Chinese social media users were up in arms Thursday over the latest addition to China’s lineup of luxury cigarettes: an extremely high-end version of the Good Cat brand, which features a demure red feline stamped on a gold cigarette pack. The price? As high as 5600 yuan a carton (US$890).
Local media reports that cartons of the new cigarettes — which haven’t been officially released by the manufacturer — have been selling for sky-high prices in the central Chinese city of Xi’an roiled users on the Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo.
“One stick is my whole month’s ration!!!!!!!!!!!” wrote one user in Chengdu.
“We all know the soil that [such expensive cigarettes] rely on for growth is our corrupt social system,” wrote another in Jiangxi.
Outrageously priced cigarettes are nothing new in China, where more than half of all adult men smoke. Across the country, cigarettes are offered as gifts on occasions from weddings to business meetings to tomb sweepings. Easily tucked into a pretty box or briefcase, they can also be vehicles to curry favor with government officials. Panda cigarettes — the brand once favored by Deng Xiaoping — can cost as much as $107 a pack, compared with about $2 a pack for generic brands.
Accordingly, cigarettes have been at the heart of many Chinese scandals: In 2008, Zhou Jiugeng, the director of the Nanjing Property Bureau, was fired after Internet vigilantes spotted him at a news conference with a $22 pack of luxury cigarettes.
Such anger over government consumption of luxury cigarettes helps explain Weibo comments like this one: “How is 5600RMB ($890) a carton expensive?” one microblogger mused, “It’s bribery. In order to achieve your end, even 10,000RMB (US$1,600) a cartoon isn’t expensive.”
With China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, about to convene its annual plenary session in Beijing amid widespread public anger over corruption, the outpouring over the new Good Cats comes at a delicate time.
Good Cat cigarettes are manufactured by China Tobacco Shaanxi Industrial Co. Ltd., which is part of China National Tobacco Corp., the state-run cigarette company. And cigarettes are big business for Beijing: In 2010, tobacco taxes brought in $75 billion in tax receipts — that makes cigarette taxes the central government’s largest single source of revenue. In places such as the southwest province of Yunnan, where much of China’s tobacco leaves are farmed, the figure is still more dramatic: There, the government relies on tobacco taxes for 45% of its income, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
Reached at Shaanxi Tobacco Company’s general affairs office, an employee surnamed Wu explained that pictures being circulated online are simply sample products, and that the official product has not yet hit shelves. No date for the formal launch has yet been announced, he said. The company is still working to secure a patent for this latest good cat-brand cigarettes, including the new “technology” such cigarettes will incorporate, which involve packaging, among other elements.
Although he wouldn’t comment on how much the cigarettes would eventually be sold for, he said the company has been working on research and development of the cigarettes for three years, and would be valued accordingly.
“Bull—-,” wrote one user based in Hunan. “Cigarettes are the product that requires the least amount of skill to make. These so-called ‘sky-high priced’ cigarettes are just being hyped by the manufacturer.”
