Smoking Is Good For Me: The Uphill Battle to Break China's Tobacco Addiction

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
(Pacific)
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Speaker: 
  • Susan V. Lawrence

Susan V. Lawrence is Head of China Programs at the Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids, a Washington, DC-based non-governmental organization that works to reduce tobacco use and its devastating health and economic consequences in the United States and around the world. She divides her time between Washington, DC and China.

The Campaign is a partner organization in the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, launched in 2005 with funding from New York Mayor and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg. The initiative’s work is focused on low- and medium-income countries that together account for two thirds of the world’s smokers. Other partners in the initiative are the Centers for Disease Control Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, the World Health Organization, and the World Lung Foundation.

Before joining the Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids, Ms. Lawrence worked for 16 years as a journalist, including a cumulative 11 years between 1990 and 2003 as a staff correspondent in China. She served as China bureau chief and later Washington correspondent for the Hong Kong-based newsweekly Far Eastern Economic Review, as a Beijing-based staff correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, and as China bureau chief for the newsmagazine US News & World Report. A fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker, she holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in East Asian Studies from Harvard University and was a Harvard-Yenching Institute Scholar in the History Department at Peking University from 1985-87. 

Her talk is the third in the colloquium series on tobacco control in East Asia, sponsored by the Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in coordination with FSI’s Global Tobacco Prevention Research Initiative.