I picked up on this on a news report on WNRN yesterday, and had to pursue it when I got back to the office. It was that absurd. Leave it to provincial officials in China to require people to damage their health. Or rather, leave it to become state policy. Regardless, it takes a special kind of topsy-turvy world where you require people to smoke 230,000 packs of cigarettes a year — just to stimulate the local economy.
Sad to say, it just validates whole other layers of bizarro-world that I experienced when I traveled there in 1996.
(Image picked up here. Check it out.)
