Throw a baby in the water. Watch them struggle to get to the surface. Watch them struggle to stay on the surface. Watch them figure out how to stay on the surface without struggling. No baby drowns.  That is how we teach a baby to swim in the west.

You have been thrown [...]]]> LEARN TO SWIM

Throw a baby in the water. Watch them struggle to get to the surface. Watch them struggle to stay on the surface. Watch them figure out how to stay on the surface without struggling. No baby drowns.  That is how we teach a baby to swim in the west.

You have been thrown into the immersion water of English. You may be scared, you may be struggling. BUT, you will figure it out and survive.

In 8 years no one has drowned in the Holistic English pool.

Do not use machine translations. They are not even as good as your Chinglish.

UNREACHABLE AND UNTEACHABLE STUDENTS

Every Chinese college and university has them, from top tier down to the bottom 4th tier.Usually every class has at least one and the unlucky teacher may be saddled with several. Occasionally, an entire class may be beyond reach.

No matter what the pedagogy, the methodology, the materials; there are some students who [...]]]>

UNREACHABLE AND UNTEACHABLE STUDENTS

Every Chinese college and university has them, from top tier down to the bottom 4th tier.Usually every class has at least one and the unlucky teacher may be saddled with several. Occasionally, an entire class may be beyond reach.

No matter what the pedagogy, the methodology, the materials; there are some students who have decided that higher education is only an endurance requirement.  In America there is an educational philosophy that no child shall be left behind. China has a slightly different bent – no college student shall fail to receive a diploma so long as the tuition has been paid.

Nationally, 5% of Chinese university students are unreachable and unteachable. At Zongshan University 1.6%  of the post-graduate non-English majors are unreachable and unteachable.

Chinese students know full well that they will not be failed even if they never attend classes. They are allowed to retake a final exam, with a different teacher each time, until a teacher is found who will pass them. Failing grades issued by foreign teachers are administratively changes rather regularly. The Chinese educational system deprives the teacher of a major external motivational tool and the students take advantage of this situation.

These students are not too hard to identify. They sit in the back row and try to blend into the back wall. Some sit up front, arms crossed with a scowl on their face that says a D-8 bulldozer isn’t going to move them.

Some give themselves away by telling the foreign teacher “you do not understand China” or “you do not understand Chinese students” or “you do not teach like a Chinese teacher.”

Others will declare their open contempt for English due to some misguided nationalistic pride. Some will state that they do not need English now or in the future. A Shanghai University student declared that his father was a very high Shanghai Government party official and that his father would always take care of his future, both politically and financially. This boy was well connected and his future was assured. Within months his father was caught up in the political purge and power shift that saw all of Shanghai’s political leaders replaced. His father was imprisoned and made to forfeit all of his money and property.  The boy was weeks away from graduation and would receive a useless degree.

A young man in Guangzhou insisted that he would never need English because his father was Chairman of the Board and majority Shareholder of a major Chinese company. This boy wasted his educational opportunity in reliance on his father’s position and wealth. Within two months of the boy’s graduation his father was imprisoned for economic crimes and sentenced to death and forfeiture of all money and property.

It is sad indeed to watch any misguided student pursue a path of self-destruction. But no matter what you say or do, they are determined to serve their time at university without earning an education because they know an education (Diploma) will be handed to them as long as their tuition is paid. Educated idiots!

How will an employer know that you are the best choice? How will the employer know that you stand head and shoulders above all others? How will the employer know that [...]]]> With 6 + million new Chinese university graduates this next June, how do you expect to get one of the 3 + million new jobs?

How will an employer know that you are the best choice? How will the employer know that you stand head and shoulders above all others? How will the employer know that you are NOT just one of many in a crowd? How will you prove that you are worthy?

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90778/90862/7221262.html

“Also, at least 85 percent of jobs with the central authorities this year required more than two years of work experience, which could dissuade college graduates from sitting the exam, Nie said.

