Amanda Zhang was planning a quiet dinner out with her mother, who had recently undergone surgery for lung cancer. But as Ms. Zhang walked through a shopping mall, she was suddenly confronted by clouds of cigarette smoke in the corridor outside the restaurant.
Worried about her mother’s health, Ms. Zhang, a student in her 20s, approached the source, a middle-aged couple, and pointed out that smoking in indoor public areas was not allowed in Nanjing, a city in eastern China. When they persisted, she went into the restaurant, pulled out her phone and began photographing them through the window.
The man rushed inside and started berating her. He shoved his own phone in her face, taking photos. His family members, who were also eating at the restaurant, joined in the scolding. “If you don’t want to breathe smoke, stay home!,” his daughter can be heard screaming in a video Ms. Zhang recorded, which was reviewed by The New York Times.
Such friction is not unusual in China, which consumes roughly half the world’s cigarettes and where enforcement of local smoking bans can be lax or virtually nonexistent. Smokers routinely light up at bus stops, elevators, parks, restaurants and even hospitals.
While tensions have simmered for years, disputes over smoking are becoming more visible — often amplified by social media — as a younger generation increasingly confronts smokers in public venues and demands stronger enforcement of rules.
“My mother told me not to meddle in others’ business, even though she has lung cancer,” Ms. Zhang said in an interview. “But the smokers have become out of control these days.”
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In June, a man in Shanghai was injured in a brawl at a restaurant after trying, according to state media, to shield his pregnant wife from secondhand smoke.
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In April, a woman surnamed Wang confronted a man who was smoking at a bus stop in Shenzhen. She splashed fruit juice on his hand, according to a police report cited by state media. Both were taken to a police station, where an officer strip-searched her, Ms. Wang said in a post online, an ordeal that set off an outcry on social media.
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The same month, the police responded to another smoking-related assault at the Shanghai Disney Resort. That 34-year-old smoker apologized and provided compensation to the 24-year-old man who had complained, according to a police statement.
Smoking is less common among young Chinese. Just 10 percent of people aged 15 to 24 were smokers in 2024, less than half the national rate.
The issue also has a distinct gender dimension.
Half of men in China smoke, compared with less than 2 percent of Chinese women.
“In Chinese culture, smoking cigarettes is considered a masculine thing. It is acceptable,” said Lu Pin, a Chinese feminist activist who is based in the United States. “The police also participate in and support this aspect of male culture, so they won’t invest resources” in enforcing anti-smoking rules, she added.
By contrast, smoking by women historically has been frowned upon in official propaganda.
“Nationalist trailblazers began tarring female smoking as ‘Western humiliation’ in the early 1900s,” said Matthew Kohrman, an anthropologist at Stanford University who studies China’s tobacco industry and gender issues. When the Communist Party took over in 1949, it “excoriated female smoking anew but also rebuilt the country’s war-torn tobacco industry” as a source of revenue, he said.
The wife of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, a former smoker himself, publicly campaigned against smoking years ago, yet change has been slow. Bans exist in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but there are no nationwide rules.
A decade ago, draft legislation for a national indoor smoking ban was blocked by China’s State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, experts have said. The administration both regulates the industry and operates the China National Tobacco Corporation, the country’s dominant cigarette maker. The company’s profits, together with taxes on tobacco, account for 7 percent of China’s annual revenue — an amount nearly equivalent to what the country says it spends on defense.
“Given the fact that the people selling tobacco are the people setting the policy to control tobacco, there’s a lot of conflict of interest there,” said Ka Hung-Chan, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford who studies China’s tobacco control policy.
Tightened state control in recent years also has stifled anti-smoking media campaigns and deterred lawyers who once pursued lawsuits against those seen as failing to uphold no-smoking rules, experts say.
Such changes have made tobacco-control advocacy more challenging, said Yang Gonghuan, a former deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
When Ms. Zhang, in Nanjing, urged the police to penalize the smokers she had confronted in the mall, the department refused, calling it a minor offense. She also filed complaints with multiple municipal bodies, to no avail.
“As an ordinary person, I feel a sense of helplessness about this,” Ms. Zhang said. “I just hope they carry out the law.”
But after she posted messages online about the failure of her advocacy efforts, her social media accounts were silenced.
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