While many Chinese cities have been blanketed by smog for many years, public awareness of the dangers of pollution had remained low until recently. The new Environmental Protection Law went into effect on January 1. On February 27, the new environmental protection minister was appointed. Smog has become a hot topic among lawmakers and political advisers, as well as on social media. The great deal of public attention that has been paid to pollution issues recently has laid a foundation for more effective law enforcement, according to NGOs that have been campaigning for action on pollution for many years.
Workers push a minecart at a coal field on March 4 in Huaibei, East China's Anhui Province. China is the world's largest coal consumer and 65 percent of its power comes from burning coal, which is considered a major contributor to smog. Photo: CFP
Despite China's chronic pollution problems, public awareness of the dangers of pollution has remained low. Following the introduction of the "strictest ever" new Environmental Protection Law, the recent appointment of a new Environmental Protection Minister and the ongoing efforts of campaigning NGOs, pollution has become a bigger issue than ever in China.
Environmental protection has been further highlighted during the ongoing two sessions.
During a meeting with National People's Congress (NPC) deputies from Jiangxi Province on March 6, President Xi Jinpingasked them to protect and treat the environment like "their own eyes and lives."
In the government work report given during the two sessions, Premier Li Keqiang vowed a "harsh strike" against illicit polluters and to impose a "strict penalty" on government officials who assist offenders.
Both Fu Ying, spokeswoman for the third session of the 12th NPC, and Chen Jining, Minister of Environmental Protection, stressed at press conferences that the new environmental protection law "has teeth."
Several provincial and municipal governors from Hebei, Tianjin, Shandong and Zhejiang have pledged to enhance their pollution controls, including measures such as increasing their usage of clean energy and shutting down polluting plants.
This has coincided with an increasing presence of discussions about the issue on social media.
Public awareness about the need for greater environmental protection has been raised and many have started to take some kind of action to fight pollution and its effects. These efforts range from tipping off the authorities about polluters, volunteering with NGOs or simply buying air purifiers for their home or workplace.
In response to the growing public interest in these issues, NGOs are busy raising funds and encouraging volunteers to help them, ready to turn this interest into concrete change.
"The [pollution] situation is not helpless or hopeless. The widespread discussion works as a great call to action, which is vital to the country's crackdown on pollution in next 10 years," Ma Jun, the director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (PEA), told the Global Times.
Vital volunteers
The PEA, a non-profit environmental protection organization based in Beijing, has created a pollution map so people can see how clean the air is in their area and take the necessary precautions.
Through the app, which offers real-time emissions monitoring data from 190 cities across the country, in addition to monitoring the emissions of hundreds of businesses, users can alert authorities of problems at any time.
The app experienced technical problems at the end of February. "The number of people downloading the app soared suddenly and the growth was beyond our capacity. Too many users opened the app at once and caused traffic congestion," Ma said.
What surprised him more was that many users left messages expressing their support and said that they were happy to wait for the app to be improved, instead of complaining. Several leading Internet firms like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent offered to help with software and hardware support, Ma said.
The app came back online after its capacity was expanded the following day, and the app was downloaded 1.7 million times in recent week according to Ma.
The website of Friends of Nature, another environmental protection NGO, was also overloaded due to the number of people visiting the site. Friends of Nature produced a short animated film to demonstrate how PM 2.5 particles enter the body and harm the organs.
Zhang Boju, secretary-general of the Beijing-based Friends of Nature, told the Global Times that a couple of IT engineers called them to offer technical help and several lawyers approached the NGO offering to help it file public interest litigation.
"Suddenly, more public attention was brought to environmental protection NGOs and people's passion to participate our activities was ignited," Zhang said.
Several NGOs have said that many more people have reached out to them recently and offered to volunteer, fund-raising has become easier and the environmental protection authorities have become more open to cooperation.
But some conservationists have expressed worries that enthusiasm is already cooling. Feng Yongfeng, head of the environmental organization Nature University, said on his WeChat social media account that the pace of online donations has already slowed down. "Is it because people think the smog has become a thing of the past?" he asked.
Where there's muck there's money
Companies that sell products that lessen the impact that pollution has on people's health have seen their stocks rise rapidly as more and more people have begun to seek ways to safeguard their health, such as purchasing face masks and air purifiers. Both of these products have seen a sharp spike in sales on online shopping platforms.
