Striving for clean air

Iwas born in Linfen, a city in North China’s Shanxi Province that is “famous” for its abundance of coal as well as its air pollution. During my stay in Linfen for the Spring Festival holiday last week, I heard many stories of the local government’s and residents’ efforts in the “anti-air pollution” drive.

My husband and I decided to drive home from Beijing on February 2 – which meant a journey of more than 500 kilometers through Beijing and Hebei to Shanxi. The weather seemed foggier when we left Beijing and entered Hebei Province. The situation did not change when we entered Shanxi, and we could occasionally see flying dust outside the car.

My husband said that compared with what he had previously experienced in Taiyuan, the capital city of Shanxi, the environment has improved.

“When I was in middle school, I had to clean my nostrils out after riding my bicycle to school,” he said. His words triggered similar memories for me, and for one moment I wondered whether cleaning the nasal cavities before class was something all students born in the late 1980s in Shanxi did, no matter which city we lived in.

I also remembered that during the early springs when I was in high school, my friends and I would not talk when we rode our bikes to school, even though we wanted to share our opinions on the cute guy in the hottest soap opera. Why? The fear of a mouthful of sand.

Sand storms and air pollution were common sights during winters and early springs around 2005. We had to keep our mouths firmly shut or wear a mask – where two black dots would form where the nostrils were by the end of the day.

Local governments in Shanxi began ramping up their efforts in fighting air pollution 10 years ago. In Linfen, for example, I noticed that several ecological parks have been built. Fenhe, a river which passes through Linfen and, according to my childhood memory, had little water, now has an abundance of it.

The efforts seem to have yielded some results, with more clear skies to see and cleaner air to breathe in Linfen in recent years. But these were undermined by a major setback in 2016.

The air pollution in Linfen once again made headlines after the city saw high concentrations of sulfur dioxide in December that year, which reached 348 micrograms per cubic meter, 4.8 times the national standard. The concentration soared to 1,303 micrograms per cubic meter on January 4.

Zhang Wenqing, the then head of the Linfen Environmental Protection Bureau, told media in March 2017 that the main reason for the high concentration of sulfur dioxide was local residents’ burning coal for heat.

Another battle in the war against air pollution ensued.

In 2018, my mother saw a group of government officials standing in a residential area, supervising workers as they took away all the coal that residents usually stored as fuel to heat their boilers during the winter.

For residents who usually burn coal for heat, the government now installs central heating systems for them. In the outskirts, where there are still no central heating systems, the government encouraged residents to use gas heaters and gave 4,000 yuan to each household as subsidies for the winter in 2018.

Discounts on electricity costs have also been given to residents who use electric radiators – 0.28 yuan for every kilowatt hour within 2,000 kilowatt hours.

“This is the way the local government is trying to keep residents warm for the winter and also to ensure a decrease in the burning of coal. Many of the residents seemed satisfied with the arrangement,” a resident surnamed Yin who lived in a residential area in the outskirts, told me.

Apart from updating the heating systems, the Linfen government has rectified high-polluting industries, including chemical factories, coal cleaning plants, building materials factories and coking plants.

Other measures include requiring all barbecue stands in night markets to use electric cookers, stopping all inkjet printer businesses, and imposing a fireworks ban in cities during holidays. A friend of mine who works in a government department told me that they had to print banners in a neighboring city during the ban on inkjet printer businesses in Linfen.

After all these efforts were made, I asked my mother about her feelings on the air quality in Linfen this winter. She reluctantly admitted that “at least we are doing something to improve the situation.”