Tobacco Firms Make Inroads Into Asia’s Huge Youth Market

In Beijing, young cyclists race in the blue and white colors of Kent cigarettes, cheered on by fans wearing sun visors emblazoned with “Kent.”

In Bangkok, children play with toy racing cars bearing the logo of Japan’s Mild Seven tobacco company.

Philip Morris hands out fine arts prizes to young competitors in several Southeast Asian capitals.

Multinational tobacco companies are forging aggressively into Asia, looking to the region’s vast young population and booming economies to offset the loss of business in the West.

Despite the criticism of health activists, the companies are getting their products known to young people by sponsoring numerous sports, music and cultural events that effectively elude bans on direct advertising.

Asian girls in particular could mean big profits. Very few now smoke, but economic growth is providing more pocket money and fraying cultural traditions that considered a woman with a cigarette ugly and immoral.

“In every country we’ve looked at girls smoking, even Singapore, it’s increasing. . . . We’re losing everywhere,” says Judith Mackay, director of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control.

She and others blame promotional campaigns that link smoking to sophistication and glamour--an appeal to the Westward-looking attitudes of many Asian youths.

It is a charge also heard in the West, and tobacco company executives offer the same defense. They say they never target children, contending that their campaigns are aimed at getting adults to stay with their brand or to switch from other brands.

Traditional Asian tobacco is harsh, and foreign cigarettes, which are advertised as “light” and “mild,” make it easier for young people to start smoking.

If current trends continue, 50 million children and teenagers alive in China today will eventually die from health problems related to smoking, says Richard Peto, a British epidemiologist.

Anti-smoking movements are growing in Asia, but the habit will spread because government resolve is weak, says Hatai Chitanondh, president of the Asia Pacific Assn. for Control of Tobacco.

The World Health Organization says tobacco consumption in Asia increased 15% between 1988 and 1992. The tobacco industry has predicted that sales in Asia will increase 33% between 1991 and 2000.

Smoking is increasing among all ages of students in South Korea, Mackay says. And in Taiwan, the number of 15- to 17-year-olds who experimented with smoking increased from 3% in 1985 to 20% in 1991.

Despite tough legislation and a government that tries to fashion the ideal citizen, Singapore’s Health Ministry found that the proportion of young people ages 18 and 19 who smoke tripled to 15% from 1987 to 1991.

To make cigarettes less affordable for youths, the Hong Kong government has proposed banning the sale of individual cigarettes. In Seoul, a new law says all new cigarette vending machines can be installed only in places off-limits to minors, such as bars.

In Manila, Jakarta in Indonesia, and other cities, keeping cigarettes away from youths is doubly difficult because huge numbers of cigarettes are peddled by street children. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, tobacco companies hire pretty young girls in sexy uniforms to hand out free samples to young men.

But in China, where the huge bulk of Asia’s smokers live, recent laws restricting advertising are not well enforced and smoking by minors is not against the law. A survey found that 18% of primary and middle school students smoke, the China Daily recently reported.

Smoking starts at childhood in China’s countryside, particularly in Yunnan, the tobacco-growing area. Restaurants, trains and other public places are filled with clouds of smoke. Cigarette brand names appear on baseball caps, jackets and table umbrellas in restaurants. In Chengdu, a huge, lighted billboard showing the Marlboro man looms over a night market.

To get their names known in countries that ban direct advertising, tobacco companies use their brand or company names on other goods and services that they advertise widely.

Offers of Kent Leisure Holidays and Salem High Country Holidays contain mottoes and depict scenes such as those in cigarette advertisements. Marlboro Classics shops sell cowboy-style gear.

The tobacco companies’ sponsorship of activities involving young people has attracted controversy as well. Firms even have established university departments.

Philip Morris has sponsored the Hong Kong Arts Festival for several years and the musical “The Phantom of the Opera” during its three-month run in the British colony last year. Such sponsorship has increased since the colony banned cigarette advertising on TV and radio in 1990.

The “Philip Morris Group of Companies ASEAN Arts Award” was given in several Southeast Asian countries in 1994. In each country, a company executive had his picture taken giving out the award.

Michael Chang, the American tennis star who is idolized by teenage girls in Asia, plays in Marlboro and Salem tournaments in the region. And the Chinese bicycle team in the recent Kent Tour of China wore Kent’s colors and name on their jerseys while teenage girls in shorts offered journalists Kent cigarettes on silver platters.

Japan’s Mild Seven recently held a Formula One auto racing festival in Bangkok. A minitrack with cars was set up for children to play with. Kids got prizes for drawing pictures of racing cars.

At sports events, cigarette logos appear on uniforms, equipment and billboards. The logos are glimpsed hundreds of times during an hour’s televising of a game.

Many of the events are carried by uncensored satellite television, which reaches countries where cigarette advertising is banned. Star TV, based in Hong Kong, is seen by 220 million people in Asia.

“Satellite broadcasting is going to override all the struggles that have been going on for 15 years in this region,” says Mackay, the anti-smoking activist.