BEIJING - Annual government funding for tobacco control is just several hundred thousand yuan for each province on the Chinese mainland, far below what's needed and much less than the amounts provided in other countries, anti-smoking experts said.

In the United States, hundreds of millions of dollars are allocated annually for tobacco control research and projects, said Jonathan Samet, chairman of the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"Although we've seen the prevalence of both the smoking epidemic and lung cancer decline in the US, tobacco control is still an urgent and important issue, given that nicotine is highly addictive and we don't want our children to take up smoking," he told China Daily in an interview on Sunday.