The number of those taking the exam yesterday was 1.03 million, still ludicrously high given that only 16,000 jobs are up for grabs, Nie said.

This means roughly only one out of 64 exam takers can land a government job.”

Bi-lingual job applicants have a major advantage.

GOOGLE  “China bi-lingual jobs” Mandarin and English skills alone can get you a job in a foreign country. Within China the demand for English proficiency is growing.  Stop wasting your educational opportunity and start taking English seriously.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/world/asia/12beijing.html?_r=1&ref=world

China’s Army of Graduates Is Struggling

By ANDREW JACOBS

Published: December 11, 2010

Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room.

Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the rabbit warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. “Beijing isn’t like this in the movies,” she said.

Often the first from their families to finish even high school, ambitious graduates like Ms. Liu are part of an unprecedented wave of young people all around China who were supposed to move the country’s labor-dependent economy toward a white-collar future. In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising.

It is a remarkable achievement, yet for a government fixated on stability such figures are also a cause for concern. The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.

“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”

In a kind of cruel reversal, China’s old migrant class — uneducated villagers who flocked to factory towns to make goods for export — are now in high demand, with spot labor shortages and tighter government oversight driving up blue-collar wages.

But the supply of those trained in accounting, finance and computer programming now seems limitless, and their value has plunged. Between 2003 and 2009, the average starting salary for migrant laborers grew by nearly 80 percent; during the same period, starting pay for college graduates stayed the same, although their wages actually decreased if inflation is taken into account.

Chinese sociologists have come up with a new term for educated young people who move in search of work like Ms. Liu: the ant tribe. It is a reference to their immense numbers — at least 100,000 in Beijing alone — and to the fact that they often settle into crowded neighborhoods, toiling for wages that would give even low-paid factory workers pause.

“Like ants, they gather in colonies, sometimes underground in basements, and work long and hard,” said Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at Renmin University in Beijing.

The central government, well aware of the risks of inequitable growth, has been trying to channel more development to inland provinces like Shanxi, Ms. Liu’s home province, where the dismantling of state-owned industries a decade ago left a string of anemic cities.

Despite government efforts, urban residents earned on average 3.3 times more last year than those living in the countryside. Such disparities — and the lure of spectacular wealth in coastal cities like Shanghai, Tianjin and Shenzhen — keep young graduates coming.

“Compared with Beijing, my hometown in Shanxi feels like it’s stuck in the 1950s,” said Li Xudong, 25, one of Ms. Liu’s classmates, whose father is a vegetable peddler. “If I stayed there, my life would be empty and depressing.”

While some recent graduates find success, many are worn down by a gantlet of challenges and disappointments. Living conditions can be Dickensian, and grueling six-day work weeks leave little time for anything else but sleeping, eating and doing the laundry.

But what many new arrivals find more discomfiting are the obstacles that hard work alone cannot overcome. Their undergraduate degrees, many from the growing crop of third-tier provincial schools, earn them little respect in the big city. And as the children of peasants or factory workers, they lack the essential social lubricant known as guanxi, or personal connections, that greases the way for the offspring of China’s nouveau riche and the politically connected.

Emerging from the sheltered adolescence of one-child families, they quickly bump up against the bureaucracy of population management, known as the hukou system, which denies migrants the subsidized housing and other health and welfare benefits enjoyed by legally registered residents.

Add to this a demographic tide that has increased the ranks of China’s 20-to-25-year-olds to 123 million, about 17 million more than there were just four years ago.

“China has really improved the quality of its work force, but on the other hand competition has never been more serious,” said Peng Xizhe, dean of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Given the glut of underemployed graduates, Mr. Peng suggested that young people either shift to more practical vocations like nursing and teaching or recalibrated their expectations. “It’s O.K. if they want to try a few years seeking their fortune, but if they stay too long in places like Beijing or Shanghai, they will find trouble for themselves and trouble for society,” he said.

A fellow Datong University graduate, Yuan Lei, threw the first wet blanket over the exuberance of Ms. Liu, Mr. Li and three friends not long after their July arrival in Beijing. Mr. Yuan had arrived several months earlier for an internship but was still jobless.

