Recently, the Center for Tobacco Control Research,ZUSM, published a paper titled “Male smoking reduction behaviour in response to China's 2015 cigarette tax increase” in BMJ Tobacco Control. Tobacco Control is a leading international journal which is ranked 5^th among the 162 public health journals (SSCI; IF:6.22).

The paper was published when the Ministry of Finance of the People's Republic of China drafted a consumer tax policy, World Health Organization (WHO) regarded the findings of this research as “robust evidence” and strongly recommended a new cigarette tax increase policy in China. The key messages of the paper were reported by The Global Alliance Against Chronic Respiratory Diseases Newsletter (GARD Newsletter), an organization leaded by WHO.

This study was funded by the National Nature Science Foundation of China. The first author is Dr. Lingwei Yu of the School of Public Health and the corresponding author is Professor Tingzhong Yang, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research. This study was the first to evaluate male Chinese smokers’ reported smoking reduction behaviour following China’s 2015 cigarette tax increase, providing empirical evidence for national tobacco control policies. The study found that about one in five male Chinese smokers reduce their smoking behaviour to as the cigarette tax increase in 2015. This is a relatively large impact given the very modest tax increase. Even with the 2015 increase, the excise tax represents only 36.3% of the cigarette price in China. Tax increases are needed to achieve the WHO’s recommended level of 70%.

Table 3 Reported reduction in cigarette consumption by demographic and smoking characteristics among 2244 smokers

Link of the article：https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2019/05/29/tobaccocontrol-2019-055053

Link of GARD’s report：https://gard-breathefreely.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/GARD-Newsletter-V2N2_FINAL_2019-06-19.pdf