On first approach, Yunxiao seems like any other Chinese backwater caught in an uneasy industrial transition. Faded advertisements line the downtown streets, where motorcyclists wearing bamboo-frond hats vie for paying passengers in a riot of honking. A cheerful red banner in the city center exhorts citizens to develop the local economy. The message seems ironic. After all, since the 1990s, Yunxiao has sprouted its own league of millionaires, famous throughout China.
But what is the secret?
Ringed by thickly forested mountains, illicit cigarette factories dot the countryside, carved deeply into caves, high into the hills, and even buried beneath the earth. By one tally, some 200 operations are hidden in Yunxiao, a southwestern Fujian county about twice the area of New York City. Over the last 10 years, production of counterfeit cigarettes has soared in China, jumping eightfold since 1997 to an unprecedented 400 billion cigarettes a year—enough to supply every U.S. smoker with 460 packs a year. Once famed for its bright yellow loquat fruit, Yunxiao is the trade's heartland, the source of half of China's counterfeit production.
-Slate
Talking about China and Cigarettes, there is one proud father in China, dementedly so:
A two-year-old kid named Tong Liangliang from the city of Tianjin in China is now considered to be the world’s youngest smoker.
And get this: His dad is proudly telling people that he’s the one who taught his kid how to smoke. He said that his son was born with a hernia, and since he’s too young to get an operation he has just decided to teach his son how to smoke to help him cope with the pain.
-daily.starcentralmagazine.com
If this dad is wrong, then take a look at what this man did- he went the other direction, but still- totally wrong:
A man has been charged with domestic battery after he drenched his wife with a garden hose and attacked her, according to an affidavit released Monday.
The altercation happened Saturday when the victim entered the couples' residence in the 1400 block of Northeast Chardon Street, while smoking a cigarette.
The affidavit says the victim's husband, John Jeffrey Murray, 51, began yelling at her about smoking in the house and sprayed her with the hose.
-www.abc2news.com
Be happy.
Chinese again they are ahead of everything. when it comes to treachery they are leaders.
ReplyDeletewhen 2 year old start smoking they need even more factories.
but what govt does with these illicit mfrs. collecting bribes?