60 Billion Cigarettes Have Gone Missing. Have Young Chinese Decided Smoking Isn't Cool?

Cigarette sales in China fell for the first time in 20 years. Will the decline last? And what set it off?

Cigarettes were pushed out of public places long ago, but they never left people's lives.

You may not know this: Chinese smokers account for 45% of the world's cigarette consumption — and they do it while the rest of the world is cutting back. Over the past decade global cigarette sales fell 2%. China's rose 21%.

That is a little hard to explain. The sheer size of the population is one factor, but growth like that is nearly impossible without matching enthusiasm. China campaigns against smoking about as hard as other countries do. And as everywhere else, smokers pay the warnings no mind.

In 1929, when the painter René Magritte finished his famous picture of a pipe, he wrote a line of small French type beneath it: this is not a pipe. By accident, it captures something about how people look at cigarettes. What they love is the act of smoking itself. The curling smoke, the flick of the fingers — to the eye and to the hand it gives off a suggestive air, and it once stood for freedom, pleasure, passion, sex. Or just for relief from stress, which is the most basic promise of all.

None of that has changed. The numbers have.

Cigarette consumption in China fell 2.4% in 2015, a drop of about 60 billion cigarettes — the first decline in 20 years, according to Euromonitor data cited by the Financial Times.

Are more people quitting? A report from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention says no. Never mind the quit rate: even the number of people who say they have thought about quitting is no different from five years ago.

Have cigarettes got more expensive? Data shows that after smokers had to pay more tobacco tax, the priciest brands actually sold better.

If smokers haven't cut back, where did those 60 billion cigarettes go? The likelier answer is that no fresh blood is joining them.

In Europe and the United States, where the tobacco trade is more commercial and more mature, the giants set their sights decades ago on each new generation of young people to keep consumption growing. And it is those young people who, for all sorts of reasons, have been smoking less and less. The same thing is now happening in China.

Tougher smoking bans, the pull of popular culture and a growing middle class have all held consumption down. This article tries to answer why the number of smokers in China is falling now, why the young no longer treat smoking as an act of rebellion, and why health has only now become a serious brake on consumption.

The young people the tobacco business counted on are dwindling

Just as companies and brands today cannot stop talking about consumers born in the 1990s, tobacco companies in Europe and America fixed on young smokers back in the 1960s.

In Alluring Smoke: A History of the Cigarette (《烟火撩人：香烟的历史》), Didier Nourrisson quotes a market research document from the makers of Camel filter cigarettes in the United States: "To ensure the company's long-term development, we should set about strengthening our market share among consumers aged 14 to 24. Consumers at this level have a more open spirit and represent the future of the tobacco business."

The two decades of competition for young smokers that followed were the golden age of the Western tobacco industry. Annual sales of tobacco products in France jumped from 3.66 billion francs in 1960 to 26 billion francs in 1980; cigarette consumption in the United States rose from 484.4 billion cigarettes to 631.5 billion.

All of this had everything to do with the population boom after World War II. The clearest case is America's baby boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964: the golden age of Western cigarette markets arrived exactly as those people came of age. No such demographic windfall has come again.

And as the young population shrank, smoking rates fell too. Among Americans aged 18 to 29, the rate dropped 11 percentage points over the past decade.

In China, cigarette consumption took off later, roughly from the 1980s. "Judging from the research data, people born in the 1960s have the highest smoking rate, close to 70 percent," says Ma Yan, an assistant researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Among those born in the 1970s and 1980s the rates have fallen to 58% and 49.57% — still far above American levels.

China is not short of young smokers, but the group is growing more slowly. The 2015 China Adult Tobacco Survey Report found that the number of smokers in the country rose from 301 million in 2010 to 316 million in 2015 — 15 million more in five years.

One plain reason for the shift is that there are fewer young people every year. China's birth rate has fallen sharply since 1987. The cohort that turned 15 in 2015 was about 3.9 million smaller than the one that turned 15 in 2010. The chart below shows how fast the country's 15-to-24 population has dropped in these years.

The films and the ads that tempted the young have been banned, one after another

Once young people became the target, the tobacco companies opened up with every kind of advertising. American tobacco ads set the style of the era.

The classic of the genre is the series of tough-guy ads that the New York agency Leo Burnett began making for Marlboro in 1954. From 1965, when Marlboro tied itself to the image of the Western cowboy, the brand stood for wildness and freedom — and became the best-selling cigarette in the world.

Ads courting the young filled television, magazines and newspapers at the same time. The American tobacco giants paid Hollywood stars — Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Henry Fonda among them — huge sums to praise the taste of their cigarettes.

The companies were shrewd enough to step around the question of harm. Instead they sold cigarettes to the young as one of the tools for entering the adult world. "If you can find yourself at 20, you will be as grown-up as someone of 30." That was the pitch in the cigarette ads in the September and December 1976 issues of the French magazine Marie Claire.

More tempting still were the characters in the movies. After the first 007 film appeared in 1962, planting cigarette ads inside films became standard practice: along with the cars, the champagne and the watches, cigarettes were part of what gave Bond his charm. Cigarette advertising brought the film industry enormous revenue, and it shaped characters as well. What made Audrey Hepburn so alluring in 1962's Breakfast at Tiffany's was the cigarette holder more than 20 centimeters long in her hand, and the way she smoked it.