“If you’re not the son of an official or you don’t come from money, life is going to be bitter,” he told them over bowls of 90-cent noodles, their first meal in the capital.

As the light faded and the streets became thick with young receptionists, cashiers and sales clerks heading home, Mr. Yuan led his friends down a dank alley and up an unsteady staircase to his room. It was about the width of a queen-size bed, and he shared a filthy toilet with dozens of other tenants and a common area with a communal hot plate.

Mr. Li smiled as he took in the scene. Like most young Chinese, his life until that moment had been coddled, chaperoned and intensely regimented. “I’m ready to go out into the world and test myself,” he said.

The next five months would provide more of a test than he or the others had expected. For weeks Mr. Li elbowed his way through crowded job fairs but came away empty-handed. His finance degree, recruiters told him, was useless because he was a “waidi ren,” an outsider, who could not be trusted to handle cash and company secrets.

When he finally found a job selling apartments for a real estate agency, he left after less than a week when his employer reneged on a promised salary and then fined him each day he failed to bring in potential clients.

In the end, Mr. Li and his friends settled for sales jobs with an instant noodle company. The starting salary, a low $180 a month, turned out to be partly contingent on meeting ambitious sales figures. Wearing purple golf shirts with the words “Lao Yun Pickled Vegetable Beef Noodles,” they worked 12-hour days, returning home after dark to a meal of instant noodles.

“This isn’t what I want to be doing, but at least I have a job,” said Mr. Li, sitting in his room one October evening. Decorated with origami birds left by a previous occupant, the room faced a neighbor’s less than two feet across an airshaft. The only personal touch was an instant noodle poster taped over the front door for privacy.

Because he had sold only 800 cases of noodles that month, 200 short of his sales target, Mr. Li’s paltry salary was taking a hit. And citing the arrival of winter, “peak noodle-eating season,” his boss had just doubled sales quotas.

Mr. Li worried aloud whether he would be able to marry his high school sweetheart, who had accompanied him here, if he could not earn enough money to buy a home. Such concerns are rampant among young Chinese men, who have been squeezed by skyrocketing real estate prices and a culture that demands that a groom provide an apartment for his bride. “I’m giving myself two years,” he said, his voice trailing off.

By November, the pressure had taken its toll on two of the others, including the irrepressible Liu Yang. After quitting the noodle company and finding no other job, she gave up and returned home.

That left Mr. Yuan, Mr. Li and their girlfriends. Over dinner one night, the four of them complained about the unkindness of Beijingers, the high cost of living and the boredom of their jobs. Still, they all vowed to stick it out.

“Now that I see what the outside world is like, my only regret is that I didn’t have more fun in college,” Mr. Yuan said.

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Jennifer Taylor of Australia has executed a copyright transfer in favor of English in China Today at Harbin Institute of Technology, for the following articles:

This public notice is made because it is believed mischief may be afoot. [...]]]> NOTICE OF COPYRIGHT TRANSFER

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Jennifer Taylor of Australia has executed a copyright transfer in favor of English in China Today at Harbin Institute of Technology, for the following articles:

1. Native vs. Non-native Teachers of EFL/ESL
2. THE ECOLOGY OF ENGLISH IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

This public notice is made because it is believed mischief may be afoot. Any interference with this copyright transfer will be dealt with severely in accordance with law.

Serious ethical issues arise when any author attempts to withdraw an article after it has been accepted, edited and the copyright transfer executed.

Jennifer has unsuccessfully attempted to withdraw one of the articles by stating that “it is no longer available for publication.” She has been asked numerous times to explain her actions but she is stonewalling and instead seeking third-party assistance to have this post removed.

Maybe such a lack of ethics does not matter in the Australian outback but this is China’s Ivy league.

She used our new publication as a sounding board, received free editing and then unsuccessfully attempted to withdraw without any explanation, in direct violation of her contract obligations. This also shows a complete disrespect and lack of loyalty for HIT.

