IN 1643 Fang Yizhi, a Chinese scholar, wrote that smoking tobacco for too long would “blacken the lungs” and lead to death. The then-emperor, Chongzhen, didn't bother with warning labels. He outlawed growing and smoking the leaf. Violators were to be beheaded. (As it happens, a year later, the Ming dynasty and Chongzhen were both dead, neither from blackened lungs.)

Attitudes to smoking have changed somewhat since then. Today a carton of smokes is one of the most popular gifts in China, especially at the Chinese new year. In tobacco-rich Yunnan, the cigarette industry is a local pillar. Many advances over the centuries have taken place in the processing, packaging and marketing of tobacco. Top-end brands can sell for $25 a packet (and some are proudly labelled “organic”). On health warnings however, progress has been slight: packets bear a simple, generic message printed in text, with no eye-catching images.

That is because the cigarette-makers want it that way. China's tobacco industry is both owned and regulated by the government. It makes and sells more than two-fifths of the world's cigarettes—2.4 trillion in 2011, 3% more than in 2010. The government says the industry took in profits and tax receipts of 753 billion yuan ($119 billion) in 2011, an annual increase of over a fifth. Production, sales and tax receipts are likely to increase for years to come.

As a signatory to a World Health Organisation tobacco-control treaty, China is, rather awkwardly in the face of these projections, meant to reduce smoking. The country has more than 300m smokers, close to a third of the global total. Cigarettes are still the currency of masculinity, especially in rural China, and more than half of Chinese men smoke. About 1m Chinese die each year from smoking-related illnesses.

More explicit warning labels would help. The government is mandating a larger font size on its labels from April 1st, and is pondering whether to make the labels more dramatic, using gruesome images. However, the cigarette-makers are powerful, and the Ministry of Health is not. “If you really were to use disgusting images, that would hurt the function of cigarettes as a gift,” says He Youfei of Hongta, one tobacco group, sitting in the company's canteen (smoking permitted).