Focus on Arts and Ecology

The big environmental stories in the Chinese media this week (6-12 Sep)

The Ministry of Environment and Ecology (MEE) has criticised the city of Linyi in Shandong province for arbitrarily closing down a large number of businesses in a last ditch bid to lift its air quality ranking.

Known as China’s plywood capital, Linyi ranked in the bottom ten for air pollution of 168 major Chinese cities in the first six months of 2019. The result prompted the provincial government to task the city with improving its air quality.

Soon some of the methods were found extreme and the city received a flood of complaints from local businesses and residents. In the Lanshan district, for example, MEE inspectors found most of the restaurants in the city’s main street, more than 400 plywood factories and 24 carparks closed for “rectification”. 

Such inflexible approaches have been applied in many provinces in China’s fight against air pollution. In the winter of 2017, some rural homes and schools in northern China ended up cold in the hasty switch from coal to gas heating. In the same year, more than 1,000 hotels and restaurants near Erhai, a major tourist attraction in Yunnan, faced year-long closure in an effort to clean the famous lake. 

Li Ganjie, China’s environment minister, said at this year’s National People’s Congress that such one-size-fits-all approaches should be prohibited. After the ministry’s notice of criticism, Lanshan district announced it would investigate, and censured bureaucrats involved in the rectification campaign.

Read more about controversies and tensions in China’s environmental protection movement.