The publishing submission requirements clearly stated:

Submission of an article is taken to imply that it has not previously been published in English, and has not been submitted for publication elsewhere, in English. Authors of articles published in the book series assign copyright to Cambridge Scholars Publishing (with certain rights reserved) and you will receive a copyright assignment form for signature on acceptance of your paper.

Jennifer Taylor signed the Contributor’s Agreement

JENNIFER HAS RESPONDED:

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Jennifer submitted her articles in July 2011 and they were accepted in the same month. Jennifer signed the copyright transfer in the middle of November 2011. One week after she submitted the copyright transfer she stated that her article “is not available for publication at this time.”

Martin: Please explain why your article is no longer available. (November 15, 2011)

Jennifer: All you need to know is that the article I have withdrawn is not available for publication in the journal which you are editing. (November 15, 2011)

Your handwritten note raises even more questions about your integrity.

Due to the apparent lack of integrity and ethics; an editorial decision has been made NOT to publish any article from Jennifer Taylor, now or in the future.

Tomorrow will have its own requirements and difficulties. Things will only get worse when you procrastinate.

The pressure will build and then you will be tempted to do a so-so job just to meet a deadline.

DON’T DELAY – DO IT TODAY

Get it done, get it behind you, take the pressure off.

DON’T [...]]]> DON’T DELAY – DO IT TODAY

Tomorrow will have its own requirements and difficulties. Things will only get worse when you procrastinate.

The pressure will build and then you will be tempted to do a so-so job just to meet a deadline.

DON’T DELAY – DO IT TODAY

Get it done, get it behind you, take the pressure off.

DON’T DELAY – DO IT TODAY

(INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS LAW)

FINAL (Take Home) Exam

Watch the Movies The Insider, Barbarians at the Gate and Thank You For Smoking. All 3 movies are available on the ZSTU intranet.

China is under global political pressure to comply with the anti-tobacco treaty (contract) it has signed. The [...]]]> CONTRACTS

(INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS LAW)

FINAL (Take Home) Exam

Watch the Movies The Insider, Barbarians at the Gate and Thank You For Smoking. All 3 movies are available on the ZSTU intranet.

China is under global political pressure to comply with the anti-tobacco treaty (contract) it has signed. The CCP has asked for your advice on how to proceed.

Using Microsoft “Word” word processing, double spaced, write a formal report to the Chinese Government setting forth your advice.

Print your report and turn it in at the time of your scheduled final examination.

REPORT FORMAT:

MEMORANDUM

TO:

FROM:         (English name and class # AND Chinese name and student number)

DATE:

RE:  Advice regarding compliance with anti-tobacco treaty

You have asked for my advice on compliance with the anti-tobacco treaty. My advice follows:

***

READ FOR BACKGROUND

China Dependent On Tobacco In More Ways Than One

by Louisa Lim February 18, 2011

The eight cigarette-shaped pillars are seen outside the headquarters of Yuxi’s Hongta group.

As if on a pilgrimage trail, visitors to the city of Yuxi in southwest China pose for photographs beside eight cigarette-like pillars and then in front of a hilltop red pagoda, instantly recognizable to most Chinese from the cigarette packets of the Hongta — or Red Pagoda — group.

With 80 percent of Yuxi’s revenue from tobacco taxes, this is the town that tobacco built. In particular, one cigarette brand, Hongta, now owned by the Hongyun group, is responsible for this town’s wealth. Yuxi has a Hongta avenue, a Hongta hotel, a Hongta sports stadium — and even a tobacco culture museum devoted to extolling the pleasures of smoking.

Tobacco Dependence

On a national level, too, tobacco plays an important role, providing Beijing’s biggest single source of tax revenue: Last year topped $75 billion. The Chinese government actually runs the world’s biggest tobacco company and is intimately involved at every level of this deadly, murky industry — from marketing, sales and distribution down to production with widespread reports of village officials forcing farmers to grow tobacco against their will.

