Shanghai residents looking to quit smoking have been encouraged to join new support groups on WeChat where doctors and psychologists can provide round-the-clock professional advice.

Launched on Dec 18, the online initiative is the result of cooperation between the Shanghai Pilot Health Promotion Center, and the Shanghai Association of Tobacco Control. According to the organizers, the online groups will be able to support 5,000 people.

In addition to advice from doctors and psychologists, members of these groups will also be able to access scientific information and medication related to smoking cessation for free.

Li Jian, 31, who has stopped smoking since joining one of the WeChat support groups in June, said that he received strong support from the psychologist in the group.

"She kept reminding me to think more of my family in various ways whenever I revealed that I felt the urge to smoke. That really worked for me," said Li, a father of two children who had been smoking for 12 years.

Feng Hai, labor union chairman of Nippon Paint China, which participated in the trial WeChat project and encouraged employees to join the support groups, said that some smokers think smoking is personal and not anyone else's business.

"But actually, it relates not only to themselves but also to their families and the people around them, safety of the workplace and the environment," he said.

Data from the Tobacco Control Office of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention showed that secondhand smoke increases the risk of lung cancer by 20 to 30 percent, and the risk of suffering from the disease among women whose husbands smoke is almost double that of those whose spouses do not.

Lung cancer causes 600,000 deaths in the country each year.

Twenty-four cities on the Chinese mainland have introduced tobacco control regulations that forbid smoking in public venues, including offices, buses and public waiting areas, with Beijing the first to adopt them in June 2015.

Wang Tong, director of the health promotion department at the Shanghai Health Commission, said that the smoking rate among people 15 years old and above in the city fell to 19.9 percent in 2018, making Shanghai the first city to bring the figure within 20 percent, an objective laid down in the Healthy China 2030 Initiative.

The national figure last year was 26.6 percent.

Shanghai also took first place in recent rankings by People's Daily for the implementation of nonsmoking laws and law enforcement among the 24 cities that have introduced such regulations, Wang said.

"We hope such methods of helping people quit smoking can be replicated in other regions after obtaining enough operational experience in Shanghai," he said.