For China’s Professional Cigarette Smokers Life Is Good
LI Hui is a cigarette tester. She tests them by smoking them. And she loves her job:
As one of hundreds of “tobacco appraisers” in China, Li Hui, a petite, pony-tailed mother, has been smoking up to 30 cigarettes a day for more than 20 years. “It’s my job, and I like it,” Li explained in a long profile in the Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper. “Besides, I haven’t seen anyone around me or my friends getting sick from smoking yet.”
Li’s attitude, and the fact that she works for an officially-sanctioned company, Heilongjiang Tobacco Industrial, encapsulate the paradoxes China faces in dealing with a smoking epidemic. The country has over 320 million smokers, more than the population of the United States and over one-third of the world’s total, and the government has been taking small steps to try to discourage smoking, as Quartz previously reported. But with the country’s tobacco regulator and much of the tobacco industry controlled by the state – and tobacco taxes making up as much as 10 percent of state revenues – it’s a tough battle.
Is she ignorant?
Li is an organic chemistry graduate; her job involves smoking “tobacco leaves from every production area across the country,” continuously throughout the day. She is so dedicated she was even recognized as a “model worker” by the city of Harbin.
Well, you need to know that your fags are safe, don’t you…
Posted: 16th, October 2013 | In: Money, Strange But True, The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
