Public spaces means offices or other working environments as well as public transportation, schools, daycare centers, youth activity centers, gyms, historical sites, and hospitals. (Yes, up until now it wasn’t illegal to smoke inside a hospital).

While Beijing first proposed a ban in 2008, it was vigorously opposed by China’s powerful cigarette industry. China’s tobacco companies have been able to, for the most part, keep warning labels off their products and ensure cigarettes are sold at low prices. Chinese cigarette manufacturers continue to provide incentives to the government by earning huge revenues and employing a vast number of workers. It therefore remains to be seen how strictly the new smoking ban will be enforced.

China is the world leader in tobacco use, with over 300 million cigarette smokers. Cigarette use has long been entrenched in Chinese culture as a social custom, with cigarettes commonly given as gifts.

Chinese officials were banned from smoking in public places last year, while Chinese films and television programs were banned from depicting characters who smoke.

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However, that’s not what the graphic says. Translated from Chinese, this is what’s written:

Smoking Leads to Male Impotence

People who smoke more than one pack a day
will be more at risk
than non-smokers
by more than
40%

Maybe the cultural divide is still too great and the message still isn’t getting through, so we’ll bluntly put it this way: this anti-smoking campaign is comparing men’s penises to a gun, and that smoking will reduce the effectiveness of your substitute killing machine by causing your rigid, burly barrel to go limp.

Just as guns must have straight barrels to shoot out their bullets, we are shown this metaphor that the penis must also remain virile to shoot out its sperm in the proper direction. I mean, just look at those wiggle lines drawn next to the wilting barrel—you don’t want wiggle lines next to your penis, do you?

This graphic was published on the Weibo account of the Southern Metropolis Daily and was accompanied by several fascinating bits of trivia to educate the Guangdong public against the dangers of cigarettes.

For example, quiz yourself with these interesting facts:

• A study of 7,345 junior high school students showed that 9.9% of all respondents had been exposed to cigarette smoke, thus diminishing the capacity of their developing guns
• Male students were five times more susceptible to smoking than female students
• Experts warn that the low cost of cigarettes is boosting the trend of smoking among adolescents, and recommend raising the price in order to help protect gun caches in pants across the nation

Strangely, the NF Daily article linked to by the Weibo post is about adolescent cigarette use and has nothing to do with male impotence, guns or a Robert Rodriguez-type hybridization of the two, leading us to wonder where this gun metaphor came from.

We can only hope that an epidemic of “limp barrels” does not afflict the population of China because there clearly isn’t enough endangered tiger penis and rhinoceros horn to help heal all the crooked shooters in China.

Photos: Southern Metropolis Daily via Weibo

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According to a notice issued by Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission, smoking will be banned in all public government offices, meeting rooms of state organs, nurseries, kindergartens, schools, hospitals, libraries, archives, exhibition halls, science and technological museums, art galleries and other exhibition places, theatres, cinemas, parks, banks, shopping malls, hotels, restaurant, elevators (finally!) and exhibition centres.

While it might seem like common sense to ban smoking in places like kindergartens and nurseries, Shenzhen does plan to take this a step further in the future. The regulations point out that smoking will be “limited” in other venues such as bars and cafés, but not until 2016.

Home page photo credit: The Guardian

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