China's 300 million smokers are turning to slim and super-slim cigarettes in the mistaken belief that they will be exposed to less harmful chemicals than traditional brands.
The world's largest tobacco consumer and producer, production and sales of slim cigarettes doubled in China in 2014. A total of 15 billion slim cigarettes were sold that year, a drastic increase from 2007 when the figure was a mere 500 million.
Smokers are under the impression that slim cigarettes are "healthier" compared with the regular cigarettes. "It's the lesser of two evils," said Zhang Qingyu, a middle-aged chain smoker who switched to slim three years ago.
"My family support me on the switch because, you know, smoking kills and with such a 'healthier' alternative, I may live longer," he added.
Most disturbingly, slim cigarettes are popular among young smokers and fashion conscious white collars, a large proportion of them being female.
At a cigarette store at Beijing's Xuanwumen, colorful packs of slim cigarettes are prominently displayed in glass counters.
"We have over a dozen slim brands with prices ranging from 12 yuan (approximately 1.8 U.S. dollars) to 32 yuan," said the shop owner. "There are a growing number of slim brands and they sell well," he said, adding that most of his customers are young people.
China's vocal anti-smoking lobby believes that slim cigarettes are "less harmful" myth is a dangerous one, which they describe as a "beautiful trap."
Wu Yiqun, executive vice director of ThinkTank, a Beijing-based NGO committed to tobacco control, said the hazards of slim cigarettes have been greatly underplayed in China.
"There has been no evidence that a smoker is exposed to less chemicals and poisons after switching to slim cigarettes," said Wu, one of China's most prominent anti-smoking campaigners.
"Smokers feel slim cigarettes are less 'fulfilling' so they use other tobacco products, smoke more of them or simply take more drags," she said.
Xu Guihua, deputy head of the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control, said that promotion of slim cigarettes by the tobacco industry misleads consumers.
"There is no such thing as 'safe' cigarettes no matter how slim they are," she said, adding that slim cigarettes are a marketing hoax used by the industry to dupe and extract more profits from the world's largest tobacco market.
Ling Chengxing, head of the China's State Tobacco Monopoly Administration and China National Tobacco Corporation told a meeting earlier this year that the slim cigarettes are "in line with the trend of consumption and tobacco product innovation" and are of "lower costs and cause less harm" compared with the regular smokes.
An article on the corporation's website says that slim cigarettes have a"huge potential market."
China's tobacco industry generated almost 956 billion yuan in taxes and profits in 2013. More than 1 million people die in the country from tobacco-related illness annually - around 3,000 people every day - around 150,000 U.S dollars of profit for each death.
