A deceptive and deadly marketing approach that Western tobacco companies were forced to disavow is propelling cigarette sales in China to new heights.

Smokers buy a half-trillion “low tar” cigarettes in China each year, accounting for 20% of all sales in the world’s biggest tobacco market, according to data from TobaccoChina, a trade magazine. And sales are rising, up 50% in 2022 from six years earlier. 

Though cigarette packages don’t actually say “low tar,” they prominently display their tar content, and some incorporate the tar levels – as measured in milligrams – in their name. Zhongnanhai, a popular brand developed for the chain-smoking Chairman Mao Zedong, for example, sells lines named “Black Eight,” “Five,” and so on.

“The Chinese state tobacco monopoly started late but is following Big Tobacco’s ‘low tar’ marketing strategy from the 20th century,” said Mary Assunta, a senior policy adviser at the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance. “It’s not surprising smokers would choose Chinese-branded ‘low tar’ cigarettes. Many smokers mistakenly think they are safer.”

The marketing of “low tar” cigarettes as a less-risky alternative was a major part of the business model of Western tobacco companies for decades as they sought to dissuade smokers from quitting. But the science ultimately didn’t support the claims. Lung cancer rates among older smokers kept rising in the U.S. even after “low tar” cigarette use became widespread, and the National Cancer Institute concluded in 2001 that there was no evidence such cigarettes brought any public health benefits. One anti-smoking group, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, described the approach as “one of the deadliest consumer frauds of our time.”

By the early 2000s, governments began banning such deceptive marketing. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, one of the most globally influential regulators, followed suit in 2010. 

But in China, this recycled business strategy is driving growth at China National Tobacco Corp., commonly known as China Tobacco, a state-run monopoly that controls 99% of the world’s largest cigarette market. 

Total cigarette sales increased in China for a fourth consecutive year in 2023 even as they declined globally, according to the market research firm Euromonitor International. “Low tar” sales accounted for all of this growth. 

New documents obtained by The Examination show that China Tobacco continues to invest in “low tar” research. China Tobacco’s subsidiaries have applied for at least 24 new Chinese patents related to “low tar” cigarettes since July 2023. These include a new method for punching holes in filters to allow smoke to escape, a new tar-reducing filter design and numerous additives designed to improve the taste and smell of “low tar” cigarettes. 

China Tobacco’s branding approach circumvents the country’s obligations under a 21-year-old global treaty that requires or recommends a range of anti-tobacco measures, including banning the use of the terms “low tar” or “light" on cigarette packages, enacting restrictions on sales to children and raising cigarette taxes. That treaty, the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, also outlaws most forms of tobacco advertising.

Previous reporting by The Examination and media partners found that China Tobacco has waged a highly effective two-decade campaign to undermine the treaty. The company’s approach to selling “low tar” cigarettes is another chapter in this story.

Leading China Tobacco brands such as Nanjing, Liqun and Taishan all also produce varieties that retailers market online as “low tar,” as does Yunyan, the world’s No. 3-selling cigarette brand after Marlboro and Winston.

Enabling this workaround is China Tobacco’s dual status as both the country’s sole producer of cigarettes and the government’s tobacco regulator, with a large role in determining tobacco control policy. 

“‘Low tar’ marketing is “a crucial part of the industry’s overall strategy,”  said Yang Gonghuan, an epidemiologist and former deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing. “The tobacco industry is not just a business but also a government department.” 

China Tobacco’s influence stems from its financial might: In 2023, the company paid $214 billion in profit and tax to Beijing. That’s more than the $199 billion Saudi Aramco – a state-owned oil giant – contributed to Saudi Arabia in 2023.

Moreover, China Tobacco’s top executive is a powerful figure in the Communist Party, with a rank equivalent to that of mayors of major cities like Guangzhou or Shenzhen. As a result, the company often gets formal support from other elements of the Chinese government.

In Chongqing, a sprawling megacity whose population now rivals that of Shanghai and Beijing, the municipal government identified the production of “high quality, low tar, low hazard”  cigarettes as a “key point” of development in its most recent five-year economic plan. 

In Yunnan, the country’s tobacco heartland, China Tobacco’s local office recently reported the provincial government “has given strong support to the sales of low-tar…cigarettes” and that the sales of such cigarettes more than doubled between 2017 and 2021.  

The focus on supporting the state cigarette-maker comes at an enormous cost to health. China consumed more cigarettes in 2023 than the next 85 countries combined, according to Euromonitor data. The government does not release statistics on tobacco mortality, but the World Health Organization estimates that 3,000 people in the country die each day from smoking-related diseases – a figure that one study projected could triple by 2050. 

