Bill Gates and Chinese billionaire Robin Li, who co-founded Baidu, one of China's largest Web services companies, have announced an anti-smoking initiative, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The campaign, the first initiative of a global public health partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the recently established Baidu Charitable Foundation, will focus on helping smokers in China quit and raising awareness about the dangers of second-hand smoke. Gates declined to give financial details of the partnership but said China will be a major focal point in the foundation's work on tobacco control.

Earlier this year a group of sixty Chinese public health experts released a report which estimated that almost a quarter of the country's 1.34 billion people smoke, with nearly a million dying from tobacco-related causes every year. The report also estimated that smokers in China spent approximately $9.5 billion on tobacco products in 2010. Last month, China's Ministry of Health launched a ban on indoor smoking, but without specific enforcement guidelines; thus far, the regulation has been largely ineffective.

"Over time, they need to raise the taxes even more, they need to probably put some teeth into these regulations, but it's a good start," said Gates. "The greatest thing would be a grassroots sense that people don't want forced smoking."