Advertisements promoting brand names such as Baisha, Hongta and Furongwang are a common sight in cities across China. Visible at bus stops, in railway stations, on top of buildings and at eye-level on apartment gates, to residents these cigarette companies are household names, though often the ads don’t even mention cigarettes or smoking.
　　A recent survey conducted by China’s National Tobacco Control Office (NTCO) in Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming and Wuhan found that tobacco ads are rife in large Chinese cities.
　　In Beijing, tobacco ads were found on 11 of the 18 streets surveyed, and in two of the city’s three major railway stations. In Kunming, the airport was plastered in tobacco ads. In Shanghai, although there were no billboards promoting tobacco companies in the subway system or at the airport, four of 10 local magazines surveyed carried tobacco ads.
　　All this, despite laws and regulations that are supposed to prevent tobacco advertisements in China.
　　
　　Stopping the ads
　　
　　Enough is enough, says Zhang Yifang, Vice President of the nongovernmental Chinese Association on Tobacco Control (CATC).
　　According to Zhang, tobacco ads are a key way for tobacco companies to seize market share, boost product consumption, encourage smokers to continue their habit and lure new people, especially youth, to start smoking. He said that ads are partly responsible for the rising smoking rate, which for many people will eventually mean smoking-related illnesses, and even death.
　　Zhang pointed out that tobacco ads have been rampant in Chinese cities since the 1990s. They’ve evolved from television ads to other media such as newspapers and the Internet, from only in more prosperous coastal cities to poorer inland areas, from small posters to large billboards and advertising light boxes, and from direct advertising to indirect or implicit advertising.
　　Zhang’s organization launched an initiative of selecting and honoring tobacco ad-free cities in the 1990s, and Ministry of Health and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce endorsed the program in 2003.
　　The two departments named 14 cities as “tobacco ad-free cities” on May 31, 2005, the World Health Organization’s annual World No Tobacco Day. They are mostly small and medium-sized cities, and exclude the four target cities of NTCO’s survey. The CATC is currently evaluating other cities that have filed applications and hopes to add more to the list on the same day this year.
　　
　　Legal loopholes
　　
　　China began to exercise legal control over tobacco ads as early as 1987 with the adoption of the Regulations on Control of Advertising.
　　
　　In the years that followed, provisions governing tobacco advertising were enshrined in a number of laws and regulations, including the Law on Tobacco Monopoly (1991), Advertisement Law (1995) and Interim Measures on Tobacco Advertisement Supervision (1996). These legal measures ban tobacco advertising in mass media such as radio, movies, television, newspapers and magazines, and in public venues including waiting lounges, theaters, meeting rooms and stadiums.
　　owever, according to the Beijing Advertisement Monitoring Center, all 581 tobacco-related ads that it caught in various media last year are suspected of being illegal. Most of these ads were under suspicion not because they outwardly promote tobacco, but because the ads contain slogans or images that are associated with certain brands of cigarettes. What’s behind this strange phenomenon is the diversification of large tobacco companies.
　　Yang Yan, Associate Professor at NTCO, said the laws and regulations governing tobacco ads adopted many years ago have proved lacking under today’s circumstances.
　　Shen Erli, CATC Vice President, pointed to Baisha light boxes at bus stops in Beijing. “You cannot simply conclude that they are tobacco ads,” he said. While the ads are for Baisha, they don’t promote tobacco companies under the Baisha Group, and the words and images in the ads are different from those found on Baisha cigarette packs. He added that as Baisha Group is also engaged in pharmaceuticals, logistics and culture dissemination, these ads promoting the Baisha brand name are deemed lawful.
　　However, among 1,200 people polled by the NTCO in Beijing, 67 percent of the adults and 50.6 percent of young people identified these Baisha ads as tobacco ads. “This shows they are tobacco ads in effect,” Yang said, “and therefore should be banned.”
　　
　　The challenge of control
　　
　　Yang said there are loopholes in the existing laws in this respect. When a Formula One race, an event mainly sponsored by tobacco companies, was first held in Shanghai in 2004, experts from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to which the NTCO is affiliated, wrote a letter to the organizers calling on a tobacco ad-free event.
　　Under public pressure, the organizers made some concessions. However, they also came up with inventive ways of advertising--putting tobacco ads on the clothes of the racers and painting them on the cars, creating “moving tobacco ads” that Chinese laws overlook.
　　“Many foreign tobacco companies come to advertise in China just because tobacco ads are strictly forbidden in developed countries,” Yang said. “In China, the laws are not that strict, and the people’s awareness of tobacco control is still low.”
　　The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, an enforceable international convention that went into effect in China in January, requires signatories to realize a “comprehensive ban” on tobacco advertising within five years.
　　Yang said it will be an uphill battle, as the supervision of tobacco advertisements in China currently falls far short of the requirements for tobacco control.

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