Gejiu is a city of 135,000 people that lies 280 kilometers southeast of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, and several hours north of China’s border with Vietnam. Sibling mountains cradle Gejiu in a narrow valley, made even smaller by the wide Golden Lake (金湖) which sits at the city’s center.
To the west of Gejiu rises Laoyin Mountain (老阴山) and to the east Laoyang Mountain (老阳山). In Chinese, yin denotes feminine while yang stands for masculine. As Laoyin Mountain dwarfs its masculine counterpart, residents of Gejiu are quick to remark that this symbolizes the comparative strength and formidability of Gejiu’s women.
Although spoken in jest, geography has indeed influenced the station of Gejiu’s men. The ridges that unfold on either side of Laoyin and Laoyang Mountains hold rich deposits of tin that have made Gejiu the site of Asia’s largest tin industry and home to the Yunnan Tin Corporation (云南锡业集团). Beyond these mountains, fertile hills to the south supply leaf for Honghe Tobacco, one of China’s most iconic cigarette brands. Together, tin mining and tobacco production – twin engines of Gejiu’s economy – have united to give Gejiu a lung cancer incidence rate for men that is among the highest in China and 5-7 fold higher than among US populations of comparable age (Qiao et al, 1997).
Outside of hospital wards and accounting ledgers, the history of Gejiu’s tin and tobacco industries rises from the gentle incline of Laoyang Mountain. Half-way up Laoyang sit three-story brick houses, the former dormitories of Soviet technical advisers that helped restart Gejiu’s tin industry after WWII. Further up Laoyang, a new development of multi-story, single family homes with yards and carports houses employees of the Hongyun Honghe Tobacco Group Company (红云红河烟草集团有限责 任公司), the world’s fourth largest tobacco company after Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco. Hongyun Honghe produces some of China’s most famous cigarette brands, including Honghe, Shilin and Yunyan – all named after growing places in Yunnan or neighboring Guizhou Province.
Gejiu sits near the center of China’s tobacco industry yet remains virtually unknown outside of the People’s Republic. Even within China, Gejiu has maintained a low profile for a city with such prominent extractive industries. Friends in Gejiu often invoked the phrase “the sky is high and the Emperor is far away” to describe Gejiu’s relative obscurity. More than once, people in Gejiu joked that few of China’s political leaders could locate Gejiu on a map and would only come to Gejiu if war broke out with Vietnam. Like China’s political leaders, I knew little about Gejiu before traveling there in the summer of 2010 to assist a local public health program. Expecting to find a dusty mining town, I instead discovered a jewel of a city awash in wealth and civic pride for its local corporate giants. As June turned into July, I set out to learn more about Gejiu’s tobacco industry and the Hongyun Honghe Company, perhaps the least well known of the world’s major tobacco companies.
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China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco.
The 2010 Global Adult Tobacco Survey, conducted by the Chinese Centers for Disease Control in partnership with the US CDC and the World Health Organization, estimates that China has 350 million smokers, or more smokers than the entire population of the United States. Smoking in China remains a highly gendered behavior with 57.4% of men and 3% of women smoking, respectively (WHO, 2010). The concentration of smoking among men reflects advertising and marketing strategies that have linked tobacco to traditional notions of masculine identity (nanzihan – 男子汉), political leadership (imagery of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping smoking) and expressions of nationalism and patriotism (cigarette brands such as Zhonghua – 中华). Anthropologists such as Matthew Kohrman have described how exchanging cigarettes forms the currency of male networking and friendship in rural and urban China (Kohrman, 2007).
In 2007, China produced 40% of the world’s tobacco leaf crop on 1,364,500 hectares of land. Although this constitutes less than 1% of China’s total agricultural land area, tobacco leaf contributes an outsized proportion of government tax revenues in tobacco producing regions. Over 40% of land under tobacco cultivation in China is located in Yunnan (Tobacco Atlas, 2009). Many in the industry consider Yunnan tobacco among this highest quality grown in China due to Yunnan’s high elevation and plentiful rainfall. The majority of Yunnan tobacco is grown in seven prefectures located in central and eastern Yunnan – Kunming, Yuxi, Chuxiong, Zhaotong, Qujing, Dali and Honghe (Eng, 1999).
