A third of all young men on the mainland will die as a result of smoking, the world's biggest investigation into tobacco deaths has found.
'Of the 300 million males under 29, at least 100 million will be killed by tobacco,' said an article to be published today in the British Medical Journal.
Researchers from the Chinese Academies of Preventative Medicine and Medical Sciences, in collaboration with Oxford and Cornell universities, interviewed one million families of people who died from tobacco related diseases and 250,000 others.
The fieldwork involved more than 500 interviewers in 24 major cities and 74 rural counties.
Smoking kills more than 2,000 mainlanders every day. By 2050, the researchers predicted, this figure could be more than 8,000 a day - three million a year.
China has the biggest number of deaths from smoking of any country, having recently overtaken the United States. One-in-three cigarettes are smoked in China, and annual consumption has gone from 500 billion in 1980 to 1,800 billion today.
