FROM early September, equipment at some steel mills in northern China's Hebei Province began grinding to a screeching halt in what is usually the peak season for steel sales.

The eerie silence in what are perhaps the world's busiest workshops is attributed to local authorities' demand that energy-intensive industries, notably steel making, suspend operations to help meet targets for reducing carbon emissions.

Long-time readers of this newspaper must be familiar with its criticism of many officials' fetish for boosting GDP in order to bolster their own careers.

Hence, they may be heartened that at last some wiser heads have decided not to place growth above all else, at least for now.

Their euphoria will probably end at the news that a blackout had hit much of Hebei's rural communities because some officials thought by cutting power to a large farming population, they could make good on their green commitments, Caijing magazine reported in its September 27 issue.

The persistent blackout has pushed up the prices of candles and diesel generators in some parts of rural Hebei.

Diesel option

To retain orders, some businesses responded to the draconian power cut by buying expensive diesel generators to keep operations going.

An unanticipated consequence of the blackout is that while its advocates touted the emissions reduced, it was encouraging petroleum use and pollution in another form.

So the question arises: why this sudden, and potentially misplaced, sense of urgency since the environment is almost always an afterthought to growth?

The round of mass power cuts in Hebei is part of a nationwide race to curb carbon intensity as required by the 11th Five-Year Plan, which expires in about four months. However, many cities in Hebei still fall short of even reaching 30 to 40 percent of their emissions reduction targets, Caijing reported.

Unlike past days when official lapses in going green resulted mostly in a slap on the wrist or no punishment at all, this time the disciplinary measures will be, at least on paper, a bit harsher.

An official decree obtained by Caijing reporters shows that every town governor in Wei County, which falls under the jurisdiction of Handan City, has to see to it that power consumption doesn't exceed given quotas. Otherwise, he/she risks having his/her career cut short or even wrecked altogether.

This explains why after a headlong rush for much of the first half of the year, the very officials who were obsessed with GDP are suddenly hitting the brake on growth.

Temporarily shutting down large companies, though a painful move that flirts with labor unrest, thus becomes an option of last resort.

Although I don't dismiss the steep fall in power consumption as a bad thing per se - which means less coal is hauled by miners from shafts that may collapse and devour them at any time and fewer pollutants are discharged into the already smoggy skies - the "blitzkrieg" tactics with which the war on carbon emissions is waged are wrong and unsustainable.

In fact, past examples suggest that without a genuine desire to shift the emphasis on growth over the environment, officials will only go through the motions of green initiatives or even disguise blatant shams as a meaningful environmental movement - for temporary convenience and political survival.

In perhaps the whackiest case of officials' environmental treacheries, villagers in Hua County, Shaanxi Province, were recently hired by the government to spray barren mountainside with green paint to deceive the satellite photographing the region's vegetation.

Years of reckless logging had stripped the hills of forest cover, the Guangzhou-based news portal ycwb.com reported on September 2.

Similarly lunatic tricks abound. To fool inspection teams into believing they have done a good job of preserving arable land, officials in Longchuan City, Zhejiang Province, a place with immense forests, ordered the felling of a swath of hillside trees and cultivating of the barren slope into terraced fields - on which nothing can be grown.

After the inspectors left, the fields were abandoned, Xinhua news agency reported on September 10.

Green charades

Likewise, the no-questions-asked blackout in Hebei can only be as disingenuous, if not worse.

After returning from an inspection tour of several provinces, Zhu Hongren, chief engineer at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, told Caijing that regional authorities gave him a list of 2,087 factories that "are being closed" to reduce carbon intensity. Their authenticity is hard to verify, he said.

Subsequent media revelations found 40 percent of these "closing" companies actually folded two years ago, which means the real figure is far lower, the Caijing report said.

When green credentials become intertwined with officials' chances of promotion - just as GDP is closely tied to their future - it surprises no one to hear of them putting up "Potemkin villages" to win approval from above. Once danger is past, they revert to business as usual.

Fortunately, not all Chinese urban planners are blinded by the thirst for GDP or green charades as window dressing.

"Preserving our mountains and waterways should also be an official pet project," Jiang Hongliang, Yixing's Party chief, was quoted as saying in the Xinhua Daily on October 5.

My recent trip to Yixing, an idyllic city on the western shores of Taihu Lake, has opened my eyes to the city's determination to improve the environment, not for pleasing higher authorities, but its own citizens.

Yixing has made strenuous efforts to fulfill its "official pet project," known to some only as a parochial chase after GDP. While the city already has high air quality thanks to its vast forests, it does not rest on its laurels.

In a decisive move, it plans to close down all remaining 279 factories of glazed tiles, once considered a staple product of Yixing but now recognized as a heavily polluting industry.

Given the fact that some regional governments have sheltered polluters in exchange for tax money, Yixing's choice to financially reward the first businesses that sign off on contracts to close is all the more remarkable.

Its emissions of major industrial pollutants dropped by 34 percent last year thanks to the genuine green push.

It doesn't take a genius to see that spontaneous green campaigns count a lot more than projects hastily implemented due only to official pressure.

During my stay in Yixing, I wandered into its bamboo groves - the largest in Asia - from a mountain trail that few had trodden. Listening to the rustling bamboo and burbling creek offered me a moment of inner peace from the razzle-dazzle of Shanghai.

For some officials, it ought to be a place to reflect on their skewed pursuit of growth at the expense of the environment, and more important, on the merit of slowing down, both in growth and in the much-hyped industrial overhaul.