Residents pitch in to burnish coastal city’s clean reputation
It was 7 o’clock in the morning. Peng Zuxun, 82, a resident of Qinhuangdao’s Greatwall Garden community, left home to start his day, with a scraping tool in his pocket as usual.
At 9 o’clock, Zhou Huixia, director of the Tianyang Xincheng neighborhood committee, which covers several adjacent communities, saw a picture posted in a WeChat group showing small advertisements put up on the wall on the way to the Greatwall Garden. The photo was taken the day before.
“Peng must have cleared it by now,” Zhou said.
Peng is an icon for many in the coastal city, population 1.4 million, which is known for its beach scenes and attracts millions of visitors, including China’s top leaders, every year.
Several years ago, the city’s environment and sanitation situation was not good. Now it has become the cleanest city in Hebei.
Local legend
In the province’s clean-city appraisal last year, inspectors were surprised when they failed to collect any dust after sweeping a square meter of ground in the Shanhaiguan district in Qinhuangdao. Local legend has it that one inspector put on white gloves and wiped the ground, only to find that the gloves did not change color. The anecdote was quickly and widely spread around Hebei.
Li Yaobin, director of the city’s urban management office, said the changes started when Meng Xiangwei, the Party chief, arrived in September 2015.
“He said we have to improve sanitation, and his first requirement was that the chief of urban management has to work on the street,” Li said. “In my understanding, he was asking us to work at the front, and to find and solve problems there.”
In January last year, Meng took officials on an 8-kilometer walk in bitter wind to investigate. “I felt great pressure at that time,” Li said.
After that, the bureau made a careful analysis and listed 48 problems in four categories. It introduced an extremely high standard based on the one used in Zhongwei, in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, which had become famous during a national city sanitation work conference held there in 2015.
Under that standard, dust collected from every square meter in main and secondary streets in the major urban area should not exceed 5 grams, while garbage should not stay on the ground for more than five minutes in such areas.
To that end, the city has spent more than 110 million yuan ($16.5 million) on environmental and sanitation equipment since 2016.
“It greatly eases pressure on the sanitation workers while improving the level of cleanness,” Li said.
Keeping beach clean
At the seashore in Beidaihe district, the beach remains clean despite the massive number of visitors. Zhang Li, head of the district’s urban management office, said a large number of beach cleaners were put to work long before the summer vacation. After the tide of visitors arrived, they used a smaller number of cleaners to regularly tidy the beach.
The city was also mapped into a digital grid — an overlay in which every road and every section of the beach are assigned to four people at various levels — from municipal leaders to sanitation workers, according to Xie Xiaobing, deputy director of the city urban management office. City officials are required to walk through the whole area they’re in charge of at least once a month, while districtlevel officials have to inspect twice monthly and the sanitation workers must clean the area every day.
Once a problem is identified, the people in charge of fixing it can be found by simply clicking the screen of the monitoring center, Xie said.
Another impressive move was to start the “All in City Washing” activity, in which residents are called upon to clean the city on the afternoon of the last Friday of every month from April to October. Later, people voluntarily started heading into the streets to clean on every rainy day to save water.
“Many people participated, from the Party chief to ordinary residents,” said Zhou, the neighborhood committee director. “For many citizens, rain is the order. It is not an administrative order, but it has been the norm.”
Employees volunteer
Zheng Lei, a human resources manager at Ugrant, a retail chain, said many employees at the company volunteer for cleaning because they have gradually found that both their living conditions and relations with colleagues and neighbors improved. It was a good chance to educate kids, she added.
The company has encouraged its more than 3,000 employees to join the cleaning effort.
As for the sea, the Qinhuangdao Maritime Safety Administration listed seven situations in which vessels might discharge pollutants, said Wang Yunpeng, director of the administration’s dangerous pollution prevention division.
The administration uses its rich experience to assess the risk of pollution discharge for more than 10,000 arriving and departing vessels at the port every year. For instance, they will check a ship if they find the volume of remaining pollutants does not match the figure calculated according to the distance it traveled, as well as other conditions.
Zhou said that this year she found an increasing number of people from other places living in her neighborhood, especially elderly people.
“At first I thought they were visiting their children. But later I found that some people do not have children there. They simply chose the city as the place to spend the rest of their life, because of the city’s pleasant appearance, the clean ocean and the warm community.”