Bourgeois Decadence or Proletarian Pleasure? Women, Men, and Smoking in China across the 1949 Divide

The Institute of East Asian Studies will hold a talk about the history of gendered smoking practices in China.

Speaker: Carol Benedict, Professor, Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of History, Georgetown University

Panelist/Discussant: Wen-hsin Yeh, Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair Professor, Department of History, UC Berkeley

Cigarette smoking in China today is a highly gendered practice. With 301 million current smokers, China has the highest rate of cigarette consumption in the world. However, at present most Chinese smokers are men: about 53 percent of men over age fifteen smoke while only two percent of women do.

The stark differences in patterns of men and women’s smoking behavior in China are often attributed to lingering cultural taboos against female smoking, generally assumed to have been in place for centuries. In fact, the masculinization of Chinese smoking is of fairly recent vintage, dating only from the mid-1900s. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, many Chinese women smoked tobacco but by 1949, smoking among women was in steep decline. In contrast, smoking prevalence among men remained consistently high across the entire century.

An essential aspect of the gendered history of smoking in China are changes in social and political norms across the 1949 divide that made smoking politically incorrect for women but not for men. In this presentation, I will discuss how and why female smoking in China came to be perceived as a bourgeois vice after 1949 while smoking among men was readily transformed into a legitimate proletarian pleasure.