Anger at Beijing inaction as smog shrouds capital
Print Edition
Heavy smog in Beijing lasting for days has triggered public criticism over the city government’s inaction.
At 8pm yesterday, the air quality index (AQI) at monitoring stations in the capital’s downtown areas read between 342 and 414 and was rated at Level 6, the highest level, indicating hazardous pollution, according to the Beijing Environmental Monitoring Center’s website.
Late on Saturday, the business channel of China Central Television questioned why the government failed to initiate an emergency response under such smoggy weather.
“Beijing city government, don’t pretend to be blind in the fog,” the channel said via its account on Weibo.com. “The government should not shun its responsibility or turn a blind eye to the smog.”
The channel tweeted twice on the matter in five minutes, and the post had been forwarded thousands of times as of yesterday morning.
Beijing was not the only region facing the suffocating air yesterday. The National Meteorological Center issued a yellow alert at 6am, forecasting medium to serious haze in Beijing, the nearby city of Tianjin and the provinces of Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Shanxi and Shaanxi.
The city government put into effect an emergency response system last October. The system requires that traffic be cut with alternate driving days for even and odd-numbered license plates and schools suspended if a red alert, the highest level for air pollution, is issued. Industrial plants will be closed or told to reduce production and fireworks will be banned if an orange alert, the second-highest, is issued.
However, there has been no emergency response since the program came into effect on October 22, although the public has on several occasions complained of smog heavy enough to warrant a response.
Lowest blue alert
The government issued a blue alert for air pollution late on Saturday, the lowest of the four-tier alert system.
The latest round of smog began on Friday, when holiday fireworks took the AQI from more than 300 in the morning to 500 in the evening.
Wang Yuesi, a researcher with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said orange and red alerts required action by the public, such as cutting traffic, and government authorities were reluctant to issue the response as smog for three consecutive days is difficult to forecast accurately.
“Environmental authorities lacked preparation in responding to smog for both technical reasons and management reasons. All they hope is that continuous smoggy days like this never come,” Wang said.
He said the response would be useless even if traffic were cut and plants suspended, because smog is not strictly a Beijing problem, but a common issue faced by a much larger region. His research last year found that hazardous heavy metals in Beijing’s air came from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area.
In October, the Ministry of Finance announced a 5 billion yuan (US$824 million) reward for air pollution reduction.
And a statement released after a State Council meeting last week urged reduction of PM2.5 and other pollutants in smoggy cities as the key task. It noted that consumption of coal should be controlled, calling for more efforts to promote high quality gasoline, energy saving in construction and the use of environmentally friendly boilers.
The government has allocated 10 billion yuan this year as rewards for key cities and regions which make significant progress in air pollution control.
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