We have to hand it to the Gong'an county government in Hubei, which has hit upon a novel approach to expanding the tax base in these straitened times: Order local officials to smoke more cigarettes:

Officials in a county in central China have been told to smoke nearly a quarter million packs of locally made cigarettes annually or risk being fined, state media reports.

The Gong'an county government in Hubei province has ordered its staff to puff their way through 230,000 packs of Hubei-produced cigarette brands a year, the Global Times said.

Departments that fail to meet their targets will be fined, according to the report.
 
"The regulation will boost the local economy via the cigarette tax," said Chen Nianzu, a member of the Gong'an cigarette market supervision team, according to the paper.

Of course it will. All such tax revenue is no doubt funneled into only the worthiest of endeavors, and certainly not into the gas tanks of Porsche Cayennes. And technically, they're not even raising the cigarette tax. It's genius.

It scarce needs be pointed out that ordering local government officials to smoke more is kind of like ordering frat boys to drink more beer -- redundant at the best of times. In fact, speaking of drinking, the only thing possibly more ridiculous than ordering local government officials to smoke more would be ordering local government officials to, well, drink more.

And it turns out that has also happened in Hubei, back in 2006, albeit in a different county, when officials in Hanzhou city were ordered to drink more local hooch to prop up a liquor maker.

So let's hear it for Hubei. For purely pragmatic, economic reasons they've ordered local officials to drink more and smoke more. If they can order local officials to hire more prostitutes (local ones only, of course) they will have mandated a perfect sin trifecta in the name of provincial stimulus. So to speak. That will be something to be proud of and, Imagethief is sure, will help to ensure that the Hubei provincial pavilion will be the most fun you can have at the Shanghai 2010 Expo.

H/T: The Humanaught via Twitter.

Update:

No word on the prostitutes yet, but Hubei is big on mud wrestling apparently. I gather this from the big photo spread on the front page of the online China Daily. A sample, and my proposed tourism slogan for Hubei below:

 

Hubei. What's not to like?

And the original photo from this post:

That's one small puff for the motherland...
Photo source.