Given China’s burgeoning ranks of smokers, the tobacco business has been hugely lucrative for Beijing, with annual profits up almost 20 percent every year for the past five years.

“The industry in China is run by the Tobacco Monopoly Administration, a central government administrative body created in the 1980s, also known as China Tobacco Corp.,” says Stanford University’s Matthew Kohrman, who has researched smoking in China for the past eight years. “This is one of the last bastions of the command economy system. Quotas are set; factories are required to meet them. Once they meet those quotas they are required to shut down.”

The Hongta factory in Yuxi is one of the world’s largest, with an annual production of 93 billion cigarettes. According to epidemiological studies, that’s enough to kill 77,000 people every year.

‘How Could This Be A Bad Influence?’

But despite the fatal nature of its products, most people in Yuxi support the factory, largely because the city is so dependent upon it.

“Of course the Hongta group’s good. It’s made Yuxi rich,” says Mr. Zheng, an elderly visitor to the museum, who has brought his 5-year old grandson to examine the museum dedicated to smoking.

“How could this be a bad influence? It’s just about tobacco production: planting, curing tobacco, all the way to cigarettes,” he says.

The walls of the museum are decorated with photographs of China’s leaders smoking, including Chairman Mao surrounded by a bevy of smiling beauties, vying to light his cigarette. Deng Xiaoping is shown puffing away and quoted as telling Japanese visitors: “I only smoke because I’m so healthy. I hear there are a lot of advantages to smoking.”

There’s a wall of fame for celebrity smokers like Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro and Vincent van Gogh. There are bronze statues of tobacco growing; there are star-shaped arrangements of cigarette filters; but there are no notices pointing out that smoking is bad for your health.

China is failing to curb smoking, despite attempts by anti-smoking campaigners. China has a third of the world’s smokers, with almost 60 percent of adult Chinese men smoking regularly. In January, Beijing marked its fifth anniversary since ratifying the international anti-smoking treaty, the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, with an admission that it had managed to fulfill only 37 percent of its commitments.

The government just announced new moves limiting scenes showing smoking on television and in films, but campaigners say the real problem is structural. In what is itself a violation of the FCTC, the same government body that develops and manages the tobacco industry in China also oversees anti-tobacco efforts.

“The leadership of tobacco control should change,” says Wang Ke’an, who works for the Think-Tank Research Center for Health Development. “The tobacco monopoly should not be involved. … It’s not so good because they give some interference when it comes to tobacco control.”

Tobacco Farmers’ Fate

On the ground, farmers also report interference, this time by village officials. Few willingly grow tobacco, since they say they can make three to five times more growing vegetables. Surveys bear this out, showing tobacco has the lowest revenue-to-cost ratio of all crops surveyed.

A 2005 investigation by a Chinese paper, the Economic Times, estimated the average income among tobacco farmers in Hongta district to be just a quarter of the average annual agricultural income, well below the poverty line. The most recent official government statistics claim that tobacco farmers earn on average $3,500 a year, but on the ground, farmers say their income is as little as a tenth that figure.

Some farmers do choose to grow tobacco, since there’s a guaranteed buyer — the state — and other enticements, including subsidies in the form of free or cheap fertilizer. Tobacco farmer Huang Mei describes how it works in her village.

“The village committee holds a meeting. If you want to grow tobacco, then you tell village officials how much land you will use, and you get cheap fertilizer. They also teach you how to grow tobacco,” she says. “Last year there was a drought, and the government gave us water. If we were growing vegetables, we wouldn’t have had such treatment.”

But there are widespread reports farmers are being forced to grow tobacco, miring them in poverty. According to a 2004 survey carried out by Berkeley professor Hu Teh-Wei and some Chinese professors, 93 percent of tobacco farmers indicated that they would not have grown tobacco if they had not been subject to government pressure. Many say the situation has improved since then. But one farmer who gives his name as Yang insists that in his village, most tobacco growers are forced into it.

