Vaping Studies, Vaping vs. Smoking
Vaping, Can It Save China’s Tobacco Epidemic?
Oct
China, the promised land of Big Tobacco.
With almost 300 million smokers, about the entire population of the US, China is funded mainly by cigarette sales. Their tobacco tax generates more revenue than what they spend annually on the military.
Cigarettes are a part of Chinese culture where they are even stocked at wedding banquets for guests to enjoy. Domestic demand alone causes the China National Tobacco Corporation to manufacture roughly a staggering 40 percent of the world’s cigarettes each year. That makes China the greatest producer and consumer of tobacco in the world.
One of the biggest health threats facing China is the tobacco epidemic. A million mainland smokers die every year. According to Oxford University, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, if the trend continues that number will rise to two million by 2030.
“The worst of the epidemic isn’t here yet. It’s yet to come,” says Dr. Homer Tso, the head of the tobacco control board at the University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital and former chairman of the Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health.
“Morbidity is the issue,” says Tso. He explains that the real risk to Chinese society isn’t death from tobacco, but from the costs used to treat patients with cancer, stroke, and heart disease from the smoking epidemic.
In 2003 China signed the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in attempts to curb the tobacco problem. It called for a ban on tobacco advertising, major tax hike, and improved cessation assistance.
Some of this has already come to pass. The Chinese government raised the tax on wholesale cigarettes from 5 to 11 percent in 2015. That same year Beijing banned smoking in indoor public places. A nationwide ban is set to take place by the end of this year. Due to First Lady Peng Liyuan’s intolerant stance towards tobacco, President Xi Jinping is also requiring high-level cadres to refrain from smoking in public and during conferences.
“These are steps,” says Tso. “It’s a big country. It takes time. But it’s happening.”
According to Euromonitor, for the first time in 20 years, tobacco use has dropped by about 2.4%. It may not sound like much, but it’s enough for China Tobacco to declare that the world’s largest tobacco market has gone into a downward spiral.
It isn’t just the new policies that are having an effect, but it’s also due to the new street-style-loving Chinese millennials introducing vaping onto the scene.
Fei Xiang was too busy writing a letter of resignation to hear about China Tobacco’s first fall.
The 27-year-old quit his desk job to open a vape shop in Guangzhou with a friend in October 2016.
Figuring vaping would catch on one day Xiang says, “We saw there was potential for this market. It was new, “after all, and there could be opportunities.”
China’s vaping industry is expanding too fast not to notice in what Fei calls a “period of rapid development.” Just two years ago one would have been pressed to find a vape shop in first-tier cities like Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou. Today there are close to a hundred vape shops in each city selling a vast array of vaporizers and e-liquids.
Vaping is playing a pivotal role as China moves to lower tobacco use by offering smokers a convenient and healthier alternative to cigarettes.
Brian Bai, the founder of Tianjin’s first vape lounge, which opened last December, suggests “the culture is developing quite quickly since people are raising their standards for health. Vaping is no doubt seeing an upwards trend, and cigarettes will slowly get replaced by vape.”
Chinese vape store owners all agree that the industry’s ‘big boom’ started in late 2016, the same year studies announced the first drop in tobacco sales. Though, in northern China, distributors were developing the market as early as 2013.
Considering Western countries were gaining vaping traction a decade ago, China may seem to be late to the game; but China’s love affair with smokeable vapor began long before that. Hon Lik, a Chinese pharmacist, invented the first e-cigarette in 2003, hoping it would help him quit smoking after losing his father to the same habit.
A production hub was established in southern China following Lik’s invention, exporting hardware to countries all over the globe. Even today, 90% of the world’s e-cigarettes and vaporizers still come from Shenzhen. Like iPhones, brand-name vapes are manufactured in China and exported abroad before returning to the mainland again as ‘imports’ and taxed accordingly.
Vaping devices were primarily created for overseas consumers, not Chinese. Thus, the Chinese government had little reason to regulate the industry- until recently.
The regulatory framework is turning out to be a big problem as a growing number of mainlanders adopt the hobby and open shops.
Electronics, wholesale trade, tech, biotech, and even ‘cultural development’ are a number of classifications which have used to register vape retailers in the past when applying for a business license.
“The licensing official looked at me and asked, ‘so what are you actually selling, tobacco products or electronics?’ and I just said, ‘well there is still no law to define this thing, but our products are probably closest to electronics – there is no tobacco involved – so we’ll just define our shop as an electronics store.”, Fei said.
Vaping has since enjoyed an explosion in its market. It is most certainly 95% safer than smoking. What the majority of the public still don’t realize are the chemicals used in vaping, such a propylene glycol, are also used in many processed foods. We take in processed foods that are FDA approved on a daily basis. Yet, the FDA is constantly going back and forth with the vaping community over the safety of vaping.
This battle is mainly caused by the direct impact vaping has made in sales of the tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies. This is why vaping is still demonized by the media to the public. Yet scientific studies have proved that vaping is far safer than smoking.
