Pollution control targets to be met
China will be able to meet all of its nine pollution control targets during the 13th Five- Year Plan ( 2016- 20) period as scheduled, a senior environmental official said on Wednesday.
All the targets, which deal with air and water pollution control, have been essentially completed.
“The environmental improvements in the country after 2015 have been bigger than those in each of the other five- year plan periods,” said Zhao Yingmin, viceminister of ecology and environment, at a news conference organized by the State Council Information Office.
While eight of the goals, including reductions in the discharge of sulfur dioxide, oxynitride and ammonia nitrogen, had been achieved as of 2019, even more progress in reductions was made between January and September, he said.
Zhao said the country is also expected to meet its ninth goal — ensuring fairly good air quality, considered to be below 100 on the 0- 500 air quality index scale, on at least 84.5 percent of days in the 337 monitored cities — by year’s end.
From January to September, the proportion of days with fairly good air quality in those cities reached 87.2 percent, 5.7 percentage points higher than that of the same period in 2019, he continued.
He said the marked improvement in air quality can be attributed to consistent efforts in optimizing the industrial structure and decarbonizing energy consumption.
About 200 million metric tons of excess steel capacity has been eliminated across the country. By the end of 2019, extra- low emissions had been realized in 890 million kilowatts of coal- fired power generation capacity, he said, adding that the country is still forging ahead in upgrading 610 million tons of steel capacity for extra- low emissions.
He also said that over 25 million rural households in the Beijing- Tianjin- Hebei region and the Fenhe- Weihe River Plain area, which is located in Shanxi, Shaanxi and Henan provinces, have changed from coal to cleaner energy such as natural gas and electricity to heat homes during the winter.
87.2 percent
Proportion of days with fairly good air quality in the 337 monitored cities from January to September
The commission will further improve regulations to deepen opening- up and sharpen the country’s financial competitiveness while safeguarding financial security, he said.
“We will steadily push ahead rulebased capital market opening- up,” said Yi Huiman, chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the top securities watchdog, adding that the commission will refer to mature market practices when improving the fundamental rules of the capital market.
The commission will improve the capital market’s institutional framework, with market- oriented reform of initial public offerings as a key focus, work to streamline and unify the channels for foreign capital to take part in domestic markets and further open the futures and bond markets, Yi said.
Vice- Premier Liu also called for maintaining the stability of the country’s monetary policy and keeping market liquidity reasonably ample, adding that is important to strengthen international macro policy coordination to promote the global recovery.
Yi Gang, governor of the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, said at the conference that China will maintain a prudent monetary policy and improve the structural financial policies for mitigating the impact of the COVID- 19 pandemic.
The central bank governor forecast positive GDP growth this year, although uncertainties still exist due to the pandemic.
“Some policies have completed their temporary missions, but some measures, especially for supporting small, micro and private companies and stabilizing employment and green development, must continue in order to facilitate the nation’s dual- circulation development pattern,” Yi Gang said.
The dual- circulation pattern means relying more on the domestic economy to drive growth while the domestic and foreign markets complement each other.
China will sustain conventional monetary policies as long as possible, and policies beneficial for the sustainable growth of the economy and society, he added.
Yi Gang expected a stable debt- toGDP ratio in next year, as GDP growth continually accelerates and the overall money supply remains reasonable for risk control.