Then the laboratory photographs and the medical reports started coming out. The New York Times published the famous account of "12 dogs that got lung cancer after smoking," which pushed Congress to order warning labels on cigarette packs and in ads. In 1969, before hearings on a cigarette bill, anti-smoking groups screened a carefully cut film "exposing the ugly face of the tobacco companies." In 1971 the United States banned all cigarette advertising on television. In 1981, American cigarette sales fell for the first time.

In 1989 the European Community's council of ministers adopted a directive banning tobacco advertising on television, and the continent set about enforcing it.

China's tobacco industry is essentially a state monopoly, so the country never saw an advertising war of the Western kind. Smoking on screen was another matter. The cool characters in A Better Tomorrow, Young and Dangerous and Infernal Affairs all disappear behind clouds of smoke.

As those scenes and those ads vanish, so do the chances of a young person being tempted.

Smoking once meant freedom and rebellion. Young people don't find it cool anymore

This was the value the tobacco companies were selling: to be young is to rebel, and a cigarette will make you surer of yourself. It fit what the young believed for decades — small wonder that Magritte called his famous pipe painting The Treachery of Images.

In American and in early Chinese films about adolescence alike, cutting class and smoking stood for teenage defiance. Smoking went with the bad kids, but that was fine — it was exactly why they thought it was cool.

But young people define cool differently now, and that has more to do with the media and with popular culture. We talked to 29 people born in the 1990s in different cities. They work in all sorts of jobs; some are still in school. Twenty of them do not smoke. Of the remaining nine, one quit last year and three smoke only now and then. Any conclusion drawn from a group this small is bound to be skewed, but it may still say something. Most of them think smoking is unhealthy and dislike the smell, though they see no harm in it as long as it doesn't bother anyone in public. None of them thought it had anything to do with being cool.

You can sense the same thing in what young people talk about on social media: their idea of cool has more than one shape. Wang Jiamingmei, 19, who is studying in California, defines cool and free as the travel buffs and the photography buffs — "people with a skill who can stick with it, whether they're the gifted type or the hardworking type." She adds: "Once I'm working, I hope to use my own money to slowly finish my dream of traveling around the world." Liu, 23, who asked not to be named, joked that marrying right out of university already counts as pretty cool.

Here is one way to feel the change. Look at the cool, heroic characters in today's movies: Ben Affleck tearing down the street in Batman v Superman, Tom Cruise climbing the 828-meter Burj Khalifa in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Colin Firth in Kingsman patting skincare onto his face. What you no longer see is a sharply dressed James Bond lighting a cigarette. It has been 11 years since Daniel Craig became "the first 007 who doesn't smoke."

The middle class is getting bigger, and health is getting urgent

Wayne McLaren, who played the cowboy in Marlboro's ads, died on July 22, 1992. The cause was lung cancer. His death marked the end of the cigarette industry's long party. After the 1990s, tobacco consumption in Europe and America first slipped year by year, then collapsed.

This is a problem for the whole species. According to the World Health Organization, more than half of adult Chinese men smoke, and a million people a year die of cigarette-related disease. But the attention paid to health — or rather the growing urgency of that attention — has arrived along with a bigger young middle class. Data shows that the more educated and the better paid someone is, the less likely they are to smoke and the less they smoke.

China's new middle class is expanding at a startling rate. Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report 2015, which defines the middle class locally as those holding US$50,000 to US$500,000 in wealth, found that China had 71.8 million middle-class people in 2000 and 115 million by 2015 — a rise of 60.3% in 15 years.

You hardly need the data to see it. The fitness craze and the boom in health foods say the same thing: people care about their health as never before. Health has become a way of life and a philosophy.

The richer people get, the more they want to hold on to life.

The smoking bans keep getting stricter

China started down the road of tobacco control in 1979, when the State Council approved a notice from four ministries on publicizing the harms of smoking and controlling it. But China's position is unusual. In a country this dependent on tobacco, the state budget leans heavily on the industry. Take 2015 alone: China's tobacco industry generated 1.1436 trillion yuan in taxes and profits and handed 1.095 trillion yuan to the treasury. That was about 8.77% of the country's total tax revenue that year — more than the full-year fiscal revenue of Guangdong, the province that collects the most in China.

American tobacco tax revenue in 2015, by comparison, was US$14.45 billion, about 0.44% of the federal government's US$3.249 trillion in revenue.

"Tobacco still ranks first among Chinese industries for tax revenue, but that is changing," a person in the Chinese tobacco industry who asked not to be named told QDaily. "Tobacco's share of total national tax revenue is slowly dropping, and it will keep dropping. For one thing, the industry has very little room left to grow; for another, as China's economic structure shifts, tax contributions across industries will even out."

That has given the government more resolve. In the past few years it has written rules on smoking in public places and on smoking scenes in film and television, and the Advertising Law that took effect in September 2015 banned nearly every form of tobacco advertising. Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai have all introduced their strictest smoking bans yet.

The economy shapes every kind of spending, cigarettes included. Before American cigarette consumption fell in 1981, the country went through the 1979 downturn. German cigarette consumption also turned down after 1980, alongside GDP. China looks much the same lately: growth has slowed noticeably since 2011.

In May 2015 the government also raised the tobacco tax from 5% to 11%, pushing cigarette prices up an estimated 10% on average and squeezing some low-income smokers. "Before the tax change we had already projected sales would fall by 2 million cases, or 100 billion cigarettes," the same industry insider told QDaily. "As a rule, a 1 percentage point rise in price cuts sales by 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points."

Whatever the cause, the news that China is smoking less seems worth being glad about.

Graphics by Lingwei Wu

Cover image from douban and tumblr