Summary: The three campaigns illustrate that the anti-cigarette agenda was embedded in more significant social political themes such as cultivating qualified citizens, saving the national and local economy, and establishing new public etiquettes. The anti-cigarette rhetoric connected the personal action of smoking with the fate of the nation, and thus persuaded individuals to give up smoking for the benefit of the nation. In this sense, the anti-cigarette campaigns also demonstrate the mechanism of informal social control in modern China. The weakness of these campaigns lay not in the rhetoric but in the implementation in which the civil society and the government lacked cooperation.