Textual analysis of 38 Chinese subnational tobacco control regulations against FCTC Article 8
Yu Chen, Xinjie Zhao, Chunyan Chen, Xinyi Zhang, Jinghan Li, Jiayi Lan, Shiyu Liu, Xinyao Yu, Kin-Sun Chan, Qian Zeng · 2026
Read Textual analysis of 38 Chinese subnational tobacco control regulations against FCTC Article 8 by Yu Chen, Xinjie Zhao, Chunyan Chen, Xinyi Zhang, Jinghan Li, Jiayi Lan, Shiyu Liu, Xinyao Yu, Kin-Sun Chan, Qian Zeng (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13261637.txt.
Description
Yu Chen and colleagues present a 2026 textual analysis of Chinese local tobacco control laws against the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. China ratified the treaty in 2005, but with no national smoke-free law, cities and provinces wrote their own rules unevenly. The team compared legal texts with the treaty's Article 8 on smoke-free environments.
They compiled 38 dedicated subnational regulations enacted or amended between 2006 and 2024, totaling 100,635 substantive Chinese characters. Only 10 regulations (26.3%) met the Article 8 compliance criteria, while 28 (73.7%) did not. Compliant texts were longer, with a median 3,249 versus 2,572 characters, and had more clauses. They more often banned e-cigarettes and required quitting services. The 10 compliant jurisdictions cover about 121.6 million residents, 8.6% of mainland China's 2020 population. The authors stress these are features of legal text, not proof of real-world enforcement.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yu Chen, Xinjie Zhao, Chunyan Chen, Xinyi Zhang, Jinghan Li, Jiayi Lan, Shiyu Liu, Xinyao Yu, Kin-Sun Chan, Qian Zeng |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 50312 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |