Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives

325 Pages·2018·11.676 MB·English

by  Matthew Kohrman, Gan Quan, Liu Wennan, Robert N. Proctor

Poisonous Pandas
THE WALTER H. SHORENSTEIN
ASIA-PACIFIC RESEARCH CENTER
Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Andrew G. Walder, General Editor
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman
Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University sponsors
interdisciplinary research on the politics, economies, and societies of
contemporary Asia. This monograph series features academic and policy-
oriented research by Stanford faculty and other scholars associated with
the Center.
Poisonous Pandas
chinese cigarette manufacturing
in critical historical perspectives
Edited by Matthew Kohrman, Gan Quan,
Liu Wennan, and Robert N. Proctor
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any informa-
tion storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford
University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kohrman, Matthew, editor. | Gan, Quan, Dr., editor. | Liu,
Wennan, editor. | Proctor, Robert, editor.
Title: Poisonous pandas : Chinese cigarette manufacturing in critical
historical perspectives / edited by Matthew Kohrman, Gan Quan, Liu Wennan,
and Robert N. Proctor.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. |
Series: Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017046984 (print) | LCCN 2017048149 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781503604568 (e-book) | ISBN 9781503602069 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781503604476 (pbk : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Cigarette industry--China--History.
Classification: LCC HD9149.C43 (ebook) | LCC HD9149.C43 P65 2018 (print) |
DDC 338.4/7679730951--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046984
Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/14 Adobe Garamond
Table of Contents
Preface vii
Robert N. Proctor
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Matthew Kohrman
(cid:15)(cid:23)(cid:22)(cid:21)(cid:25)(cid:16)(cid:28)(cid:27)(cid:13)(cid:25)(cid:29)(cid:28)(cid:12)(cid:19)(cid:26)(cid:21)(cid:22)(cid:29)(cid:23)(cid:17)(cid:25)(cid:31)(cid:30)(cid:23)(cid:28)(cid:24)(cid:27)(cid:25)(cid:23)(cid:31)(cid:22)(cid:16)(cid:26)(cid:26)(cid:25)(cid:22)(cid:27)(cid:14)(cid:16)(cid:17)(cid:19)(cid:21)(cid:29)(cid:16)(cid:28)(cid:23)(cid:22)(cid:11)(cid:25)(cid:10)(cid:16)(cid:22)(cid:12)(cid:27)(cid:22)(cid:26)
Chapter 1 –E xperimentation: Cigarettes in the Communist Base Areas
during World War II 37
Liu Wennan
Chapter 2 –M alformed Monopoly: How Nationalization of China’s Tobacco
Industry Was Shanghaied by a 1950s Cigarette Conference5 6
Sha Qingqing
Chapter 3 –(cid:30)e Chinese Cigarette Industry during the
“Great Leap Forward” 73
Huangfu Qiushi and Matthew Kohrman
(cid:15)(cid:23)(cid:22)(cid:21)(cid:25)(cid:21)(cid:9)(cid:16)(cid:13)(cid:25)(cid:31)(cid:19)(cid:17)(cid:21)(cid:19)(cid:22)(cid:23)(cid:17)(cid:25)(cid:17)(cid:27)(cid:24)(cid:29)(cid:21)(cid:29)(cid:20)(cid:23)(cid:21)(cid:29)(cid:16)(cid:28)(cid:25)(cid:21)(cid:30)(cid:22)(cid:16)(cid:19)(cid:24)(cid:30)(cid:25)(cid:14)(cid:29)(cid:26)(cid:19)(cid:23)(cid:17)(cid:25)(cid:23)(cid:28)(cid:12)(cid:25)
(cid:30)(cid:29)(cid:26)(cid:21)(cid:16)(cid:22)(cid:29)(cid:31)(cid:23)(cid:17)(cid:25)(cid:20)(cid:23)(cid:28)(cid:29)(cid:15)(cid:19)(cid:17)(cid:23)(cid:21)(cid:29)(cid:16)(cid:28)(cid:26)
Chapter 4 – Bourgeois Decadence or Proletarian Pleasure? (cid:30)e Visual
Culture of Male Smoking in China across the 1949 Divide 95
Carol Benedict
vi Contents
Chapter 5 – Curating Employee Ethics: Self-Glory Amidst Slow Violence
at the China Tobacco Museum 133
Matthew Kohrman
part three: money and malfeasance
Chapter 6 – Wrangling the Cash Cow: Reforming Tobacco Taxation
since Mao 157
Matthew Kohrman, Gan Quan, and Teh-wei Hu
Chapter 7 – Tobacco Governance: Elite Politics, Subnational Stakeholders,
and Historical Context 179
Cheng Li
part four: obstructing tobacco control
Chapter 8 – Filtered Cigarettes and the Low-Tar Lie in China 207
Matthew Kohrman, Ronald Sun, Robert N. Proctor, and Yang Gonghuan
Chapter 9 – Aiding Tobacco: Academic-Industry Collaboration in China 233
Gan Quan and Stanton A. Glantz
Chapter 10– Manuals of Obstruction: China Tobacco Blueprints Its Resistance
to the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control 254
Wu Yiqun, Li Jinkui, and Pang Yingfa
Afterword 277
Robert N. Proctor
Contributors 291
Index 295
Preface
China has become the world’s cigarette superpower. By 2014, factories there
were already cranking out almost half the world’s cigarettes—an astonishing
2.6 trillion sticks per annum. Each stick is about 85 mm in length, which
means that China has reached the point where it is producing some 220
million kilometers of cigarettes in any given year. That’s enough to circle the
globe more than 5,500 times, or to make a continuous chain from Earth to
the sun, with enough left over for most of the return trip home.
Managing this production is one of the most lucrative state monopo-
lies in human history: the China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC).
China is renowned for doing things on a grand scale, and here too in the
cigarette realm we are talking about, annually, hundreds of thousands of
hectares devoted to growing tobacco, millions of trees felled for flue- curing
finished leaf, trainloads of natural and synthetic chemicals injected as ad-