In 2007, revenues from tobacco production contributed 50% of total tax revenues collected by the Yunnan Provincial Government (Tobacco Atlas). An April 2011 Quarterly Economic Update published by the Yunnan Statistics Bureau called tobacco production Yunnan’s “primary mainstay industry” and a “critical driver and support for provincial industry” (云南省统计局, April 2011).
Despite being one of the world’s largest tobacco companies, little has been written about Hongyun Honghe. Hongyun Honghe formed in 2008 through the merger of Hongyun Group and Honghe Group, two formerly separate tobacco companies. This consolidation occurred under permission of the State Tobacco Monopoly Association (STMA), a state organ under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology charged with managing China’s state-owned tobacco industry. Interestingly, the Ministry of Agriculture does not hold authority over the production, pricing or marketing of tobacco leaf. The STMA issues tobacco production quotas and licenses and enforces these directives through the China National Tobacco Corporation, which controls the procurement, transport, storage of tobacco leaf (Hu et al, 2007). This model of vertical governance is intended to create a centrally integrated command chain, although in reality local governments exercise considerable influence over regionally-based tobacco companies (Eng, 1999). The merger that created a united Hongyun Honghe reflects the general trend toward consolidation of China’s fragmented tobacco industry in order to manage inter-regional competitiveness between China’s tobacco companies while positioning the larger industry for greater international influence and expansion.
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To better understand the role of tobacco in Gejiu’s economy, I joined an official Hongyun Honghe tour of tobacco farms during harvest. A close friend attended elementary school with the wife of a Honghe brand supply chain manager. After a flurry of SMS messages between my friend and her classmate, I found myself eating dinner in the well-appointed, company-owned home of Big Qu and his wife (all names are pseudonyms). When my taxi pulled into their new subdivision on the upper slopes of Laoyang Mountain, I noticed that all of the stand-alone homes were painted the same shade of pale yellow. I have come to associate this yellow with young real estate, as it colors the facades of new apartment buildings, luxury towers and residential districts across Yunnan. It is identical in hue to the dry mud that stuccos the walls of family compounds in rural villages – a bit of country aesthetic coloring Yunnan’s new urban landscapes.
Over a meal featuring local seasonal mushrooms, I told Big Qu about my family’s historical involvement in tobacco farming. Generations of my father’s family farmed burley tobacco in the fertile hills of central Kentucky. I related how my great-grandmother, Zelma Crump, managed a 100 acre farm, a portion of which held a Federal tobacco allotment allowing her to grow and sell tobacco to a local curing barn. Issued by the United States Department of Agriculture, tobacco allotments set quotas on the amount of tobacco individual farmers could grow in a given year, thereby supporting the price of tobacco by limiting supply. Zelma kept a small portion of the farm’s tobacco, which she used to roll her own cigarettes, disdaining the introduction of filters. In response to the Surgeon General’s landmark 1964 Report on Smoking and Health, Zelma cut down to smoking just one pack of hand-rolled cigarettes a day. I neglected to mention to Big Qu that Zelma died of emphysema in 1971, after which her daughter sold the farm to neighbors and moved to Louisville.
After hearing my story, Big Qu raised his shot glass of bai jiu and proposed a toast. He had visited Kentucky several years earlier while on a company study tour in the United States and remembered it as “green” and “beautiful,” with hills similar to those in Hong He. At the end of the night, he invited me to accompany him in two days’ time on a tour of tobacco farms several hours to the south of Gejiu in Ping Bian County (屏边苗族自治县). Accepting his offer, I confessed that I had never before seen a tobacco plant; family stories of Zelma were the closest I had ever come to a tobacco farm.
At the appointed time, I waited for Big Qu on the steps of my hotel, watching rain strafe Golden Lake, the run-off unfurling long tendrils of street debris into the blue-green water. Five black SUVs pulled into the hotel’s roundabout, and Big Qu rolled down a window and waved for me to get into the fourth car. At dinner several nights earlier, he had described this trip as a routine checkup on the beginning of the harvest. Now he explained that a company executive, Boss Wang, had decided to accompany the tour and would be meeting with local government officials along the way, cementing the close relation between Hongyun Honghe Tobacco Company and political leaders in Ping Bian County.
