A November 2000 Report from U.S. Embassy Beijing

Industrial pollution, acid rain, water quality and availability, deforestation, land degradation and desertification all compete for the resources and attention of environmental protection authorities in North China’s Hebei Province. Air pollution is the major focus of attention in the capital, Shijiazhuang, but water is considered the number-one problem province-wide. Clean-up efforts must vie simultaneously with the legacy of Maoist industrialization and the confusion inherent in China’s transition to a market-oriented future. With 60 days left to meet environmental targets mandated under the Ninth Five-Year Plan, authorities in Shijiazhuang claim that essentially all industrial pollution sources under their supervision will meet the applicable emissions standards. But they concede that the city has no chance to achieve the targets for ambient air and water quality. In all these respects, Hebei closely reflects the situation nationwide.
 
 

The Road to Shijiazhuang

An Embassy EST officer traveled to Shijiazhuang (pop 1.3 million), capital of Hebei Province, in late October and met with officials from the provincial and municipal environmental protection bureaus (EPBs). Hebei, which surrounds Beijing and Tianjin municipalities, is home to 65 million people (more than France) crammed into 190,000 square kilometers (smaller than Nebraska). The north, bordering Inner Mongolia, and the western border with Shanxi Province are mountainous. There are forested areas east of Beijing and Tianjin. The southern and central regions are heavily cultivated plains. The landscape between Beijing and Shijiazhuang, 275 kilometers to the southwest, is punctuated with smoke-belching chimneys, dry or near-dry riverbeds, dusty fields and small plots of corn and vegetables.
 
 

Environment Under Stress from All Directions

The latest annual report from the Hebei provincial EPB paints a bleak picture. Of 130 water-quality monitoring points throughout the province, 63 reported pollution levels off the scale of China’s five-level index, meaning the water was considered unsuitable for any use. The average concentration of suspended particulate matter (TSP) throughout the province in 1999 was 3.6 times the World Health Organization standard. Three-quarters of cultivated areas are considered of low or middle quality, having been degraded by overuse of pesticides and fertilizers and industrial pollution, and 2.3 million hectares are in danger of desertification. More than 40 percent of forestland has been deforested, and 45.7 percent of grasslands are either degraded or in the process of degradation. A city EPB official said he had estimated that pollution cost Shijiazhuang 5.3 percent of its Gross Domestic Product in 1995 through its effects on human capital (i.e. quantity and quality of available labor).
 
 

City Officials Focus on Air Pollution

Asked which of the problems confronting them — air pollution, water pollution or land degradation — was considered most urgent, the Shijiazhuang EPB officials said that all three were serious but that the city was currently directing most of its attention to air pollution. Shijiazhuang ranked among China’s five worst cities in terms of air quality, they said, and as a provincial capital it was one of 47 key cities targeted for clean-up by Beijing.

In 1999, according to the Provincial EPB, the composite air quality index for Shijiazhuang was 1.8, signifying that, on average, the concentrations of TSP, NO_x and SO₂ were 80 percent above their respective target standards (200 micrograms per cubic meter for TSP, 150 for NO_x and 60 for SO₂). The EPB officials said the major pollution problem in the city was particulate matter. Sand regularly blows in from the dried-out bed of the Hutuo River to the north, which has not had water for years. Other major contributors are dust from construction sites, coal smoke and emissions from the dozens of large, aging factories that lie within the city’s center — a consequence of the Soviet-style industrialization of the early Mao era, when there was no distinction between industrial and residential development.

Within the roughly 100 square kilometer area inside the city’s second ring road are a large steelworks employing 20,000 workers, an associated coking plant, a chemical fertilizer plant, a pharmaceutical plant, several flour mills, a large coal-fired power plant, a dyeing plant and assorted other industrial establishments, all built in the 1950s. There are also more than 70 cement and lime factories upwind to the northwest. In the last 10 years, most new factories have been located in an industrial development zone east of the ring road. Many of these newer factories are foreign joint ventures. Pharmaceutical plants predominate. There is also an electric vehicle plant. The air in this eastern zone is relatively clean.
 
 

Water is the Main Concern Province-Wide

A provincial EPB official said that, province- wide, water was considered a more serious problem than air quality. She said per-capita fresh water resources in Hebei were one-eighth the national average, which in turn is one-fourth the world average. Of these scant water resources, she said, 80 percent are polluted beyond the applicable national standard (based on the designated use of the water). A city official added that none of Shijiazhuang’s surface water met the relevant standards.

The provincial official added that ecological issues had also become more prominent recently, especially in the aftermath of the severe dust storms that hit Beijing and other parts of North China last spring. The storms prompted Premier Zhu Rongji to make an emergency inspection tour of desertified regions of Hebei. Central Government leaders in Beijing are now urging Hebei to take marginal land out of cultivation and let it revert to forest and grassland. But the Hebei officials said that was easier said than done — 2 million people now farming those lands would have to find alternative means of livelihood.
 
