U.S. Cigarettes: Secret Pleasure in Korea

When South Korean authorities lifted restrictions on the sale of imported tobacco this month, some Koreans became two-pack smokers--puffing away at domestic cigarettes in public but keeping a pack of foreign cigarettes to inhale in private.

The double life of tobacco addicts is one of the more peculiar manifestations of bubbling nationalism in South Korea. American brands are now widely available and nearly as cheap as the domestic competition. But smoking them is simply unpatriotic.

“Taxi drivers will yell at you if they see you with foreign cigarettes,” said an urbane Korean smoker who switches from Parliament 100s to the popular, home-grown “88” brand--named after the 1988 Olympics--when he leaves the privacy of his office.

A prominent clergyman confesses that he smokes an occasional Lark at home but begs that his name not be published.

“Koreans may be smoking American cigarettes when they’re alone, but they don’t dare smoke them in public,” said Chun Dai Lyun, general secretary of the Seoul YMCA and one of the organizers of a nationwide boycott of foreign tobacco. “They’d feel shame.”

American cigarettes still carry a strong stigma, dating back to the 1950s, when they were bartered as a luxury currency in the war-flattened Korean economy. Smoking them was illegal until a few years ago, and they were available only through black-market channels.

Now the government has responded to lobbying by U.S. tobacco firms and a trade complaint by the U.S. Commerce Department by allowing full access to the Korean market, where about 80 billion cigarettes are smoked each year.

On July 1, import quotas were abolished and foreign tobacco firms were allowed to advertise and set competitive prices, a change that is expected to expand their share of the market from 0.2% to as much as 5% over the next year.

Howls of Protest

The liberalization raised howls of protest--and spurious allegations of dumping--from the domestic tobacco industry, which is controlled by the state-run Korean Monopoly Corp. Opposition also came from an unexpected quarter: the smokers themselves.

Chun said his boycott campaign has taken root among the 300,000 active members of the Seoul YMCA and has spread to 37 local YMCA branches nationwide.

“The best thing is not to smoke,” Chun said. “But if you can’t quit, why not stay with a Korean brand?”

For some, the message takes on anti-U.S. overtones. South Korea’s radical student movement has embraced the American cigarette boycott with a dogma that links the push for greater tobacco and agricultural imports to a supposed U.S. conspiracy to divide the Korean peninsula militarily and weaken the South Korean economy.

U.S. industry executives see the resistance as a temporary phase.

“There’s been a lot of emotion expressed in Korea,” said Raymond K. Donner, a spokesman for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco. “I think some of it is nationalistic and some of it is the exuberance of youth. Maybe it’s something to be expected when you open up a market that has been closed for so many years.”

The American side characterizes the tobacco flap as typical of immature economic relations with South Korea, which racked up a $9.6-billion trade surplus with the United States in 1987. U.S. officials point out that Korean growers exported twice as much tobacco, in the form of tobacco leaves, to the United States as the country imported in American cigarettes last year.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz blasted South Korea in a speech delivered in Seoul last Monday for expecting to enjoy the fruits of free exports to the United States while insisting on protecting its home markets. Shultz declared that the United States will continue to push for greater access.

But Korean critics say the tobacco dispute has as much to do with health issues as macroeconomics.

“The United States says cigarettes are not good for your health: ‘Don’t smoke,’ ” said Chun. “But at the same time they bring their cigarettes here and force open our markets. Sometimes we feel like this is another Opium War.”