We left Gejiu’s narrow valley driving south, descending hills into the broad plain that stretches to Mengzi, Hong He’s new prefectural seat of government. Along the road we passed new mixed commercial and residential developments – acres of recently constructed ghost towns, half the buildings painted Yunnan yellow, the other half unadorned cement. Just outside of Mengzi, we passed a hulking compound of buildings fronted by an enormous statue of a charging bull, the symbol of both Hone He Prefecture and Hong He cigarettes. “That’s the new government seat,” Big Qu explained. “It’s bigger than your White House!” Leaving Mengzi, we began to ascend gentle hills, entering a countryside of unpaved mud roads and sporadic developments of low slung buildings clinging to the side of the road.
July marks the beginning of the tobacco harvest in Yunnan as well as the halfway point in the rainy season. A steady rain fell over verdant fields, low clouds scraping the surrounding hills, as we toured several farms and granary centers. Most tobacco farmers in Ping Bian County are ethnic Miaozu, also known as the Hmong. Families own the land on which they farm, but contract with the Hongyun Honghe Tobacco Company to sell the season’s harvest to company-controlled collection centers and curing barns. Big Qu explained that farmers in Ping Bian are not allowed to sell tobacco leaf on the open market or to other tobacco companies such as the Hongta Tobacco Group (红塔烟草集团), headquartered one prefecture away in Yuxi. Hongta Tobacco Group retains a similar purchasing monopoly over tobacco grown around Yuxi. This system of restricted purchase allows the China National Tobacco Corporation to manage competition between its local partners and brands.
Tobacco farming in Yunnan remains un-mechanized, so farmers pick leaves by hand and then pile them into tall stacks which they carry on their backs. Planting also occurs manually, as does “topping,” a process by which farmers remove the flower of the tobacco plant to promote leaf growth and increase the plant’s nicotine concentration. As our caravan of SUVs pulled up to the first farm, we saw several farmers descending the slick hillside, wearing clear ponchos and shouldering culled leaves to be sorted and dried. Boss Wang stepped out of his car and struck out into the field. A film crew followed behind him, everyone sinking their loafers several inches deep into the spongy mud. Boss Wang wore a spotless pair of hiking boots into which he had tucked his suit pants. I watched from the road as a man in camouflage fatigues spoke to Boss Wang, gesturing out over the field. Standing in the shelter of my umbrella, Big Qu remarked that the man in camouflage worked for the nearby township government.
As the farmers approached the road, I noticed that none were wearing gloves. Harvesting tobacco in the rain increases the risk of acquiring Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS), or acute nicotine poisoning caused when nicotine from tobacco leaves dissolves in rain water and then leaches into one’s skin upon contact with dew. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, dizziness, weakness and fluctuations in blood pressure and heart rate (CDC, 1993). Studies in the United States have estimated that the average harvester working in wet field conditions may absorb the nicotine equivalent of 36 cigarettes from contact with dew per day (McKnight et al, 2005). The risk of Green Tobacco Sickness is particularly high when harvesting flue-cured tobacco, the type of tobacco grown in Ping Bian. Flue-cured tobacco is dried in a heated room and harvested one leaf at a time. Workers snap off individual leaves through “trimming,” a process that occurs over a period of several weeks as tobacco plants develop and mature. Burley tobacco, the kind grown by my great-grandmother Zelma in Kentucky, is harvested as a whole stalk cut at the base and then naturally air dried in the field or in a barn.
Once the farmers reached the gravel road, they turned and headed toward a collection of single-story brick homes built on a gentle incline above the fields. Leaving the farmers, we walked several hundred meters in the opposite direction until we reached a long, narrow building that resembled a storage facility. Boss Wang stood at the front of our group as another man in our party explained that this building housed flues, or ovens and racks used to dry and cure wet tobacco leaf. A man swung open one of the doors to reveal a room of sloped wooden shelves. Further up the road stood a large, open air garage that served as a storage facility and loading bay. Covered trucks parked next to stacks of dry, khaki-colored tobacco, wrinkled and slightly shrunken in comparison to the piles of just harvested leaves awaiting curing. After drying, the leaves are trucked to a factory in a larger town where they are processed and rolled into cigarettes and stamped with the iconic emblem of the Honghe cigarette brand: a charging bull.
