BEIJING - Schools and kindergartens are among the first places where the effects of a national battle to ban indoor smoking in public are being seen, according to a survey conducted by China Daily.

The ban, which started on May 1, is meant to make kindergartens and primary and secondary schools in the capital smoke-free by the end of the year, Beijing health authorities reiterated at the weekend. Their words came in the days leading up to the 24th World No Tobacco Day, which falls on Tuesday.

China's smoking ban forbids people from lighting up indoors but stops short of imposing penalties on violators.

Most Beijing schools began enforcing the ban earlier this month, after a recent poll showed nearly one in four high school students in the capital have smoked. About 9 percent of the students polled were addicted to cigarette.

And the smokers weren't made up solely of students.

"Teachers with the smoking habit used to light up in the school's public restrooms," Yang Jie, a high school teacher in the city, said on Sunday. "But now they have to go off campus."

The school's statutes have long forbidden students from smoking on campus, she added.

Kindergartens are also places where smokers must now stub out cigarettes.

"There is not a smoking room or any other place where lighting up is allowed in our kindergarten," said a teacher, surnamed Yan, in Shanghai.

In Beijing, health authorities are finding it difficult to turn universities and vocational schools into smoke-free places.

According to a recent survey, about 80 percent of universities and vocational schools in the capital city can accurately claim to have smoke-free campuses, according to health authorities. The rest have not adopted rules that ban smoking or put up no-smoking signs.

In hotels, restaurants and other public places, authorities are still fighting for smoke-free air.

A manager with the Kingdom Hotel in Nanjing of Jiangsu province, who asked to be anonymous, said it isn't easy to enforce the smoking ban, partly because the regulation doesn't impose specific penalties.

"We only have the right to politely tell our customers to smoke outside the hotel," he said. "I think the situation is even worse at small restaurants."

China's past experiment with letting public places choose to ban smoking proved ineffective, Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the 2011 China Tobacco Control Report, which was published on Thursday.

The report by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention's tobacco control office estimated that more than 300 million Chinese people smoke. About 740 million people, including 180 million minors, are victims of secondhand smoke, the report said.

Cang Wei contributed to this story.

China Daily

(China Daily 05/30/2011 page3)