A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-twentieth century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliché to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last fifty years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fueled a tripling of the world's annual consumption of cigarettes. At the forefront is the China National Tobacco Corporation, now producing forty percent of cigarettes sold globally. What's enabled the manufacturing of cigarettes in China to flourish since the time of Mao and to prosper even amidst public health condemnation of smoking? In Poisonous Pandas, an interdisciplinary group of scholars comes together to tell that story. They offer novel portraits of people within the Chinese polity-government leaders, scientists, tax officials, artists, museum curators, and soldiers-who have experimentally revamped the country's pre-Communist cigarette supply chain and fitfully expanded its political, economic, and cultural influence. These portraits cut against the grain of what contemporary tobacco-control experts typically study, opening a vital new window on tobacco-the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide today.
"This is a factually detailed, erudite, and imperative historical record of tobacco in China, compiled by experts in the field from both inside and outside China. It is at times technical, and at other times personal, poignant and philosophical. It does not mince its words as it looks both backwards and forwards in time."
Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control
"Poisonous Pandas is a stupendous and long overdue achievement. From the Communist Base areas in the 30s and 40s, through the Great Leap, the early reform period and into the present, we learn how the cigarette in China has been developed, represented in advertising and popular culture, gendered and sexed, mythologized and celebrated, argued and fought over. Here, cigarettes become agents of capit
Duke University
"Part cultural and social history of tobacco in China and part backdrop to the urgent health crisis it has caused, this is a terrific collaboration exploring the social, cultural, political, and fiscal arrangements of one of the most deadly products in one of the world's most populous nations. It is the most definitive and comprehensive study of China's tobacco problem to date."