Yuan Chengjie, marketing manager of Near Inc., a producer of air purifiers that was established in June 2014 in Shanghai, said that they have seen a noticeable rise in the number of orders this year.
In early February, they started crowdfunding on jd.com, a leading Chinese online retailer, selling advance orders for their machines for 669 yuan. As of press time, it has raised more than 480,000 yuan from nearly 2,500 backers. They will begin to ship the purifiers after March 23.
"The recent discussion has rekindled people's concerns about the smog, widely raised their awareness about the risks it poses and aroused their initiative to buy air cleaners," Yuan told the Global Times.
"But I am concerned about how long the enthusiasm will last. As you know, the interest in this kind of discussion always fades quickly in China, even if it's concerning public health," he said.
But he is confident about the future of the air filter market. There are about 600 brands of air purifiers available in China today and investment in this area is expanding, he said.
"We hope the attention can also help to promote the issue of universal Chinese criteria for air purifiers, so as to standardize the industry. Nowadays prices vary substantially and many makers even falsify test indexes," Yuan said.
Su Jun, director of mobile phone giant Xiaomi's air purifier R&D team, also acknowledged the public's rising concern about air quality.
He told the Global Times that Xiaomi has started to sell a batch of air purifiers once a week since December 16 and that each batch was snapped up in seconds every time. But he refused to reveal the exact sales volume and numbers of advance orders.
More than 100 firms in China begun making air purifiers last year and the domestic demand for air purifiers is and will be considerable, Su said.
An industrial estimate shows that the sales volume of air purifiers may reach up to 200 billion yuan in China by 2020, according to Su, who added that the country's air purifier penetration rate is 0.2 percent, much lower than in neighboring countries (It is 30 percent in Japan and 70 percent in South Korea.)
Meanwhile, so called smog escape tours and insurance claims linked to smog are another consequence of the growing awareness of this problem. After launching a "smog-travel insurance package" last year, China's leading travel company, Ctrip, released a report about smog-evasion tourism on March 6, which listed top destinations and routes taken by Chinese citizens to avoid air pollution.
A solid foundation
An important way of generating change is to bring issues to the attention of the relevant government organs. Several authorities have said that their pollution-reporting hotlines have blown up. The environmental protection bureau in Shenyang, capital of East China's Liaoning Province, claimed that the number of complaint calls they received daily tripled to 140 in recent months and they have tried to respond to every call.
There must be a transition period for the local authorities to learn to cope with a larger number of complaints than they received previously, Ma Jun from PEA said.
He said more than 300 enterprises that have their emissions monitored by the Pollution Map app have recently approached them directly or through environmental protection bureaus, either informing them about the measures they are taking to lower their emissions or claiming that the data was inaccurate due to defective equipment.
According to regulations, all manufacturers are required to install emission and waste monitoring systems, and the data should be collected and supervised by local environmental protection authorities, and this data should also be open to the public.
"But enterprises previously ignored the monitoring data as just a few people paid attention to it. Now it's different, more people have installed the app and more complaints have been made, the enterprises have become quicker to respond," Ma said.
He believes that public enthusiasm about the supervision of emissions should be maintained."It has laid a solid foundation of public opinion for law enforcement and anti-pollution campaigns, and we shall make full use of it," he noted.
Zhao Liang, a project coordinator with Nature University, said they have pledged to thoroughly investigate pollution in Hebei Province this year and write a blacklist of polluters for local law enforcement bodies.
He told the Global Times that they are trying to provide more chances for the public to get involved in reporting, supervising and cracking down on pollution, such as encouraging them to take pictures of pollution problems and forward them to NGOs and law enforcement bodies.
Tian Zuning, project coordinator with Tianjin Green Collar, an environmentalist NGO based in the city, said they are delighted about the rising public attention. "Limited funds sometimes restricted our activities and pollution testing equipment is usually expensive. But now we see more people want to donate to the cause, which has reinforced our confidence in the future activities," Tian told the Global Times.
Ma said PEA is scheduled to launch a new version of the Pollution Map next week and is going to change its name to Blue Map.
"Blue sounds positive. And we will add monitoring data about wastewater discharge, which means several thousand more enterprises will be covered by the app," Ma said, noting that some metropolises have also agreed to offer them data about small-sized plants.
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