China Smog Alerts Signal New Outlook

(WSJ) Cities across northern China maintained air-pollution measures on Monday after issuing a series of red alerts over the weekend, signaling a new willingness to pay an economic price for cleaner air.

With thick, yellow air smothering three provinces as coal-fired power plants ramp up to generate heat, the official Xinhua News Agency said more than 20 cities in the region have joined Beijing in issuing red alerts since Friday, triggering restrictions on factories and traffic.

Visibility was particularly bad in the coastal city of Tianjin, where more than 200 flights were delayed or canceled and every highway was shut down on Monday, according to Xinhua.

Environmentalists said the government’s response was better coordinated and more effective than last December, when the government waited until several days into a bout of heavy smog, and endured a public uproar, before calling its highest-level pollution alert.

In Beijing, 1,200 enterprises had to halt or reduce production and the city’s normally bustling streets were oddly quiet over the weekend as half the cars were ordered off the roads.

In some parts of the capital, government data showed levels of tiny, lung-damaging pollution particles known as PM2.5 near 400 micrograms per square meter, far above the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of 25 micrograms per cubic meter, Xinhua reported. In the industrial city of Shijiazhuang, PM2.5 levels rose to 1,015 micrograms per cubic meter, according to one monitoring station, Xinhua reported.

Many people in China have begun to rethink the value of a clean environment after decades of accepting pollution as the price of progress. A survey by the Pew Research Center released in October found that a majority of Chinese respondents said air pollution should be reduced even if it means slower growth.


“If you don’t have health, if you die prematurely, what’s the meaning of more economic growth?” said Ma Jun, founder of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a private group that tracks pollution. “That’s the choice now.”

That shift in attitudes has allowed the Chinese government to take a more aggressive—and expensive—approach to battling smog, according to Mr. Ma. While there are no authoritative calculations of the economic costs of enforcing red alerts, “the sacrifice is quite high,” he said.

The Communist Party’s flagship newspaper People’s Daily on Saturday chastised some cities for failing to clamp down on polluters during previous bouts of smog, saying local officials were still overly enthralled with economic growth.

“Between GDP and fiscal revenue on the one hand, and PM2.5 and clean air on the other, the former is their ‘true love,’” the paper said.

Because of both pollution-control efforts and slowing growth, China has seen some improvement in air quality in recent years. Across the country, according to Xinhua, PM2.5 concentrations have fallen 8.3% from a year earlier, the second consecutive reduction. Beijing’s air has gotten better three years in a row.

Data from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, which maintains its own pollution monitors, suggest average PM2.5 levels for December will finish measurably lower in Beijing compared with December last year, when they hit 162 micrograms per cubic meter.

Over the past few days, pollution-related restrictions in Beijing and elsewhere have hit companies in a range of industries. State-owned China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., also known as Sinopec, was ordered to cut output in some areas, according to an executive at the company, who said idle workers were still being paid albeit at a reduced rate.

The cotton trade in Shandong and Hebei provinces ground to a halt after most factories were closed on account of the pollution, according to the government-funded China National Cotton Information Center.

SF Express, an express-delivery company, posted a warning Saturday that packages delivered to Beijing and Tianjin would be delayed for up to two days due to traffic restrictions.

The Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau on Sunday named several businesses that were punished for pollution-related offenses over the weekend, including a Beijing roast-duck restaurant fined for “failing to use clean energy.”

There are still barriers to enforcement of environmental protections, including light and weakly enforced punishments for heavy polluters, said Ma Xiaoping, an economist at HSBC.

“Some blame the high economic growth rate for pollution but I think the real problem is a lack of government supervision,” he said. He said reductions in industrial production from pollution controls would likely have a limited impact on the overall economy as the interruptions were coming late in the year and were mostly regional.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection, which previously struggled to convince local governments to take emergency measures, has taken a stronger role this year, according to Ma Jun.

Source: Wall Street Journal by Josh Chin