Video Of Toddler Smoking On Street Corner In China Goes Viral

Video of a toddler in China smoking a cigarette on a busy street corner has gone viral on the internet.

Amidst the sound of laughter, the child in the disturbing footage (embedded below) sitting at a street stall is estimated to be somewhere in the range of two to three years old.

As alluded to above, most of the adults heard in the clip seem to treat the whole thing as a joke, although one woman appears to be very upset with the boy’s smoking. Neither she nor any anyone else on the scene takes the cigarette away from the puffing toddler, however:

“And apart from a few grimaces, the toddler appears relatively at ease, although he is seen at times coughing and spluttering. It is believed he is mimicking a man out of view of the camera who is also smoking. The footage was obtained by LiveLeak.com and has sparked fresh debate about the scale of China’s tobacco habit.”

One LiveLeak commenter suggested — using other words — that the smoking toddler might have been a form of “viral marketing” or street theater (as it were) for the boy’s family to attract customers to their stall.

According to AsiaOne, some 300 million cigarette smokers live in China, which has a male smoking rate of about 53 percent; the overall rate in the country is about 30 percent. More than one million Chinese residents reportedly die from smoking-related diseases on an annual basis, the most in the world.

China is said to be the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco.

About two years ago, as The Inquisitr previously reported, an Indonesian toddler, then age two, made headlines because of his reported two packs a day cigarette habit and that he only would smoke one particular premium brand.

What would you do, if anything, if you came across a toddler smoking a cigarette on the street corner?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW_2ihjROgw