After initiating a city-wide smoking ban, raising cigarette taxes, and banning their depiction from TV and movies, Authorities are redoubling their efforts to get people to stop smoke by incentivizing them with contest prizes.
At last Wednesday's release for an annual white paper on smoking, Beijing Health and Family Planning Commission spokesperson Gao Xiaojun said health authorities will organize contests to encourage smokers to quit.
Specific details weren't released, but the Beijing municipal government has already held one such contest last year that gave away three top prizes worth 20,000 yuan each. In the contest, 8,857 eligible participants quit for 100 days from July to October for a chance to win 30 prizes valued at 1,000 yuan and 300 prizes worth 100 yuan.
Due to the contest, by which participants had to attend anti-smoking clinics and seminars, authorities claim 656 Beijing residents successfully quit smoking.
And while Beijing is not currently hosting a cigarette-quitting contest, other Chinese cities like Kunming and Tangshan hope to entice smokers to quit their habit with similar contests.
Cigarette-quitting contests have been around for a while. Here's a Henan man who won 2,000 yuan in a contest held back in 2008:
2016 Cigarette-quitting contests
Just as we told you back in January, Wednesday's white paper said 200,000 Beijing residents have stopped smoking, reducing the city's cigarette users to just 22 percent. That's a 1.1 percent decrease from statistics taken in 2014 from before the smoking ban was first implemented.
At that time, we told you that less than a third of Beijing adults said they understood the health consequences that come from lighting up. And yet, the quitting rate of Beijing smokers rose last year by almost 2 percentage points to 16.8 percent while another 16 percent of smokers say they plan on smoking in the next 12 months.
In addition to the 10 Beijing hospitals offering anti-smoking clinics, Chinese smokers have tried to kick the habit through a variety of techniques that include vaping, tobacco patches, and nicotine-replacement gum. Some smokers have opted to replace their regular cigarettes with slim menthol and green tea cigarettes because they are considered to be "less harmful."
What many smokers don't realize is that these "light" cigarettes may actually increase chances of cancer, not reduce them.
However, there is always one surefire, final option: an outright ban on smoking throughout the country, just as proposed by the World Heath Organization.
In 2015, 733,000 Chinese smokers were diagnosed with smoking-related illnesses. Every 30 seconds, somebody in China dies as a result of smoking-related causes.
After initiating a city-wide smoking ban, raising cigarette taxes, and banning their depiction from TV and movies, Authorities are redoubling their efforts to get people to stop smoke by incentivizing them with contest prizes.