We departed the loading facility for lunch at the township government office. Our caravan pulled into a courtyard surrounded by a two-story white concrete building. Women in cooking sleeves stood bent over an open drain, washing dark green vegetables and running in and out of a small kitchen. Inside the dining room, the township government representative joined his colleagues – several men and one woman – all similarly dressed in camouflage pants and jackets. The local government leaders and the Hongyun Honghe employees greeted each other, a flurry of cigarettes exchanging owners across handshakes. After sharing pleasantries, everyone fanned around Big Wang in a wide horseshoe shape as he smoked Hong He cigarettes from an enormous shui yantong, or water pipe. Each time he finished a cigarette, an arm reached out and replaced it, dense puffs of gray smoke following moments later.
Dizzy from second-hand smoke and unable to understand the local dialect, I left the room and wandered around the cement compound. A bulletin board posted in a hallway on the second floor displayed the picture and title of each township government officer. I matched names to the faces I had seen earlier in the morning, noting that not a single one was smiling, perhaps to convey an air of seriousness.
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The Chinese tobacco industry argues that tobacco leaf provides a high-return crop upon which poor farmers and rural agricultural communities depend. In a 2004 article published by the Beijing Economic Science Press, T. Liu and colleagues estimate that four million Chinese families rely on tobacco for their livelihood – either through farming or employment in other sectors of tobacco production and sale (Liu et al, 2004). The STMA has released a more generous count, estimating that 20 million farmers representing 5 million farming households engage in tobacco leaf production (Hu et al, 2007). The economic importance of tobacco has been invoked to justify the industry’s presence in rural communities from the southern United States to Malawi to Brazil. Based on experiences with tobacco farmers in the United States, many advocates and academics working to transition rural communities away from tobacco farming concede that no “silver bullet,” or single alternative crop, offers a natural replacement for tobacco leaf (see Beach et al, 2008).
The notion that no crop can match tobacco’s profitability – an idea promoted by the tobacco industry and accepted by many in public health and government – needs to be critically reexamined in the context of local agricultural economies. Recent survey data from India and China suggests that the economic weight of tobacco relative to other crops varies across communities. A 2004 survey of 586 farm households in Yunnan found that tobacco had a lower revenue-to-cost ratio than fruits, beans and plants grown for vegetable oils. For every 1 元 (yuan) spent on tobacco, farmers received 2.4-2.8 元 in return; the survey found that other fruit and vegetable crops earned farmers 3 元 for every yuan spent (Hu et al, 2006). Certainly the unpaved roads and mud homes of Ping Bian County suggest that Miaozu farmers are not the primary beneficiaries of tobacco’s economic promise. A story with similar themes told through different details has played out in other tobacco-growing communities. From the United States to Malawi to China, government quotas restricting tobacco production and sales have allowed multinational tobacco companies to consolidate economic influence while doing little to advance the health and material wellbeing of farming households.
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Back at the township government office, lunch was served. A lazy-susan circulated dishes of rice noodles, pork and the delicate mushrooms that fill Yunnan wet markets for a brief window of summer. Seated to my right, Big Qu filled my glass with clear rice liquor, pouring from a small metal tea kettle. Conversation continued to flow in dialect, with brief pauses in Mandarin for my benefit – mostly to explain my presence as an “American friend” of Big Qu and current student of public health. If my studies gave anyone pause, it did not show on their faces, warm from afternoon drink and the steady huffing of cigarettes.
In the afternoon, we drove to another farming community where the villagers had planted tobacco right up to the road. Broad green leaves held remnants of that morning’s rain, now reduced to a fine mist that hanged in the air almost motionless. This community struck me as more isolated from the company supply chain than the first one we had visited, without curing barns or storage facilities located nearby. With evening fast approaching, Big Qu informed me that our car was going to break from the group and drive into Ping Bian City, the county seat and site of a large Hongyun Honghe office. The road to Ping Bian City hugged the side of a lush mountain, tracing a river below and occasionally opening to views of hillsides planted with banana trees. When we pulled into Ping Bian, it was well after dark.
