Smoking and the City: A Travelogue in Yuxi

We narrate our travel in a city with a prominent tobacco company to contribute to the literature on smoking and place. We show that in Yuxi, the location of the Hongta Group, China’s largest tobacco manufacturer, a smoker’s sense of self and of place is affectively, cognitively and socially tied to the tobacco industry. Tobacco-related symbolism in the city is highly visible and abundant. Smoking and tobacco are enmeshed in the fabric of the city and of people’s lives, an integrated and totalising phenomenon we characterise as ‘rhizomatic smoking’. Hence, we call for ‘rhizomatic tobacco control’ as a new direction for conceptualising the entirety of tobacco in society and for subjecting tobacco control in China to critical scrutiny.