“Local officials say they’ve received a notice from above, and every family has to grow some tobacco. Nobody does it willingly, since it does not make economic sense. We only receive half the subsidies; the rest is siphoned off by officials,” he says.

Tax Addiction

Nobody knows how widespread this is, but several tobacco control campaigners have heard similar stories, and farmers interviewed by the Economic Times said their nontobacco crops had been uprooted by village officials. The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration turned down a request for an interview, as did the Hongta group itself.

One thing, however, is clear: Such coercion could be explained by China’s addiction to tobacco tax revenues, at all levels of the government.

“A few years back, most of China’s rural agricultural taxes were ended. One of the few exemptions, though, is the tobacco tax,” says Stanford’s Kohrman. “County officials are keen to see tobacco grown, because it’s the only way that they — in terms of agricultural production — can finance themselves.”

That system seems unlikely to change. Here’s one other reason why: the deputy director of the State Tobacco Monopoly is Li Keming; he’s the brother of the man tipped to be China’s next premier, Li Keqiang.

Smoking may be costing 1 million Chinese lives a year, but the anti-smoking lobby fears the tobacco industry’s high-level political patronage means reform is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Last Updated: Monday, 29 August 2005, 03:59 GMT 04:59 UK

China backs anti-tobacco treaty

The world’s largest tobacco consumer, China, has ratified an international treaty aimed at curbing tobacco-related deaths, state media has reported.

The country’s top legislature announced shortly afterwards it was banning all tobacco vending machines, even in self-administered Hong Kong and Macau.

China has around 350 million smokers, some 36% of the population, according to the World Health Organization.

There are 1.2 million tobacco-related deaths annually, says a China watchdog.

China sold 1,798bn cigarettes in 2003, making it the world’s largest consumer of cigarettes, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

The National People’s Congress announced its decision to ratify the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control on Sunday, Xinhua said.

Parliament leaders “supported the treaty by announcing that China will ban tobacco vending machines of any kind,” the news agency said.

The treaty requires all countries signed up to it to prohibit the sale of tobacco to minors and ban tobacco-related advertising, promotion and sponsorship.

A WHO spokeswoman told the BBC that 78 countries were now party to the treaty, which came into force on 27 February this year.

Jean King, Director of Tobacco Control at Cancer Research UK, said: “Tobacco kills over a million people a year in China, so it is greatly encouraging that the Chinese government has ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

“By banning cigarette vending machines, China is taking an important step towards reducing the toll taken by tobacco on its citizens.

“If the FCTC is to be successful, member countries must take practical action on all the measures it stipulates.”

Negotiations on Global Tobacco Treaty Advance

Related Issue Briefs:

FINAL (Take Home) Exam

Watch the Movies The Insider, Barbarians at the Gate and Thank You For Smoking. All 3 movies are available on the ZSTU intranet.

Read the thread “Developed vs. Developing” on http://chinaholisticenglish.org.

Search “GOOGLE” English for Cigars.

Read:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigar#Marketing_and_distribution

The Chinese manufacturer of the Crown cigar has asked your advice regarding taking their [...]]]> MARKETING

FINAL (Take Home) Exam

Watch the Movies The Insider, Barbarians at the Gate and Thank You For Smoking. All 3 movies are available on the ZSTU intranet.

Read the thread “Developed vs. Developing” on http://chinaholisticenglish.org.

Search “GOOGLE” English for Cigars.

Read:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigar#Marketing_and_distribution

The Chinese manufacturer of the Crown cigar has asked your advice regarding taking their product global.  Discuss the four P’s in order, as and if required. (Product, Place, Price, Promotion)

Using Microsoft “Word” word processing, double spaced, write a formal report to the Chinese manufacturer of the Crown cigar setting forth your advice.

Print your report and turn it in at the time of your scheduled final examination.