Before depositing me at my hotel, where I slept on the company dime, Big Qu drove to the Hongyun Honghe offices to check-in with his staff. He explained that he lives in Ping Bian City in a shared, company-owned apartment for several weeks at a time, leaving his family behind in Gejiu. While Big Qu worked in his office, I chatted with a woman surnamed Zhou, who sat behind a computer screen, one of half a dozen people still working at 10:00 p.m. Zhou moved to Ping Bian when she accepted a job with Hongyun Honghe Tobacco Group after graduating from Kunming Agricultural and Forestry College several years earlier. Like Big Qu, she did not consider Ping Bian home, often escaping to Mengzi and Gejiu during her leave time. “Do you like it here?” I asked her. “Not really; there is nothing to do. The conditions here are very poor.”
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Why do farmers in Ping Bian continue to plant such a tightly controlled, labor intensive crop? The oversight that the STMA exercise over tobacco farmers frees farming households from worrying about storage, marketing and transportation costs. In losing access to an open market for their product, farmers are also absolved of responsibility for managing tobacco’s complicated supply chain. Many farmers may also be unaware of alternative crops, or may believe that tobacco leaf offers the highest return for their investment. Farmers are notoriously risk averse, and surveys of tobacco farmers in the southern United States suggest that those farmers most likely to transition away from planting tobacco have greater training in risk management than their more reticent peers (Beach et al, 2008). These findings have sparked a nascent conversation among public health experts about the need to integrate agricultural development into broader tobacco control initiatives, including efforts to better educate farmers on risk and reward.
Incorporating agricultural development into tobacco control faces significant obstacles in a country where the Ministry of Agriculture holds no authority over tobacco farming and where local and provincial government officials refer to tobacco as a pillar of economic development. Chinese tobacco companies actively promote their centrality to China’s economic and human development initiatives. Like their international peers, Chinese tobacco companies spend enormous sums on corporate social responsibility projects (CSR) designed to bolster public and official support for their industry. These CSR projects include the so-called “Hope Schools” tobacco companies sponsor in rural areas, the scholarships they provide to high school students and the massive, 58 million dollar sports complex built by the Hongta Tobacco Company outside of Kunming before the 2008 Summer Olympic Games (Li, 2010; 红云红河烟草集团, 2009; China Sports Today,2008).
Boss Wang’s tour of Ping Bian tobacco farms fits into this larger corporate strategy – the boots sinking into mud, the exchange of cigarettes before lunch and the guided tour of company facilities provided by the local government all serve to solidify the already close relationship between Ping Bian County political leaders and Hongyun Honghe executives. Notably, the actual farmers had no role in our tour; Boss Wang interacted with government officials, supply chain operators and other company employees, but never spoke to the men and women trimming leaves on the slick hillside.
Efforts to reduce tobacco use in China will require action on many fronts – in clinics, government offices, schools, workplaces, retail stores and international forums. Earlier this spring, China’s Ministry of Health unveiled a national public indoor smoking ban applying to hotels, restaurants, theaters and transportation facilities. Reflecting the Chinese government’s conflict of interest in regulating tobacco, the ban excludes offices and government workplaces and has vague penalty guidelines. Despite these challenges, Ministry of Health officials have signaled a greater intention to implement the legally-binding articles of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which China signed in 2003 and ratified in 2005.
Universities and civil society organizations have also begun to mobilize in the fight against tobacco through sponsoring public education campaigns, lobbying government officials and working to encourage smoking cessation and tobacco education among Chinese physicians and healthcare professionals. As the tobacco control movement in China slowly builds momentum, public health advocates will need to consider the full production chain of tobacco, a process that begins when Hmong farmers in Ping Bian, Yunnan contract their fields and turn over their leaves to “Big Tobacco.”
Mike Frick is a graduate of Harvard School of Public Health and has been living in Yunnan off and on since 2007.
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