In China, which consumes roughly half the world’s cigarettes and where local smoking bans are rarely enforced, friction between smokers and a younger, largely smoke-free generation is rising. This younger cohort increasingly confronts smokers and uses social media to amplify its grievances.

Smoking in China also demonstrates a stark gender divide: half of Chinese men smoke compared to fewer than 2 percent of women. This disparity reflects a long history of social stigma directed at female smoking in official propaganda. “Nationalist trailblazers began tarring female smoking as 'Western humiliation' in the early 1900s,” Stanford anthropologist Matthew Kohrman, a faculty affiliate with APARC who studies China’s tobacco industry and gender issues, tells the New York Times. When the Communist Party took over in 1949, it “excoriated female smoking anew but also rebuilt the country’s war-torn tobacco industry” as a source of revenue, he said. Read the article >