December 16th, 2013:

from Gu Liping of China News Service:

China is planning a national regulation banning smoking in public indoor areas, and it is expected to be enacted next year, the Beijing News said Thursday, citing an official.

Yang Jie, deputy director of Tobacco Control Office for the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, made the remarks at a news briefing on the Chinese version of the Tobacco Atlas (fourth edition), a comprehensive volume of research on tobacco and smokers.

Yang said the regulation, following the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, will ban smoking in all public places, including public vehicles, indoor workplaces, Internet bars and restaurants. Specific penalties for violations will be included in the regulation, he added.

More than 10 Chinese cities currently have smoking control rules, all of which ban smoking in public indoor areas, but implementation of the law is unsatisfactory, mostly because there is a lack of enforcement and awareness about the law.

The Tobacco Atlas, published by the American Cancer Society, says more than half of Chinese males smoke, and 12 percent of deaths in Chinese males can be attributed to tobacco. Every year, 600,000 people die from exposure to secondhand smoke in China, most of them women and children, it said.

12 Dec 2013

新京报中文报导

from Shan Juan of China Daily:

As China eyes a national ban on smoking in public indoor areas, health and law experts say regional anti-smoking regulations lack the teeth to protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke.

More than 10 Chinese cities currently have smoking control rules, all of which ban smoking in public indoor areas, said Wang Qingbin, associate professor with the China University of Political Science and Law.

“But implementation of the law is unsatisfactory, mostly because there is a lack of enforcement and awareness of the law,” he said at a symposium held by Beijing-based tobacco control campaign ThinkTank and the Tobacco Control Office of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The municipal-level rules mainly target public businesses such as restaurants, Internet bars, hotels and movie theaters, but do not focus on individual smokers, he said.

Yang Jie, deputy director of the Tobacco Control Office, explained that the city ban is similar to other bans around the world that mainly target businesses instead of smokers.

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