Anti-smoking crusader Virginia Li enlists China's farmers to curb habit

Watching Deng Xiaoping chain smoke through a lunch of bear paw and mao-tai liquor at the Great Hall of the People in 1982, Virginia Li saw what she was up against.

Li is an anti-tobacco crusader with a PhD in public health and the crazy idea the Chinese could be persuaded to give up cigarettes. "I said to him, smoking is bad for your health, and I hope you will stop smoking and the Chinese people will smoke less," she says, recalling the meal with the reformist leader. Deng ignored her advice, and lived to be 92. In three decades, the ranks of Chinese smokers swelled by 100 million.

A professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Li returned to China almost every year after that to visit with her parents the country they had left in 1947. Now 81, blind in one eye and reliant on a walking stick, she says she finally has the prescription for getting China to quit: starving the state-owned tobacco monopoly.

To do that, she's focusing on the people who grow tobacco, not on those who use it.

"Everyone already knows the health argument against smoking, so the really important thing in China is making the economic argument," says Judith MacKay, a Hong Kong doctor who advises the World Health Organisation and World Lung Foundation.