Depoliticizing Tobacco's Exceptionality: Male Sociality, Death and Memory-Making among Chinese Cigarette Smokers

This article explore the immobilizing of blame apportioning towards the industrial and governmental sources of nicotine addiction, in terms of a specific set of Chinese citizens whom the author has been interviewing recently, men like Wu and their families, people who have been struggling in China with perhaps the most notorious of tobacco-related diseases, lung cancer. Tapping and extending social theory on mass death, I argue that three socio-historical forces have been especially pivotal in producing and depoliticizing everyday experiences with this disease. First, like people elsewhere in the world, residents of the PRC have come to encounter a paradoxical situation: government authorities that are, on the one hand, reliant on a politics of protecting the nation's health and, on the other, profiteering off a commodity, the cigarette, which is highly addictive, modestly priced and acutely toxic. Second, owing to subtle historical processes that have come to fuse cigarette smoking, life enhancement and male sociality, men have felt a deep need to consume tobacco. Third, after lung cancer diagnosis occurs, the legibility of hostility toward tobacco producers is muddled by memory-making, particularly regarding the sick man's past years exchanging cigarettes with other men.