On May 1 this year, Regulations on the Scope of No-smoking Public Places in Beijing (hereinafter referred to as “the Regulations”) were released and came into effect immediately. In its implementation, the Regulations require that every restaurant, hotel, park and amusement park should be divided into smoking area and no-smoking area, but does not specify the scope and execution plans. To make the Regulations material and effective, and under the discussions with industry regulators including Beijing Municipal Bureau of Commerce and Beijing Tourism Administration, Beijing Loving-Motherland Sanitation Movement Committee released recently some suggestions on implementing the Regulations and has issued them to Loving-Motherland Sanitation Movement Committee in all the districts and counties.

The Regulations requires that no-smoking area should not be less than 50% of the total catering service area in any restaurant, and should be expanded until smoking is completely prohibited. The Regulations encourages some well-paced restaurants to exercise a complete ban of smoking. In accordance with the Regulations, in any venue that offers accommodation services including hotel, motel, guest house, training center and holiday resort, no-smoking rooms should cover no less than 50% of the total rooms and smoke-free floors should be no less than 50% of the total floors. These venues are encouraged to set their smoke-free floors in a row vertically. For those venues that have no dedicated smoke-free floors, no-smoking guest rooms should be provided back to back. In all these venues, smoking should be prohibited in the lounge, passages and shopping areas.

The Regulations also specifies requirements about the smoking areas in parks and funfairs that every smoking area should cover no more than 100 square meters and be indicated in the directional signs at the gate of parks and funfairs.

The Regulations requires that those public areas should set a post of inspector to take charge of smoking prohibition work by posting No-smoking signs at those readily accessible places or preventing the smoking behavior in no-smoking areas. In addition, every citizen is entitled to prevent undue smoking, supervise the management of every venue and report the rule-breaking actions to Loving-Motherland Sanitation Movement Committees in the city, districts and counties via 12320 Public Heath Hotline. As for the venues that are slack in implementing the Regulations, Beijing Loving-Motherland Sanitation Movement Committee is eligible to give them an administrative punishment, public criticism and disclosure in the media.

As a signatory to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the statutory document made by WHO, China promises that by January 9, 2011 smoking will be completely banned in all indoor offices and public places in China. Therefore, the current Regulations are actually an interim administrative statute. The scope of no-smoking areas shall be expanded gradually to include not only restaurants, hotels, but also parks and amusement parks until the goal of complete smoking ban in all indoor offices and public places is fulfilled.