Soldiers of China – No Smoking in Public

I wonder how long this ban lasted!! General Sung Cheh-yuan (Song Zheyuan) certainly thought that ‘educated men and foreign guests – he rightly assumed the two were not necessarily interchangeable terms – shouldn’t see soldiers smoking. Actually his desire to have the army respected was probably a good one seeing as this was January 1937. Sung himself was not quite a warlord dictator but he did fight some great battle against the encroaching Japanese (not that any Communist Party history will have much good to say about him, if anything at all) – he led the 29th Army in the Defense of the Great Wall in 1933. He died in 1940. Whether or not any soldiers were caught smoking on Peking’s streets and court martialled I’m afraid I don’t know.

General Sung Cheh-yuan