Everyone loves good news; it's so in demand that people would rather receive no news than anything bad.

So when the Beijing municipal health and family planning commission convened a press conference on Friday, they shared their good news: smoking was on the decline in the city last year.

The city's highest health authority told an assembled group of reporters that the smoking rate among Beijing adults dropped 1.1 percent from 23.4 to 22.3 percent, amounting to 200,000 fewer smokers since the smoking ban was first implemented in 2015 and leaving the city with just 3.99 million smokers remaining.

The news was reported without any ambiguity. The Shanghai Daily incorporated the statistic into their headline as "200,000 fewer smokers in the capital" while China Daily focused upon the last year gains with its headline: "Beijing has fewer smokers in 2017".

As good news goes, that's great. Beijing implemented a smoking ban in June 2015, and the decrease in smokers is obviously a result of the anti-smoking policy.

Except, that news is not true.

At their year-end press conference held in December 2016, the Beijing municipal health and family planning commission said that smoking was on the decline that year. The commission reported the annual smoking rate among Beijing adults as having dropped 1.1 percent from 23.4 percent in 2014 to 22.3 percent that year, just as the Beijinger reported it.

But the statistic doesn't end there. The health commission also said last year that the city experienced a decrease of 200,000 fewer smokers since the smoking ban was first implemented, just the same as had happened this year.

For both pieces of news to be true, this means that Beijing needed to gain 400,000 more smokers in-between stories in order to record successive year-on-year losses. And although a secretive amalgamation of the little-known suburb of "Smoker's Lung" isn't out of the question, we don't imagine this to be a success story for the anti-smoking campaign.

Having also used this same statistic for a white paper released back on July 2017 (shown below), the Beijing health commission may be enamored with this old fact due to the overwhelming need to prove the smoking ban is, in fact, working – an urgency that becomes more prominent when you consider other, less-flattering statistics.

Last year, Beijing authorities conducted 121,621 spot-checks on city properties, finding 6,013 locations to have violated anti-smoking bylaws. When compared to when the smoking ban was first implemented, this signifies a 77 percent surge in compliance; and, that's good. And yet, out of those 6,013 locations, 5,359 were let off the hook with just a warning; that's bad.

The smoking ban has been regularly touted in the Chinese press as "the toughest ever implemented," a sentiment supported by Chinese officials such as Liang Xiaofeng, the deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who said back in 2015: "If we change the fine to a warning, the law is weakened."

As it were, the smoking ban has led to varied results in enforcement.

Huge progress has been made in stamping out smoking at public places like hospitals, schools, and hotels. On the other hand, smoking is still commonly tolerated at Beijing internet bars and karaoke lounges. What's more, city inspectors have found 22 percent of 224 investigated city taxis to have permitted smoking despite 60 percent of these same cabs displaying a "no smoking" sign.

So unless it was a premonition that wasn't supposed to take effect until this year, the 2016 statistic doesn't tell us how many Beijing smokers quit the habit last year, nor does it tell us if the smoking ban is actually working. But, if we were to read the news, health officials have insisted ever since the smoking ban began that everything was going according to plan.

Angela Pratta, who leads the WHO Tobacco Free Initiative in China, touted a public opinion poll with 84 percent support for the smoking ban as proof of its success.

"A lot of people said it was crazy," said Pratta back in 2015. "They said the law would never work ... The survey, however, has quashed all doubt. It shows that the law works."

Unbeknownst to her at the time, Pratta has proved to be prophetic with her words.

"It is my dream to have the same conversation about national smoke-free law two years later," she said.

When it comes to quoting statistics, it seems we have.

More stories from this author here.

E-Mail: charlesliu1 (at) qq (dot) com

Twitter: @Sinopath

Images: Sohu