China Lights Up.

Two bewildering stories relating to tobacco have come out of China recently, and both make me glad to live in the USA:

1. The Gongan county government of central China has ordered civil servants in the area "[...] to puff their way through 230,000 packs of local Hubei-produced cigarettes over the year," or face a fine. Contradictory to the central government's policies intended to curb smoking, this edict is an effort to stem losses of tobacco tax revenue to non-local cigarette producers. The edict has since been put "under study" to determine if it should be in place or not.

2. Tong Liangliang, a two-year old from China, now holds the unofficial record of being the youngest chain-smoker in history. Liangliang (pictured above) was pushed to smoking by his father, who believed that the cigarettes would numb the pain of the boy's hernia until he grew old enough to have an operation for the condition. Liangliang's smoking began about six months ago, but he is already smoking a pack a day and "[...] resists all his father's attempts to take away his only pain killer."