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Poison warning over China's
billions of bootleg cigarettes
(Filed: 15/04/2002)
A QUARTER of all the cigarettes smoked in Britain
are thought to be counterfeits produced in illegal factories in
China using the sweepings of workshop floors. Damien McElroy reports
from Beijing.
Wrapped in cellophane, the cheap packets of Regal and
Silk Cut cigarettes carry HM Government's official health warning
and look like the real thing. They should, however, carry a second
warning: Counterfeited in China.
Every year, billions of these highly toxic cigarettes
- which have no connection with genuine Regal or Silk Cut products -
are bought from shady middlemen by British smokers who believe that
all they are doing is cheating the taxman of his cut. The reality is
that they are smoking cigarettes produced not in hygienic factories
in the West, but in scruffy little workshops in China, and what they
are smoking is very often the sweepings of a dirty floor.
It is thought that more than 100 billion counterfeit
cigarettes are produced annually in the villages of the remote area
on the border between Fujian and Guangdong provinces. I visited one
makeshift factory at the end of a rutted track concealed by a line
of banana trees. In this dilapidated house with mildewed granite
walls, gangs of men scurried around carrying pots of chemicals;
outside, a diesel generator powered the machines that churn out
250,000 cigarettes a day.
Wiry workers chopped rough-cut tobacco leaves on the
ground, mixing them with sawdust and dirt before shovelling them
into the machine. Other men, evidently more senior and significantly
more portly, measured out white powders and red liquids from
containers of chemicals, adding them to the heaps of tobacco.
Once packaged and boxed, the cigarettes leave on a
truck at dusk. From here it's a six-hour haul to a warehouse in the
port of Xiamen, from where they will be dispatched abroad. Within
three weeks, they will be on sale in Britain to smokers who will
think they are getting a genuine, duty-free bargain.
The Treasury estimates that Chinese counterfeits
accounted for at least one quarter of all the cigarettes sold in
Britain last year, costing the taxpayer £2.5 billion in lost
revenue.
"The quality of fake packaging is improving all the
time," says Tim Lord, chief executive of the Tobacco Manufacturers'
Association in Britain. "Customers only realise their cigarettes
aren't genuine because they taste bad or different, and that affects
our reputation." His association wants the government to cut the tax
on cigarettes - 80 per cent of the packet cost - to deter smokers
from buying cheap alternatives.
With Western governments worried about the damage
caused both to smokers' health and to tax revenues, China is coming
under growing international pressure to staunch the supply.
The Chinese counterfeits contain high levels of tar,
nicotine and banned chemicals: a powerful, carcinogenic cocktail.
"Counterfeit cigarettes are made with very poor quality and
dangerous ingredients," said Chen Yisheng, deputy secretary of the
China Smoking and Health Association. "They are a very grave hazard
to health."
During a trip to Beijing to tackle the problem last
week, a senior Western police officer managed to win a promise of
cooperation from China's Ministry of Public Security. "We are
putting this at the top of our agenda at the moment," the police
officer said.
The authorities in Fujian's Zhao'an county, however,
are notoriously lenient, viewing the counterfeiters' trade as a
cornerstone of the local economy. It provides jobs for local men and
lucrative bribes for government officials.
However, the counterfeits, which are also sold into
the vast domestic market, are costing China considerable amounts in
lost taxes - more than £1 billion last year - and Beijing has
introduced tough penalties for bootleggers, including a mandatory
sentence of three years' re-education at a labour camp for anyone
found in an illegal factory. So far, the authorities in Fujian have
jailed more than 90 counterfeiters and sent 70 others to labour
camps.
Even so, the majority of counterfeit operations have
carried on unaffected. Cigarette factories are easily concealed (one
is even dug into the banks of a lake). The machinery can be loaded
on to a truck in under an hour, meaning that it takes just a day for
most operations to be up and running in a new location if the owners
get a tip off that they are about to be raided.
The bootleggers would prefer not to be detected,
however, and particularly fear a visit from the black-jacketed
hardmen of the Tobacco Bureau from Beijing. Nervous guards and
lookouts patrol the lanes around illegal factories: unrecognised
vehicles trigger a sequence of whistles and signals. But production
doesn't stop.
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