In China, ‘smog refugees’ flee pollution-choked cities

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(China Today Saturday 4 March 2017)

In China, ‘smog refugees’ flee pollution-choked cities

People walking in smog towards a railway station on a polluted day in Zhengzhou,

Henan province, China. Warmer winters and a lack of strong winds to blow away pollutants

in the air have made fighting the smog harder. Photo: Reuters     

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Published: 4:00 AM, March 4, 2017

BEIJING — Desperate times call for desperate measures. Or so said one family, who decided to leave smog-choked Beijing for a leafy border town near the Mekong River.

Ms Huang Jingjing and many of her neighbours in a newly built apartment block in Xishuangbanna — more than a nine-hour drive from China’s “spring city”, Kunming — call themselves “smog refugees”. Ms Huang said she decided to quit her well-paying job as a civil servant in the Chinese capital after her four-year-old daughter developed a chronic cough and signs of asthma.

“Half the students in my daughter’s kindergarten (preschool) had coughing spells or a fever that lasted for several days around New Year,” she said.

Smog blanketed Beijing and many cities in northern China for nine consecutive days from Dec 30 to Jan 7. Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, is one of the top 10 cities in terms of having the cleanest air in China. Xishuangbanna itself is not one of the cities whose air quality the Ministry of Environmental Protection is monitoring.

Many of Ms Huang’s neighbours are also those who have fled the filthy air in north-east China’s “Jing-Jin-Ji” — shorthand for Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei. (“Ji” is a one-character abbreviation often used for Hebei.)

Policymakers have proposed integrating these three areas into an immense megalopolis to rival any other in the world. Despite coordinated efforts to tackle pollution and congestion in this region, families like the Huangs are leaving because they say years of government efforts have done little to improve air quality, particularly in the winter.

Northern China was choked by two serious spells of smog in the winter of 2016-17, triggering the highest government warning for foul air in dozens of cities where schools were shut, highways closed and flights cancelled due to poor visibility.

One-fifth of the country was engulfed by toxic air for a week in mid-December, and just two weeks later, 60 northern cities, including Beijing, rang in the New Year amid a red alert when the foul air lasted for nine days.

There are no official figures in China on people relocating due to pollution, and therefore it is difficult to say whether the Huangs’ case is part of a larger trend. But 41 per cent of those living in the country’s smog-stricken north said they frequently thought about leaving for a place with cleaner air, a recent China Youth Daily survey found. Another 14 per cent have already left in search of such a place.

“Many of my neighbours still head back to Beijing and Hebei to work for most of the year while they leave their elderly parents and children behind in Xishuangbanna,” Ms Huang said.

Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei are home to nearly 10 per cent of China’s 1.4 billion people — about six times the population of the New York City metropolitan area. And despite government efforts to cut emissions — including phasing out polluting industries, retiring old vehicles and replacing dirty coal with cleaner natural gas — the region is frequently smothered by chronic air pollution in winter.

The average concentration of fine, cancer-causing PM2.5 in the air in the Jing-Jin-Ji area in November has not fallen in the past four years, hovering at around 100 micrograms per cubic metre, data from the Minister of Environmental Protection showed.

Environmental Protection Minister Chen Jining blamed the problem on the huge amount of coal used to power winter heating systems in the area and the concentration of heavy industries that are high emitters.

Six provinces and municipalities in northern China — Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Henan, Shanxi and Shandong — account for only 7.2 per cent of the country’s total area but consume one-third of the coal, Mr Chen said.

The six also accounted for 43 per cent of the country’s steel production, half of the coke fuel output and 20 per cent of cement manufacturing, according to government statistics.

The amount of toxic pollutants usually goes up by 30 per cent in the Jing-Jin-Ji area when citywide heating systems are turned on, according to an estimate by the ministry.

Private homes, restaurants and hotels in the area add to the woes by burning 40 million tonnes of low-quality coal each year, the ministry said. That is one-fifth of the annual national consumption. Low-quality coal emits 10 times the pollutants of industry-grade coal used by power generators.

So have government efforts to clean up air in and around the capital failed, or does progress require more time?

China rolled out a national clean-air action plan in September 2012. The government pledged 10 billion yuan (S$2.04 billion) to a smog-fighting fund in 2014, with the money distributed to nine provincial-level governments in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, and the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas.

Under that plan, about 800,000 households in the Jing-Jin-Ji area were told to switch from using coal to natural gas or electricity to power their heating systems last year. This has cut the consumption of low-quality coal by two million tonnes. But that is just a 5 per cent reduction compared to the total.

Nearly four million old vehicles spewing carbon and sulphur dioxide were also removed from roads in the area in the last four years, said Mr Liu Binjiang, a department head overseeing air pollution control at the ministry.

In the Chinese capital, the average annual PM2.5 concentration level dropped 18 per cent to 73 micrograms per cubic metre of air from 2013 to 2016. In the entire Jing-Jin-Ji area, it has dropped by a third, to 71 micrograms per cubic metre of air over the same period.

But the grey pall hanging over Beijing and its two sister regions in winter has not lifted.

The level of PM2.5 particles shot up to 135 micrograms per cubic metre from Nov 15 to Dec 31, which was 2.4 times the average during the other three seasons, data from the Ministry of Environmental Protection showed. Five bouts of smog were recorded in December alone.

Mr Ji Tao, a postgraduate student who has lived in Beijing for seven years, said he did not feel any improvement. “The smog last year was just as bad as it was in 2015,” he said.

The two rounds of smog in late December and earlier January were as severe as the levels of air pollution recorded in January 2013 and February 2014, and again in December 2015, and lasted as long as those previous bouts, said Dr Wang Yuesi from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Although the air in Beijing and its surrounding areas has notably improved for most of a year, “it’s no wonder the people don’t feel the change given the ghastly choking spells in winter”, he said.

Unfavourable weather conditions in recent years, including warmer winters and the lack of strong winds to blow away pollutants in the air, have also made the battle against smog even harder to win, Mr Chen said.

Some residents who are frustrated over the slow progress are going the extra mile to hold the government accountable.

Mr Sun Hongbin, an activist from Hebei, is suing the city government in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital, demanding 32 yuan for the anti-smog mask he bought to protect himself from toxic air while on business trip to the city on Nov 20.

The 25-year-old claimed that the regional government should be responsible when the high level of toxins on the day rates as “heavily polluted”. The lawsuit, which caused a public stir when it was filed on Nov 25, is still ongoing.

This lawsuit is not just a random outburst, but a sign that the public was now ready to hold the authorities accountable for the poor air, said Mr Ma Zhong, dean of Renmin University’s School of Environmental Studies.

Even on days with a “red alert” for smog, factories continue on with business despite orders to cut production, and some cities light tonnes of fireworks during Chinese New Year, he said.

“The failure to rein in smog in China lies in the lack of an effective accountability system,” he added. CAIXIN ONLINE