North China in grip of smog again
Print Edition
THE third round of smog to hit north China in October cast a pall of gloom yesterday, with the National Meteorological Center starting to monitor worse air pollution in the already polluted region on Wednesday night and forecasting the bad weather for three days until Saturday.
This, according to an official travel report, means bad news for tourism in the area.
Due to thin wind and steady air, Beijing, Tianjin City and Hebei Province will be heavily polluted over the three-day period, especially today and Saturday, until a cold snap sweeps away the thick smog on Saturday night, the center said.
The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region often dominates the nationwide smog list, which is published by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
In the third quarter this year, Beijing, Tianjin and seven cities in Hebei were among the 10 Chinese cities with the worst air quality. The only one outside the region to make the list was Jinan, capital of eastern Shandong Province, which topped the list. It was followed by Tangshan, Baoding, Xingtai, Handan, Hengshui, Shijiazhuang, Beijing, Langfang and Tianjin.
Air pollution has become a major concern for tourists, according to Dai Bin, president of the China Tourism Academy, which revealed on Monday that China received nearly 129 million tourists in 2013, down 2.51 percent year on year.
Beijing, which set a new 60-year mark with 46 smoggy days in the first 100 days of 2013, saw an inbound tourist volume of 4.5 million in 2013, a year-on-year fall of 10.1 percent, the Beijing Statistics Bureau said.
The latest statistics show that the decline has continued this year. In the first three quarters of 2014, Beijing received 3.13 million tourists, a year-on-year decrease of 5.9 percent.
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