May 31st is World No-Tobacco Day. China’s consumption of Tobacco has reached alarming levels. Nearly one in four persons is a smoker. To address this concern, China may follow the example of other countries in raising tobacco taxes to discourage smoking.

Yunnan Province in southwest China is famous for its natural beauty. Less well-known are its tobacco plantations. The locally grown tobacco is favored by smokers for its distinct aroma and taste. With more than 45 percent of the Yunnan provincial government’s tax revenue coming from tobacco, it is truly China’s tobacco kingdom.

"Our family has been planting tobacco leaves as early since the time of my granddad. It’s our main source of income, the money is enough to pay our children’s education, bills and house maintenance. We also receive government subsidies for tobacco farming," said Pu Hongfen, a tobacco farmer in Yuxi, Yunnan Province.

From Yunan Province we traveled 2,500 miles. About 15 years ago Yunnan’s Hongta Group, then the nation’s largest tobacco producer, took over a local tobacco company in Jilin Province. The town boomed and locals were quick to cash in from the industry ever since. Here cigarettes are processed, rolled, and packaged.

China produces almost 40 percent of the world’s tobacco leaves, and nearly half of the land used to grow tobacco in China is located in Yunnan. The high-quality leaves from Yunnan have helped many tobacco companies in other provinces roll out their own cigarette brands. Even here at the country’s northeastern China-DPRK border city, the "Changbaishan" brand has become the city’s business card.

But putting the economic benefits of the tobacco industry aside for a moment, what about the health concerns？

According to The Economist magazine, China has 300 million smokers and about a third may eventually die from tobacco-related illnesses. Many of them will eventually accrue huge medical bills owing to their puffing habits. With the mounting cost of healthcare in the country, many are advocating tobacco control as a measure of wide-scale health prevention.

"We’ve seen in other developing countries where raising taxation on tobacco has been effective in terms of cutting down the number of smokers. But in China, in theory raising the taxation on tobacco might lead to cutting down smoking and increasing government’s tax income, but in practice China has its own characteristics, for instance: when cigarettes are no-longer affordable for addicted smokers, they would just switch to lower quality ones, most likely the counterfeit ones with even higher tar content. So tobacco control in China is not just about raising the taxation," said Dr. Xu Chuanchen of the Center for China Public Sector Economy Reserach, Jilin University.

Given the widespread levels of smoking in China, it would take more than simply official carrot and stick measures to kick the nicotine habit.