Throwback Thursday: Five Years and One Statistic Later, Beijing Sees Mixed Success With Tobacco Control Policies

Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our 12-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful stories of Beijing's days gone by.

It’s been five years since the city first enacted the Beijing Smoking Control Regulation, the capital’s most comprehensive smoking ban to date. At the time, the initiative was met with skepticism after a failed attempt to do something similar in 2008, however, by all accounts, it seems to have stuck – sort of.

From a purely observational standpoint, a night out in 2020 versus a night out in 2010 is more than enough proof that smoking has become relatively less prevalent over the past decade, at least indoors. Nevertheless, like most things in Beijing, the whole picture has largely been obscured by – excuse the pun – a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. So we thought we’d trawl through our archives and try to figure out just how tobacco-free the city has become, and what its plans might be for the future.

After initial reports about the ban in 2014 and 2015, things fell a bit quiet on the Beijinger. It wasn’t until the end of 2016 that the Beijing Patriotic Health Campaign Committee and the Beijing Municipal Health Commission released their first data set regarding the initiative. At the time, key findings suggested that the percentage of local adult smokers had gone down from 23.4 percent in 2014 to 22.3 percent in 2017, with roughly 200,000 fewer Beijingers lighting up over the three year period. Moreover, it was reported that 127,000 restaurants, bars, and other businesses had been inspected between June 2016 and January 2017, leading to 5,300 people being asked to put out their cigarettes and 2,719 of those folks receiving a fine for flouting the rules.

Then, in January 2018, the Beijing Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission held a press conference to announce that the smoking rate among Beijing adults had dropped 1.1 percent, from 23.4 to 22.3, resulting in 200,000 fewer smokers since 2015. Sounds pretty impressive (or familiar), save for the fact that if the accumulated reduction in smokers was 200,000 across 2016 and 2017, that either means 200,000 people quit while 200,000 started followed by another 200,000 quitting. Or, 200,000 people quit in 2016 and a whopping zero quit in 2017, thus seeing a freeze in the statistics.

Either way, eager to capitalize on January’s good news, Beijing’s Health Authority convened another press conference just five months later, in June, to announce that, according to the Beijing Commission for Health Improvement, there were – you guessed it – 200,000 fewer smokers in Beijing, with China Daily picking up the story to assert that Beijing’s remaining 3.99 million smokers made for a citywide adult smoking rate of – you guessed it – 22.3 percent.

To summarize: Between June 2015 and June 2018, four different commissions claimed that the city saw a total reduction of 200,000 smokers or a 1.1 percent decrease. Furthermore, that milestone was initially achieved within the first year of the Smoking Control Regulation’s implementation, then subsequently touted each year after that.

It would seem as though the city’s various health departments decided not to press their statistical luck any further, as both 2019 and 2020 passed without claims of 200,000 fewer smokers or a 1.1 percent decrease in tobacco users.

Surely some new information has come to light over the last two years though?

Well, in 2018 a team of researchers completed a three-year observational study during which they randomly selected 93 restaurants in Chaoyang and Dongcheng districts and made multiple undercover trips to those restaurants over the three year period, during which they would observe smoking behavior, no-smoking signs, and waiter awareness about the 2015 regulation, with baseline data, pulled from six months before and one month after the regulation was implemented.

What they found was that “The effect of the regulation weakened three years after implementation compared with that in one month after the implementation.” Moreover, “the enforcement degree of the regulation was conflicted with the pasting rate of no-smoking signs and the regulation awareness level in waiters in Dongcheng and Chaoyang districts.” Also, for what it’s worth, “No active interventions from the restaurant staff were observed when smoking occurred.”

Then, in December 2018, the tobacco spotlight briefly shifted to e-cigarettes, with the Beijing Tobacco Control Association reporting an uptick in reports and complaints about vapes in public spaces. Unfortunately, however, as e-cigarettes have continued to proliferate, they’ve largely evaded regulators, as e-cigarettes are not considered drugs or electronic products, nor do they fall within traditional tobacco products. This was in 2018, and as of May 2020, no action had been taken.

Incidentally, 2019 did see renewed calls for more stringent tobacco control policies, but those measures – part of the Healthy China 2030 Action Plan – are effectively a nationwide effort, and seemingly more intent on getting the rest of the country to catch up with the incremental advancements in cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

So here we are, five years after the Beijing Smoking Control Regulation went into effect, and while, as mentioned earlier, there is a pretty significant difference in the amount of smoke that permeates most indoor areas, given that new statistics haven’t been released in a couple of years, it would seem as though any plans to push the ban further have, for the time being, basically gone up in smoke.

READ: Throwback Thursday: COVID-19 Hits the Beijinger Blog, Gets Two Sentences Below the Fold

Images: UN News, SCMP, Reuters