Chinese cigarette producing city’s draw for tourists shows challenge of reducing smoking

Visitors mill around a bright red hilltop pagoda in southwest China, gazing down at a sprawling cigarette factory that has put an otherwise unremarkable city on the map.

China is home to a third of the world’s smokers and tobacco-related diseases are a major cause of death in the country – and likely to worsen as its population rapidly ages.

The Chinese government hopes to dramatically reduce that by the end of the decade, but is struggling to do so as it clashes with a powerful state tobacco monopoly and local economies reliant on the crop.

That contradiction smoulders in Yuxi, Yunnan province, whose nascent tourism businesses and farmers thrive on its history of cigarette production.

A mostly agricultural area with incomes lower than the national average, the city has hitched its fortunes to tobacco, which accounted for almost a third of its gross domestic product in the first quarter of last year, according to official figures.