As China continues to prefer artistic cigarette packaging, representing the designs of Chinese landscapes and embodying essence of China's traditional culture and profound history, other countries have been featuring photos depicting smoking-related diseases on them.
According to a report by Beijing Youth Daily, published during one Framework Convention on Tobacco Control conference in 2008, it was said that printing such images on the packaging would be derogatory to the Chinese culture and its people.
Although such images have proven effective in reducing tobacco consumption in other countries, China requires no plans to introduce such warnings on packaging as the country has strictly followed the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, an international agreement aimed at establishing universal standards for warnings about the dangers of tobacco products," said Duan Tieli, deputy head of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (STMA) and a representative of the National People's Congress.
As a result, graphic warnings such as smokers' rotten lungs, bad teeth, skulls and dead babies on cigarette packaging would not hit China anytime soon. Tieli also stressed that those pictures depicting diseases were not "in line with" traditional Chinese cultural values.
In China, smoking has been a part of Chinese culture and people's daily lives since ages, said Han Meiling, a Beijing-based psychologist.
"Cigarettes are present on happy occasions like weddings and family reunions," he added.
He believes that any effective measure against tobacco can be achieved through written words, like what has been done on Chinese packaging, rather than direct graphic representation of diseases.
According to a report on adult tobacco consumption published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), China accounts for more than 316 million smokers, up by 15 million since 2010. The findings showed that smokers didn't take the warnings seriously.
It was also found that more than 80 percent of the people who were interviewed didn't care about the warnings, and 74 percent of them remained unafraid of the health hazards.