As China’s middle class has grown, the state monopoly has tapped growing concern about the health effects of smoking to deceptively push a product that isn’t actually safer, said Robert Proctor, a Stanford University historian who co-edited “Poisonous Pandas,” a 2018 history of China Tobacco. The response echoes that undertaken by U.S. tobacco companies decades ago.

“Most of what is happening in China now with regards to cigarettes is playing out a story that occurred in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in the U.S.,” Proctor said. “It’s strikingly similar.” 

China Tobacco did not respond to detailed questions for this article.

American import

In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General released a report definitively linking smoking with lung cancer. In response, Philip Morris Co., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and others unveiled “low tar” brands such as Carlton, Winston Lights and Merit.

The appeal was straightforward, and in its early days, encouraged by public health authorities. Tar, a sticky brown or yellow substance that is captured in smokers’ lungs, contains toxic particles. Therefore, smoking a cigarette that produced less of it was both desirable and a reasonable alternative to quitting. At least that was the idea.

Ads for the cigarettes often featured precise measurements of tar content in milligrams, calculations that had been made by testing the cigarettes on robotic smoking machines. Some even nodded directly at fears of cancer with appeals like, “Considering all I’d heard, I decided to either quit or smoke True. I smoke True.”

While such cigarettes were sometimes marketed as technologically advanced, the engineering behind them was often relatively simple. One of the most frequently used techniques was simply cutting tiny holes in the cigarette paper to let more smoke escape before it could be drawn through the filter and into the “lungs” of the testing machines. 

Robotic smoking machines measured these cigarettes as being lower in tar, but in real life human smokers compensated in their quest for nicotine. As the National Cancer Institute would later detail extensively, human smokers covered the tiny ventilation holes with their fingertips, inhaled the smoke more deeply and smoked more cigarettes. 

In 1999, the U.S. Justice Department filed a civil racketeering lawsuit against the major Western tobacco companies. Among the allegations: that the companies deliberately designed “low tar” cigarettes so that they would deliver similar levels of nicotine and tar as regular cigarettes when used by people, but that machines would measure them as having much lower levels of tar. 

R.J. Reynolds, maker of Dorals and Camel Lights, was among those sued for deception. But even as it was mounting its legal defense in the U.S. in 1999 and 2000, China Tobacco was pursuing a partnership in this area with Reynolds, according to documents released through U.S. litigation. 

 “I am very optimistic on our future cooperation on development of low-tar blended cigarettes,” wrote Ren Min, the director of the tobacco monopoly’s science, technology and education office, in a 1999 letter to Reynolds’ representative in China. 

“Whole hog” for “low tar”

After Reynolds inked a cooperative agreement with China Tobacco, it provided detailed information to its new partners on testing methods and standards for tar and nicotine.

China Tobacco was looking to adopt Western practices to ramp up production of what it called “Chinese-style cigarettes,” which the company characterized as “fragrant, low-tar, low-harm.”

China Tobacco was undeterred in this pursuit even as the Western tobacco companies’ efforts to sell “low tar” cigarettes were dealt setback after setback. In the U.S., a judge overseeing the federal racketeering case ruled in 2006 that Philip Morris, Reynolds and others had violated laws by conspiring to hide the health risks of smoking. The decision found that the goal of “low tar” cigarettes had been to “keep smokers smoking; to stop smokers from quitting; to encourage people, especially young people, to start smoking.” By 2010, more than 50 countries banned the use of descriptors like “low tar” and “light.” 

For China Tobacco, however, 2011 was the year its “low tar” investment began paying off.  Sales that year increased a whopping 366% over the year before, and a company scientist was elected to the country’s prestigious Chinese Academy of Engineering for his work developing “low tar” cigarettes. Growth briefly stalled between 2015 and 2016 after an increase in tobacco taxes, but since then has been “stable and sustained,” according to TobaccoChina, the trade publication.

“Chinese manufacturers adopted virtually whole hog the robot method of measuring tar and nicotine values from foreign manufacturers, something that public health scholars now recognize as fraudulent,” wrote the Stanford historian Matthew Kohrman, and colleagues, in “Poisonous Pandas.”

An absence of public health messages also may have aided sales: A 2018 survey of 19,000 people by China’s National Health Commission found that just 18% of respondents knew that “low tar” cigarettes were not less harmful than other cigarettes.

Public health officials, activists and scientists were “working hard to expose the scam of ‘low-tar harm reduction’ but the Chinese tobacco industry relies on their abundant financial resources and profit and tax chips to dominate the discourse,” wrote Wu Yiqun, a physician and leader in China’s anti-smoking movement, in her 2019 memoir, “When the Fire Burns Bright, the Smoke is Light.”