REPORT FORMAT:

MEMORANDUM

TO:

FROM:           (English name and class # AND Chinese name and student number)

DATE:

RE:  Advice regarding global marketing of Crown Cigar

You have asked for my advice on marketing the Crown Cigar globally. My advice follows:

***

.

READ FOR BACKGROUND

China Dependent On Tobacco In More Ways Than One

by Louisa Lim February 18, 2011

The eight cigarette-shaped pillars are seen outside the headquarters of Yuxi’s Hongta group.

As if on a pilgrimage trail, visitors to the city of Yuxi in southwest China pose for photographs beside eight cigarette-like pillars and then in front of a hilltop red pagoda, instantly recognizable to most Chinese from the cigarette packets of the Hongta — or Red Pagoda — group.

With 80 percent of Yuxi’s revenue from tobacco taxes, this is the town that tobacco built. In particular, one cigarette brand, Hongta, now owned by the Hongyun group, is responsible for this town’s wealth. Yuxi has a Hongta avenue, a Hongta hotel, a Hongta sports stadium — and even a tobacco culture museum devoted to extolling the pleasures of smoking.

Tobacco Dependence

On a national level, too, tobacco plays an important role, providing Beijing’s biggest single source of tax revenue: Last year topped $75 billion. The Chinese government actually runs the world’s biggest tobacco company and is intimately involved at every level of this deadly, murky industry — from marketing, sales and distribution down to production with widespread reports of village officials forcing farmers to grow tobacco against their will.

Given China’s burgeoning ranks of smokers, the tobacco business has been hugely lucrative for Beijing, with annual profits up almost 20 percent every year for the past five years.

“The industry in China is run by the Tobacco Monopoly Administration, a central government administrative body created in the 1980s, also known as China Tobacco Corp.,” says Stanford University’s Matthew Kohrman, who has researched smoking in China for the past eight years. “This is one of the last bastions of the command economy system. Quotas are set; factories are required to meet them. Once they meet those quotas they are required to shut down.”

The Hongta factory in Yuxi is one of the world’s largest, with an annual production of 93 billion cigarettes. According to epidemiological studies, that’s enough to kill 77,000 people every year.

‘How Could This Be A Bad Influence?’

But despite the fatal nature of its products, most people in Yuxi support the factory, largely because the city is so dependent upon it.

“Of course the Hongta group’s good. It’s made Yuxi rich,” says Mr. Zheng, an elderly visitor to the museum, who has brought his 5-year old grandson to examine the museum dedicated to smoking.

“How could this be a bad influence? It’s just about tobacco production: planting, curing tobacco, all the way to cigarettes,” he says.

The walls of the museum are decorated with photographs of China’s leaders smoking, including Chairman Mao surrounded by a bevy of smiling beauties, vying to light his cigarette. Deng Xiaoping is shown puffing away and quoted as telling Japanese visitors: “I only smoke because I’m so healthy. I hear there are a lot of advantages to smoking.”

There’s a wall of fame for celebrity smokers like Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro and Vincent van Gogh. There are bronze statues of tobacco growing; there are star-shaped arrangements of cigarette filters; but there are no notices pointing out that smoking is bad for your health.

China is failing to curb smoking, despite attempts by anti-smoking campaigners. China has a third of the world’s smokers, with almost 60 percent of adult Chinese men smoking regularly. In January, Beijing marked its fifth anniversary since ratifying the international anti-smoking treaty, the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, with an admission that it had managed to fulfill only 37 percent of its commitments.

The government just announced new moves limiting scenes showing smoking on television and in films, but campaigners say the real problem is structural. In what is itself a violation of the FCTC, the same government body that develops and manages the tobacco industry in China also oversees anti-tobacco efforts.

“The leadership of tobacco control should change,” says Wang Ke’an, who works for the Think-Tank Research Center for Health Development. “The tobacco monopoly should not be involved. … It’s not so good because they give some interference when it comes to tobacco control.”

Tobacco Farmers’ Fate

On the ground, farmers also report interference, this time by village officials. Few willingly grow tobacco, since they say they can make three to five times more growing vegetables. Surveys bear this out, showing tobacco has the lowest revenue-to-cost ratio of all crops surveyed.

