smokers had tried to stop for at least a day in the preceding 12 months. This contrasts with smokers from Western countries with long-standing tobacco control polices, such as in the US where most smokers report wanting to quit.18 19 While smoke- free policies have been extensively implemented in workplaces in the West, even more importantly cigarette smoking is increasingly being denormalised, making smoking a socially unacceptable behaviour.20 Unfortunately, this is far from being the case in China and serves to weaken the effects of workplace smoking restrictions. We found no signiﬁcant association between smoking control policies and employees’ quitting intentions. Implementing workplace smoke-free policies for safety and production reasons, as opposed to employee health protection, could partially be relevant in explaining this. Smedslund et al, using meta- analytic procedures, compared 19 studies on the effectiveness of workplace cessation programmes and found smoking cessa- tion interventions showed initial effectiveness, but the effect seemed to decrease over time and was not present beyond 12 months.21 The authors attributed this to the proportion of committed ‘hardcore’ smokers who may be less motivated to quit and more likely to be nicotine dependent. In our study, the workplaces where smoking policies had been imposed for 10 years had more heavy to very heavy smokers than the workplaces where smoking control policies had been imposed for 3 years. The smokers from these workplaces with polices in place for 10 years also made less quitting attempts (50%) in the last 12 months than smokers (80%) from workplaces where the relevant smoking restrictions had been implemented for 3 years. After China ratiﬁed the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2005, a series of regulations were enacted by the Chinese government to strengthen tobacco control in public settings such as public transport, cinemas and hospitals, but very few workplaces were affected.14 Even in these public settings, the effects of tobacco control are still less than satis- factory. China is still considered to be in the early stages of the tobacco epidemic. The prevalence of smoking in Chinese men seems to have levelled off, but has not yet dropped. In 2005, as estimated, a total of 673 000 deaths were attributable to smoking in China.22 The adverse health effects of smoking cause a huge economic burden to the Chinese society, with an esti- mated cost of $5 billion in 2000. Of this, $1.7 billion or 3.1% of national healthcare expenditure, was spent on treating smoking- related diseases.23 To reduce such a huge social and economic burden, effective and sustained tobacco control programmes are urgently needed to curb the tobacco epidemic in China. More stringent smoking control policy, therefore, needs to be emphasised in workplaces in China to move more smokers to consider quitting smoking. The limitations of this study are those inherent in any cross- sectional research: no causal inferences can be drawn between workplace smoking control policies and employee smoking behaviours. It is possible that lower smoking rates were evident among employees whose workplaces imposed smoke-free policy before the policies were adopted. Small sample sizes in some subgroups could be another bias in this study, which may limit our data analyses. Another possible limitation in this study is that we relied on participant self-report of smoking behaviour. However, we can conceive of no reasons in the conduct of the survey as to why respondents should falsely report their smoking status. Since this survey was conducted in one multi- national company in Shanghai, the ﬁndings may not reﬂect China at large. Tobacco Control 2011;20:131e136. doi:10.1136/tc.2010.036335 Research paper What this paper adds < Smoking restrictions are uncommon in Chinese workplaces, and where they have been adopted it is primarily due to safety and production concerns and not for the protection of employee health. < As the majority of Chinese smokers are part of the working population, workplace smoking policies have the potential to positively impact smoking rates and attitudes. This is the ﬁrst study to investigate types of smoking control policies in Chinese workplaces and their potential impact on employee smoking behaviours. < The study results show a signiﬁcant association between completely smoke-free workplaces and employee smoking prevalence and daily cigarette consumption, although these impacts diminished over time. These ﬁndings underline the need for more stringent smoking control policies to be enacted in all Chinese workplaces. In conclusion, this study found a signiﬁcant association between the stringency of workplace tobacco control policy and lower smoking prevalence and daily cigarette consumption, although these impacts varied over time. However, smokers’ quitting intentions were not associated with workplace smoking policies. These results call for more stringent workplace smoking policies. Such initiatives should also be extended across China to other public places and the home. Funding This work was partially funded by the Shanghai Health Bureau. Competing interests None declared. Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. REFERENCES 1. WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2003. 2. Marcus BH, Emmons KM, Abrams DB, et al. Restrictive workplace smoking policies: impact on non-smokers’ tobacco exposure. J Public Health Policy 1992;13:42e51. 3. Glasgow RE, Cummings KM, Hyland A. relationship of worksite smoking policy to changes in employee tobacco use: ﬁndings from COMMIT. Tob Control 1997;6(suppl 2):S44e8. 4. Chapman S, Borland R, Scollo M, et al. The impact of smoke-free workplaces on declining cigarette consumption in Australia and the United States. Am J Public Health 1999;89:1018e23. 5. Bauer JE, Hyland A, Li Q, et al. A longitude assessment of the impact of smoke-free worksite policies to tobacco use. Am J Public Health 2005;95:1024e9. 6. China Tobacco Control Report. 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