And in the summer, it keeps mosquitoes away. Bai is part of a new generation of Chinese youth for whom smoking occupies an important place, along with boys, posters of movie idols, almost anything American and small stuffed animals. They will sell to anyone. The country with perhaps the world's greatest smoking problem is facing the greatest youth smoking problem, according to recent Chinese research. In some places, up to 59 percent of high-school boys and 22 percent of girls smoke, according to several studies.
China is the largest tobacco market in the world.
Its 300 million smokers represent one-third of the global cigarette market, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1999. A year earlier, the World Health Organization estimated that 2 million of the 10 million people worldwide who will die from smoking-related causes each year will be Chinese. But Western experts say the efforts are half-hearted. The main reason is that Chinese tobacco companies, which are run by the government, pay more taxes than any other industry in the country. The finances of some provinces are almost entirely dependent on tobacco, like Yunnan in the southwest, which gets 70 percent of its revenue from tobacco.