Fueling the growth in recent years is China Tobacco’s successful marketing of “slim” cigarettes, which are typically longer and thinner than regular cigarettes – and often have lower tar measurements because they contain less tobacco. 

In the West, such cigarettes are considered feminine. But in China an increasing number of men have become accepting of the narrow-diameter cigarettes, according to Euromonitor International, which noted that the cigarettes fit with consumers’ growing health consciousness. 

“Slim and superslim cigarettes typically contain lower tar levels, which many consumers consider meets their smoking needs, while minimizing harm to health,” the report said. “Although studies have shown no evidence to support this claim.”  

Protect the throat

On Chinese social media, the supposed health benefits of “low tar” cigarettes are overtly touted. 

Though China Tobacco itself appears not to directly advertise on social media, numerous accounts owned by retailers and others exist wholly or in part to promote the state monopoly’s products. 

One ad on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, released last year for Zhongnanhai’s “Five” brand, calls it “a new generation of low-hazard products that leads the world,” noting that it is low in tar and “good for smokers who want to protect their throat while smoking.” Another, for Nanjing Yuhua Stone cigarettes, claims that “after seven years of research and development, a new breakthrough” has produced “the first ultra low-tar” cigarette. 

Appealing to technology is key to the strategy. On that front, China Tobacco has maintained a robust research and development effort in pursuit of new ways to purportedly reduce the harm of cigarettes. 

Such research will have “zero” positive effect on the health of Chinese smokers and amounts to “the same old shit” done by Western tobacco scientists in the past, said Alan Blum, director of the University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, who reviewed the patent applications obtained by The Examination. 

Instead it is “a tragic waste of time and lives in quest of money through more deception,” Blum said. “All the sadder because the government is the engine driving this disgraceful perpetuation of death and disease.” 

No harm to the lungs

The marketing of “low tar” cigarettes is not the only way China Tobacco uses health messaging to sell a deadly product. A long-standing selling point for Chinese-style cigarettes is their alleged medicinal properties – many are infused with herbs and fungi used in traditional Chinese medicine.  

Unlike herbal cigarettes in other parts of the world that are tobacco free, China Tobacco products are conventional tobacco cigarettes blended with extracts of medicinal plants. Among them are brands variously marketed as infused with ginseng, jasmine and Lingzhi fungi, a famed mushroom traditionally used for improving heart function and energy.

Purchasing documents obtained by The Examination from one of the company’s subsidiaries, Sichuan Sanlian New Materials Co. Ltd., show the extent of the effort to blend medicinal plants with tobacco. The subsidiary sought dozens of ingredients used in traditional Chinese medicine in a request for bids that opened Nov. 28, 2023. Of those, at least 15 were medicines traditionally used to treat lung or respiratory ailments like chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. The list includes liquorice root as well as the herbs fritillary and loquat. All three are common ingredients in Chinese cough syrups.

The medicinal strategy is getting new momentum through the use of “pop beads” or “flavor beads” inserted in the cigarette filters that contain the extracts of some medicines, which are released when the smoker squeezes the filter. 

Fritillary and loquat are listed as ingredients in the brand Jiaozi Kuanzhai, a flavor-bead cigarette made by China Tobacco’s Sichuan Industrial Ltd. Corp. One Chinese retailer posted a video on Douyin advertising the brand, saying that “... it is the first time I found out that cigarettes can clear the lungs and relieve cough.”

Such appeals make those in public health cringe. “The concept of herbal cigarettes having any health benefits is resoundingly rejected in the face of all evidence of the harm and death they cause,” said Assunta, of the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance. “But China is a society with a rich tradition of herbal medicine, and consumers may be more open to herbal cigarettes – especially if pushed by the government.” 

In many cases, China Tobacco combines a medicinal herb with a “low tar” cigarette, essentially twinning the two “health” strategies. 

That’s the case with Dongchongxiacao, a “low tar” cigarette named after a caterpillar fungus used to treat lung cancer and kidney ailments in traditional Chinese medicine. 

One recent ad on Douyin shows a smiling woman attending a presentation and reaching for a package of Dongchongxiacao with a single stick emerging. “Low tar, low harm,” says the advertisement, posted by an account called Guangfuyuan Supermarket Guangfuxuan Red Wood. “No harm to the lungs, no harm to the throat, no coughing.”

Jude Chan is a reporter for Initium Media. A Chinese journalist contributed reporting, and is not named for security reasons. 

Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance receive funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, which also supports The Examination. Please see our editorial independence policy.