 

Mitigation Efforts Having Some Effect

Despite the overall bleak picture, the EPB report indicates recent progress on some fronts. Total emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO₂), soot and industrial particulates were all down slightly in 1999 compared with 1998. Average concentrations of SO₂ and total suspended particulates (TSP) were also down, but nitrogen oxides (NO_x) pollution was up, thanks to an increase in the number of cars. The urban wastewater treatment rate increased to 34.1 percent, from 30.5 percent. Urban areas with piped gas service (mostly coal gas and LPG) surpassed 90 percent, and the total area served by centralized district heat (as opposed to individual coal-burning heating stoves) grew more than 30 percent. The total volume of sewage from industrial sources fell nearly 9 percent. But domestic sewage volume increased more than 16 percent. A provincial EPB official said that, due to rapid urbanization over the last decade, domestic sewage now contributes as much to water pollution as industrial emissions.

The report said investments in pollution control in Hebei totaled RMB 4.4 billion (US$530 million) in 1999, up 32 percent from the previous year. It said environmental authorities carried out 140,000 on-site inspections, meted out 2,607 administrative penalties and took more than 500 law-enforcement actions. Nearly 44,000 enterprises paid pollution levies totaling RMB 328 million (US$40 million).

Shijiazhuang recently acquired automated air-quality monitoring equipment — one of 11 Chinese cities to acquire such equipment through a contract with the California company Dasibi with assistance from USEPA and the U.S. & Foreign Commercial Service. One other city in Hebei — Taishan — also has such equipment, and there are plans to install it in seven more cities next year. The EPB officials said daily air quality data from Shijiazhuang’s five monitoring stations is now being reported on TV news broadcasts and in the local newspapers. However, two local dailies purchased at a newsstand October 24 did not have air quality reports.

Shijiazhuang recently received approval from the State Development Planning Commission to begin construction of refuse-incinerating power plant — the first of its kind in North China. The plant will burn 500 tons of refuse a day.
 
 

Still, Ninth Five-Year Plan Targets Will Not be Met

In 1996 the PRC State Council mandated that all industrial enterprises in China meet emissions standards by the end of 2000 or face closure and that key cities, including Shijiazhuang, should meet national standards for ambient air and water quality. With just over two months left to meet this deadline, Shijiazhuang EPB officials told ESTOFF that many large enterprises in the city, including the steelworks, had not yet achieved the standards. But they were reasonably optimistic that most of them could meet the deadline. However, as older plants, these enterprises benefit from a more lax standard. And given the dense concentration of factories within the city, overall pollution will remain well above the target level in any case. Thus, it is conceivable that all or nearly all factories will meet (or at least be said to have met) emissions standards without any noticeable improvement in the city’s air or water quality. Province-wide, more than 90 percent of factories had met emissions standards by the end of 1999, according to the EPB report, but as stated above, air and water quality were still far from satisfactory.
 
 

Tenth Five-Year Plan: Acid Rain Control Measures

Shijiazhuang lies within the zone designated by the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) for special measures to control acid rain. Press reports indicate the 10th Five-Year Plan, to be adopted early next year, will likely require SO₂ emissions within this zone to be reduced 20 percent by 2005. The EPB officials said they had recently held a meeting to discuss how to implement the new policy. They said that smokestack monitors would be required on boilers with capacities above 35 tons of steam per hour and that burning of coal with sulfur content of more than 1 percent might be prohibited. Many firms may have to install flue-gas desulfurization equipment.

The EPB officials said Shijiazhuang had been selected by the World Bank, together with Changsha in South China’s Hunan Province, as a test city for an SO₂ control project. But they said SO₂ emissions trading was not being considered as an option at this point, since they did not think it was suitable to Chinese conditions.
 
 

Comment

Shijiazhuang will probably report at the end of December that 99 percent of its factories have met required emissions standards while air and water quality remain far below standard. This pattern is likely to be repeated in other key cities. There are a number of explanations for this apparent contradiction:

• The 1996 State Council Decision required only fixed industrial sources to meet emissions standards; mobile sources (automobiles) are responsible for a growing share of pollution; the residential sector and wind-blown dust are also important pollution sources.
• The individual emissions standards may be too loose, especially for older factories.
• The process of certifying emissions from individual factories is complex and open to abuse, fraud and misrepresentation; the ambient air quality data are more reliable and can be verified through daily media reports.
• Hundreds of small, obsolete, polluting enterprises have been closed in recent years, but authorities are loathe to shut down large operations that employ tens of thousands of people.
• It is common under central planning for quantitative targets to become ends in themselves. In the late ‘50s, when Mao enjoined the masses to double China’s steel production in a single year, people melted down perfectly good tools and cooking implements to make unusable ingots. Chinese bureaucrats have also displayed a propensity over the years to distort statistics if necessary to show targets were achieved.