(Ecns.cn)--The Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), one of the country's most prestigious academic bodies, has come under fire in recent days for selecting Xie Jianping, a scholar who specializes in refining low-tar cigarettes, as one of its new academicians.
"We've submitted a letter to the academic body asking them to rethink their choice, because the low-tar cigarette Xie has been working is completely pseudo-science," Xu Guihua, deputy director of the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control (CATC)，told China Daily on Thursday, when the organization held a discussion for experts to further study the issue.
Xu added that low tar does not mean less harm, and that low-tar cigarettes had been proven as early as the 1950s to be no less harmful than regular ones.
Xie, 52, is vice president of the Zhengzhou Tobacco Research Institute under the state-owned China National Tobacco Corporation. Dubbed "Killer Academician" and "Tobacco Academician" by Web users, he has received multiple awards from the Chinese government for finding ways to reduce tar in tobacco, as well as adding medicinal herbs to cigarettes which allegedly counter their harmful effects.
However, "low-tar cigarettes, a response by the industry to the discovery in the 1960s that smoking could kill, don't reduce the harm at all. They are just intended to mislead the public with hype," said Sarah England, a tobacco control specialist with the World Health Organization office in China, during an interview with China Daily.
She cited accepted scientific findings that almost 50 percent of long-term chain smokers will die from smoking-related diseases such as lung cancer.
"He is trying to make people more addicted to smoking and is now elected to be an academician? How strange! Millions of people have died from smoking in our country," reported Reuters, citing a micro-blogger on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.
"Xie's election is our country's compromise to the tobacco industry," revealed another micro-blogger.
The tobacco industry provides a big share of tax revenue for the country, commented Wei Fusheng, an academician at CAE and a researcher at the China National Environmental Monitoring Center.
Yang Gonghuan, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDCP)， told the Beijing Times on Monday that Xie's research was always supported by tobacco corporations and therefore suspect. "Many tobacco companies have bribed scientists in China," Yang said.
A report by Xie published in 2003 in the Acta Tabacaria Sinica, an authoritative academic journal, revealed that highly popular cigarette brands such as "Zhongnanhai" and "Baisha" saw a surge in sales in 2001 and 2002 by dint of Xie's research findings.
"Xie's election is a shame to the CAE. It shows that the academics who selected him are ignorant of global anti-smoking trends," noted Yang Gonghuan. Yang cited a survey carried out by the Center for Disease Control, which found that 85 percent of people polled believed low-tar cigarettes to be harmless or not as harmful as ordinary cigarettes. Such beliefs were especially common among educated people.
Yang's criticism was echoed by Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the CCDCP, who said that the election was a sign that even scientific circles in China are not fully aware of the true harm done by tobacco. "Without corrections, this will further mislead the general public to believe low-tar cigarettes cause less harm to health," he told China Daily.
"It's high time for the central government to make the right decision," he suggested, stressing that to remedy the situation health departments should be allowed to regulate the tobacco industry.
However, Wei Fusheng denied the accusations, saying that "the country still needs the tobacco industry. The anti-smoking campaign takes time and should be advanced gradually. The low-tar cigarette is a necessary step to completely solving the problem."
Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that China has more than 300 million smokers. Smoking has been banned at all indoor public venues since May this year, but such rules are regularly flouted. Nearly 1.2 million Chinese people die from smoking-related diseases every year.
"The Chinese have long been associated with smoking. It has been a part of life for hundreds of millions of people, which makes it hard to impose a blanket ban on it," Wei explained.