ditives, and a workforce of millions making and selling product. Curing
barns, factories, storehouses, and shops link together a supply chain, de-
livering a torrent of cigarettes, charmingly packaged under a multitude
of brands. A favorite figure for designers of these brands since the 1960s
has been the panda. From Shanxi to Yunnan, from Shanghai to Sichuan,
manufacturing arms of the CNTC have used images of pandas to market
their cigarettes, trafficking in the animal’s symbolism of nationalism, gentle-
ness, and ecological ethics. One of the most recognizable and profitable
labels today in China Tobacco’s vast portfolio of brands is Panda Cigarettes,
produced by the Shanghai Tobacco Group and sold in airports duty-free
around the world.
vviiii
vviiiiii PPrreeffaaccee
Enormity is not the only striking characteristic of the CNTC, though.
Also remarkable is the hauntingly familiar damage wrought by its expansion.
Whatever their country of fabrication cigarettes kill, and they kill at a pre-
dictable rate: for every million sticks smoked this will cause one death, thirty
years or so down the road. They kill at this all-too-predictable rate because,
as physical (and pathological) objects, cigarettes are extraordinarily homoge-
neous worldwide. All deliver the same witches’ brew of toxic agents, ranging
from gases like hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide to cancer-causing
metals like nickel, cadmium, and lead, along with radioactive isotopes like
polonium-210. There is a time delay between cause and effect, which is why
most of the world’s cigarette catastrophe lies in the future.
Understanding this mounting catastrophe in China is imperative, and so
too is untangling its origins. Tobacco is a relative newcomer in East Asia,
given that civilization there has a written record spanning some four thou-
sand years. People have been growing and using tobacco in China only since
the sixteenth century, when seeds were first imported by merchants and
missionaries. Factory-made cigarettes are even more recent for the Chinese
mainland: they began to be sold in large quantities only at the dawn of the
twentieth century, when the world’s first multinational tobacco companies
arrived. Legend has it that, roughly a hundred and thirty years ago, Buck
Duke opened an atlas of the world and pointed to China: “Here is where
we’re going to sell cigarettes.”
Duke and his British American Tobacco Company could not have cho-
sen a more tumultuous land onto which to project that dream. Twentieth-
century China would become a cauldron of cataclysmic events for most
of its residents, who suffered decades of war, famine, and revolution. De-
spite such adversity and, to a certain extent, profiting from it, the world’s
largest cigarette industry emerged triumphant. First hatched by the likes
of Duke and a collection of Chinese capitalists, then seized and coddled
by a Communist Party chaired by Mao Zedong, the Chinese cigarette in-
dustry overcame unprecedented political storms, arriving at the threshold
of the twenty-first century bigger, richer, and more deadly than anything
Duke could have imagined. Scarcely studied by scholars is how this Pyrrhic
victory was achieved. How did the Chinese Communist Party nurture an
embryonic cluster of enterprises into a modern-day industrial juggernaut?
In writing this volume, our hope has been to provoke a critical histori-
ography of cigarette manufacturing in China, a country where currently
Preface ix
most people are exposed to toxic cigarette smoke daily. Our starting point
is that cigarettes are industrial and pathological creations. Cigarettes are ad-
dictive killers, the speartips of complex manufacturing systems, possessing
rich (and enriching) histories that have by and large escaped scholarly scru-
tiny. Our historiography challenges the optic—commonplace in the acad-
emy and public health worldwide—that sees cigarettes merely as objects of
consumption, rather than as objects of production. Our goal is to challenge
the reference point of consumer sovereignty dominant in discussions of the
cigarette—where “cessation” is imagined as a burden only for the consumer
(“Just quit!”), while everything that goes into cigarette-making is left un-
examined. As if malaria were to be fought with attention to the mosquito,
while ignoring the swamp. The cigarette is a symbolically saturated object in
China, one produced by sprawling, state-owned industrial enterprises with
enormous financial resources and political power. Industries like these are
good at making themselves opaque, but with the right kind of light, their
opacity can be defied.
Writing history involves unraveling—and reweaving—how the worlds
that people occupy came into being. Writing history illuminates that the
world into which we are born is not the world we have to leave behind. His-
tory can be empowering in that sense, helping us to understand what must
be done, and what must be undone. The cigarette has become a big and per-
ilous part of how we live and die, but the future does not have to imitate the
past. A thousand years from now, people may well look back and wonder
how such a small and deadly device could capture the hearts and lungs of
so many millions—and what kinds of knowledge enabled people to liberate
themselves from the world’s most perfect engine of addiction. Hopefully
this book will provide some answers.
Robert N. Proctor