cigarettes," Wu Yiqun, a director at the Beijing-based ThinkTank Research Centre for Health Development. "It's a compromise result between the tobacco industry and the Health Ministry, and it seems the tobacco side has the upper hand." The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration was involved in the plan's preparation.

Wu, a former deputy director at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, singled out the lack of graphic photos as a weakness.