A 2005 investigation by a Chinese paper, the Economic Times, estimated the average income among tobacco farmers in Hongta district to be just a quarter of the average annual agricultural income, well below the poverty line. The most recent official government statistics claim that tobacco farmers earn on average $3,500 a year, but on the ground, farmers say their income is as little as a tenth that figure.

Some farmers do choose to grow tobacco, since there’s a guaranteed buyer — the state — and other enticements, including subsidies in the form of free or cheap fertilizer. Tobacco farmer Huang Mei describes how it works in her village.

“The village committee holds a meeting. If you want to grow tobacco, then you tell village officials how much land you will use, and you get cheap fertilizer. They also teach you how to grow tobacco,” she says. “Last year there was a drought, and the government gave us water. If we were growing vegetables, we wouldn’t have had such treatment.”

But there are widespread reports farmers are being forced to grow tobacco, miring them in poverty. According to a 2004 survey carried out by Berkeley professor Hu Teh-Wei and some Chinese professors, 93 percent of tobacco farmers indicated that they would not have grown tobacco if they had not been subject to government pressure. Many say the situation has improved since then. But one farmer who gives his name as Yang insists that in his village, most tobacco growers are forced into it.

“Local officials say they’ve received a notice from above, and every family has to grow some tobacco. Nobody does it willingly, since it does not make economic sense. We only receive half the subsidies; the rest is siphoned off by officials,” he says.

Tax Addiction

Nobody knows how widespread this is, but several tobacco control campaigners have heard similar stories, and farmers interviewed by the Economic Times said their nontobacco crops had been uprooted by village officials. The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration turned down a request for an interview, as did the Hongta group itself.

One thing, however, is clear: Such coercion could be explained by China’s addiction to tobacco tax revenues, at all levels of the government.

“A few years back, most of China’s rural agricultural taxes were ended. One of the few exemptions, though, is the tobacco tax,” says Stanford’s Kohrman. “County officials are keen to see tobacco grown, because it’s the only way that they — in terms of agricultural production — can finance themselves.”

That system seems unlikely to change. Here’s one other reason why: the deputy director of the State Tobacco Monopoly is Li Keming; he’s the brother of the man tipped to be China’s next premier, Li Keqiang.

Smoking may be costing 1 million Chinese lives a year, but the anti-smoking lobby fears the tobacco industry’s high-level political patronage means reform is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Last Updated: Monday, 29 August 2005, 03:59 GMT 04:59 UK

China backs anti-tobacco treaty

The world’s largest tobacco consumer, China, has ratified an international treaty aimed at curbing tobacco-related deaths, state media has reported.

The country’s top legislature announced shortly afterwards it was banning all tobacco vending machines, even in self-administered Hong Kong and Macau.

China has around 350 million smokers, some 36% of the population, according to the World Health Organization.

There are 1.2 million tobacco-related deaths annually, says a China watchdog.

China sold 1,798bn cigarettes in 2003, making it the world’s largest consumer of cigarettes, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

The National People’s Congress announced its decision to ratify the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control on Sunday, Xinhua said.

Parliament leaders “supported the treaty by announcing that China will ban tobacco vending machines of any kind,” the news agency said.

The treaty requires all countries signed up to it to prohibit the sale of tobacco to minors and ban tobacco-related advertising, promotion and sponsorship.

A WHO spokeswoman told the BBC that 78 countries were now party to the treaty, which came into force on 27 February this year.

Jean King, Director of Tobacco Control at Cancer Research UK, said: “Tobacco kills over a million people a year in China, so it is greatly encouraging that the Chinese government has ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

“By banning cigarette vending machines, China is taking an important step towards reducing the toll taken by tobacco on its citizens.

“If the FCTC is to be successful, member countries must take practical action on all the measures it stipulates.”

Negotiations on Global Tobacco Treaty Advance

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