China's Deadly Cravings.(national smoking habit)

The curtains are drawn in the lung-cancer ward of Shanghai No. 6 People's Hospital. The 30 metal beds, installed when the ward opened last year, are all occupied now, mostly by older men in striped pajamas staring forlornly at the ceiling. Hooked up to a respirator, Xu Yugui, 56, has just emerged from surgery that removed a lung blackened by a 36-year, pack-a-day habit. "Now we have realized the dangers of smoking," says his adopted daughter Qian Bin, gently waving a fan over her father. Qian's husband was so spooked by Xu's brush with death he quit smoking--"yesterday," she says. But not everybody has gotten the message. Outside the cancer ward, a 29-year-old doctor in scrubs takes a break after an operation--and lights up a cigarette.

Chinese men are literally dying for a smoke. With 320 million smokers-- more than 90 percent of them male--China consumes a whopping one third of the world's cigarettes each year, the equivalent of a pack a day, every day, for every man, woman and child in the United States. And Chinese smokers are starting to pay the price. Already one in every eight male deaths in China is caused by smoking, and scientists predict the ratio will rise sharply, to one in three by the year 2050. In Beijing, where smoking and smog are a deadly combination, deaths from lung cancer have doubled in the past 10 years; in Shanghai, they have risen tenfold. The epidemic, scientists warn, will fuel a crisis that results in staggering health-care costs--and millions of lonely widows.

Kicking the habit is not an easy proposition in China, where cigarettes are a fixture of daily life. Need to find a wedding gift, pay a bribe or welcome guests into your home? In China, cigarettes will do the trick every time. Chinese icons Mao and Deng chain-smoked into their 80s, and a recent survey showed ...