Beijing about to roll out harshest smoking ban ever

China has long been one of the most smoker-friendly countries in the world, with few restrictions and virtually no taboos when it comes to lighting up. Go into most restaurants in China, and expect to be engulfed in a choking cloud of tobacco smoke. The bars, not surprisingly, are worse. Offering a cigarette to a new acquaintance is considered polite, while refusing it is often seen as rude. Sparking up next to children, pregnant mothers, or anyone else is pretty much considered normal. Now all that’s supposed to change.
Starting today in Beijing a blanket ban will be imposed on smoking in public places, after the city’s Municipal People’s Congress passed the tough new law in November. Affected will be all workplaces, schools, hotels, public transport, airports (which will no longer have designated smoking rooms or lounges), and Beijing’s many historic tourist spots, including the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. The harshest anti-smoking rules ever to be imposed in China (18 other cities already have lighter bans) is seen as a trial run for a national law, already drafted but still some distance from passage.
Thousands of inspectors from the Beijing Patriotic Health Campaign Committee, part of the municipal Health and Family Planning Commission, have been trained as enforcers and can levy fines of as much as 200 yuan (USD32) on smokers and 10,000 yuan ($1,613) on businesses refusing to comply with the ban. It’s the first time a law will target businesses that tolerate tobacco use, and authorities are also encouraging the public to report on scofflaws through a hotline (12320) and popular social media app WeChat. “Tipoffs can be conducted via phone or by uploading pictures,” Liu Zejun, director of the Beijing Patriotic Health Campaign Committee, told the official Xinhua News Agency. Already tough restrictions on tobacco advertising will be even further tightened under the laws, which will ban the ads outright from television, radio, print, public transport, and the outdoors.
But enforcing the ban is bound to be a challenge, with two earlier efforts to curb smoking in China’s capital—in the mid 1990s and in 2008, right before the Beijing Olympics—having had little impact. Beijing has 4.2 million smokers (the vast majority male), about a quarter of the adult population, who in total consume an average of 14.6 million cigarettes a day, according to a survey carried out last year by the patriotic health committee.  Dexter Roberts, Bloomberg