Monitoring Tobacco Use and Implementation of Tobacco Control Policies in China

The development and sustainment of a comprehensive tobacco-use surveillance system is critical to support its national plans, priorities, and programs, as well as an obligation for the WHO FCTC’s Parties. We discussed methodology used in China’ tobacco surveillance, including sample design, module and questionnaire, along with the indicators and analysis methodology for policy performance assessment. China updated the surveillance data almost every 5 years with the similar indicators; results from the five national adult surveys and 2014 youth survey provided the trend and distribution of tobacco use at national level. Prevalence of tobacco use in China did not change a lot more than 10 years after WHO FCTC came in force in 2005, decreasing 1% and hovering around 27%. The tobacco control policies implementation was very poor in China during this period: the average score for the implementation of the five key policies of MPOWER assessment was 37.3 points based on 2010 GATS-China. The current system can’t effectively monitor the tobacco industry and has trouble with data sharing and data use, therefore, the surveillance system on tobacco is need to further improvement in China. In addition, the regular funding is shortage and capacity for surveillance is still limited, especially in local level.