Guaranteeing the country's 1.3 billion people public security and extending them a longer, healthier and happier life has always served as a primary target in the Chinese government's campaign to build a moderately well-off society.

However, smoking is one of the most fatal threats to the health of Chinese people. China has the world's largest smoking population and statistics show that the number of people who die of tobacco-related diseases is more than that of any other individual country. Currently, there are 300 to 350 million smokers in China, 30 percent of the world's total smoking population.

Of the world's 6 million people who die of tobacco-related causes every year, 72 percent live in the middle and low-income countries, including 20 percent in China.

In 2000, more than a million people died of smoking-related diseases in China, 12.2 percent of the country's total number of deaths. The number was greater than the number who died of AIDS, tuberculosis, traffic accidents, and suicide combined. About 100,000 people in the country die from secondhand smoking every year.

Given that the diseases and fatalities resulting from the use of tobacco have an obvious time lag, the number of people likely to be killed by smoking in the future is expected to increase. If effective measures are not taken to curb the widespread prevalence of smoking, it is estimated that the number of deaths directly related to the use of tobacco will reach 2 million in China by 2025, 15.8 percent of the country's estimated 12.64 million deaths.

The use of tobacco not only harms people's health, it also results in an enormous medical bill for the country and a huge loss of labor. Studies indicate that China's medical spending directly related to smoking amounted to 166.56 billion yuan (US$24.95 billion) in 2005, about 19 percent of the country's total medical outlay that year.