Vapes & vaping #2

Why China matters to understanding global trends in vapes and vaping

In this post I want to take a step back from how vapes and vaping are framed in UK public debate, as matters of environmental concern and public health (Vape & vaping #1). Instead I want to consider how and why we’ve got to here. How is it that, in the space of a few short years, vapes and vaping have gone from being things that were barely noticeable in the UK to being so commonplace that they’re literally everywhere and unavoidable?

If we’re to answer this question we need to shift outside the UK, to China.

China – and specifically the e-cigarette manufacturing cluster in Shenzhen – is the epicentre of global vape and flavours production capacity. This is where over 90% of global output is produced. It’s the equivalent of Yiwu (The Christmas Series #3) for e-cigarettes. In 2018 Shenzhen was home to 3.9k manufacturers, employed over 2m people and reported roughly equivalent domestic and export sales - $4.8bn and $4bn respectively. This is a sector reliant on entrepreneurs and venture capital, characterised by start-ups and endless innovation in vaping products. It therefore sits outside the state-owned and state-managed tobacco industry.

That positioning matters a lot to understanding the epidemic in vapes and vaping now visible not just in the UK but throughout the global North.

Tobacco products and their continued consumption matter hugely to the Chinese government. This is a country which bucks the trend observed in most other countries, in which tobacco consumption and the number of smokers have declined sharply in recent decades. In China over 30% of the adult population smoke – an effect of the continued denial in China of the health risks of tobacco consumption. Cigarette manufacture runs to 2.4 trillion per annum (4x the level of the US) and sales account for 8.7% of tax revenue. So, when e-cigarette sales in China increased 254% in the period 2017-2020, they started to be identified by the Chinese government as a threat to the state owned and managed tobacco industry. Every e-cigarette vaped became a cigarette not smoked. What ensued was a progressive ratcheting up of regulation targeting vapes consumed by the Chinese population.

2018 saw the banning of the sale of e-cigarettes to young people in mainland China. In 2019 online sales of e-cigarettes were prohibited. In 2022 that was extended to become a ban on all non-tobacco flavoured sales, whilst new standards for tobacco-flavoured vapes were introduced.

It's important to be precise about what’s going on with this suite of regulation. At face value this looks like an increasing crackdown on vape sales in China. Given the timing of these interventions – well ahead of governments in the global North – it even looks like China is in the vanguard of the regulatory war on vapes. The ‘but’ comes in two parts: 1) it isn’t vapes per se that are seen as the problem by the Chinese government; rather it’s the flavours that aren’t tobacco-based. So, Chinese consumers can purchase vapes – provided they’re tobacco-flavoured. 2) Regulation concerns domestic sales only. It therefore leaves untouched all export-oriented manufacture and sales – which means that, whilst China bans domestic sales (to shore-up its tobacco industry) at the same time it floods the global market with vapes and vape products.

It’s possible even to see how the surge in China’s global exports aligns with interventions to prohibit Chinese domestic sales, and, in turn, how they’ve led to the explosion in vaping in the younger populations of countries in the global North. Fanned by influencers and social media (especially TikTok), vaping is now an integral part of sociality and socialising for younger people. In the UK a 2023 survey of 18k university students found that, whilst most had never smoked cigarettes, 50% used vapes regularly and 25% reported their pattern of use to be addictive. In some universities over 60% of students are regular vapers.

This is what governments in the global North are contending with when they intervene to ban the sale of vapes and/or flavours: a global export industry that contributes significantly to China’s balance of trade, which the Chinese government shows no sign of regulating, and a young population in the global North in which addictive patterns of consumption are now widespread.

Banning the sale of consumer goods and particularly addictive consumer goods has an interesting history. No matter whether we’re talking about prohibition in the US in the 1920s and early 1930s or Class A drugs such as cocaine and heroin today, the combination of bans with addictive consumption has a habit of driving up illegal trade. It was the same back in the nineteenth century with opium.

In what is an interesting twist on today’s geopolitical protagonists over vapes, it was British traders who were then flooding the Chinese market with opium, produced in India. That generated a public health crisis for the then Chinese government, who banned the sale and importation of opium – to no effect. What transpired was widespread smuggling, the establishment of underground opium ‘dens’ , continued opium consumption and – eventually – The Opium Wars (1839-42; 1856-60).

We are a long way currently from the modern day equivalent of the Opium Wars, at least with vapes. Yet the turn to illicit practices and illegal markets is already discernible.

A qualitative research study conducted in China post the 2022 ban had mixed findings. Whilst the ban was seen as likely to result in reduced levels of initiation, it was doing little to address existing vapers who reported resorting to messaging platforms (especially WeChat) for purchasing vapes, repurposing tobacco-flavoured vapes with flavour pods purchased illegally and/or transitioning to smoking.

In the US, which was the first government in the global North to ban a particular type of vape product (Vapes & vaping #1), the purposeful mis-labelling of vapes imported from China is key to circumventing regulation. Fortune magazine in late 2023 was reporting the widespread mislabelling of imported Elf Bars – as toys, LED lights, batteries etc.

Bans may be effective in reducing initiation but they are a blunt and ineffective instrument in addressing established addictive consumption patterns. If the addictive patterns of vape consumption currently to be found in the UK are to be addressed what’s needed instead is sustained and hard-hitting public health messaging – and support for younger people in quitting vaping.