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SkullysBones t1_iyj7sig wrote

Reply to comment by Longjumping_Plum_964 in Smoking increases the risks of 56 diseases and kills more than one million adults in China each year from 22 different causes. The study included over 512,000 adults who were recruited during 2004-08 from 10 diverse urban and rural areas by Wagamaga

The tobacco companies are all majority owned by the state. They sell something like a trillion cigs internally in China every year. Probably a difficult source of revenue to let go of.

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shape_shifty t1_iyjj75r wrote

It's money coming from its own population so for a very economically centralized economy such as China it isn't a question of profits. It's more about social acceptance and the cost price of enforcing control if cigarettes were banned. In a very narrow vision of profit maximising, it would be banned because it would reduce the cost of healthcare for a rapidly aging population.

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