When China’s leader Xi Jinping met with Communist Party delegates from inside Mongolia last week, he urged them not to improve in the fight for the environment.
“We need to adhere to the concept that clear water and green mountains are just as good as mountains of gold and silver,” he said.
On Monday, large parts of China experienced how bad the environment can still be.
The biggest and strongest dust storm in a decade swept across northern China, grounding hundreds of flights, closing schools in some cities and throwing a terrible garb on tens of millions of people – from Xinjiang in the far west to the Boha Sea, according to China meteorological service.
The storm, after weeks of smog, is reminiscent of the ‘air pokalips’ that the country regularly experienced a few years ago, which forced the government’s efforts to address a political and public health crisis.
These efforts have significantly improved air quality, especially in the capital. But this week, three forces – the industrial rebound to the Covid, the continuing impact of climate change on the deserts of northern China and a late winter storm – combined to create a dangerous, suffocating light.
“Beijing looks like an ecological crisis,” said Li Shuo, Greenpeace China’s policy director. posted on Twitter.
In an interview, Li said Monday’s storm was “the result of land and ecological degradation in northern and western Beijing.” He added that industrial pollution in Beijing has so far this year exceeded the annual average of the past four years.
The dust was whipped up by a snowstorm that swept through Mongolia over the weekend. The storm there overturned electric towers, eliminated power in several regions and killed at least nine people.
The impact was felt in most of northern China. Measurements of the air quality index – instituted by the US Environmental Protection Agency – exceeded the dangerous level for particles related to sand and dust in the air. Pollutants measured at the concentration PM2.5, or particles of a size considered particularly harmful, were also dangerously high.
In Beijing, the authorities ordered children, the elderly and the sick to stay indoors and that everyone else should avoid unnecessary activities outside. The pollution, which turned the sky yellow-orange in the morning and a soupy gray in the afternoon, was expected to last until Tuesday morning.
Many residents responded with dark humor.
A meme circulating online has grafted an image of China’s iconic state television network headquarters with a photo of ‘Blade Runner 2049’, the 2017 dystopian science fiction film. Another showed spacecraft and figures from ‘Ultraman’, a Japanese superhero franchise marching through Beijing’s gloom.
Given the improvement in air quality over the past few years, newcomers to Beijing have experienced such air for the first time.
“I could not see the building across the street,” said Wang Wei, a 23-year-old student who recently moved to Beijing from Henan, a province in central China. “I did not think the sky could be so yellow.”
The environment remains a politically sensitive issue for the leadership of the Communist Party. Mr. Xi has repeatedly called for a “green revolution” in China’s economy, and last year he promised that China would accelerate its efforts to reduce carbon emissions, which have contributed to climate change.
However, pollution is a damaging challenge because officials continue to prioritize economic development.
Recently concluded legislative meetings have taken place during several days of heavy pollution attributed to rising steel and cement production. Many environmental groups were disappointed that the new five-year development plan adopted at the Beijing meetings no longer contained specific government proposals on tackling climate change.
Nevertheless, it appears that Mr. Xi’s admonitions sometimes scurry officials to action. Last week, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment warned the authorities in Tangshan, the country’s steel manufacturing center in Hebei Province, after finding that four steel mills had failed to reduce production to pollution.
In Inner Mongolia, a northern Chinese region whose delegates include Mr. Xi met in Beijing, the local edition of The People’s Daily was an article on efforts to combat desertification, which contributed to the dust storms. The article appeared Monday just when the worst pollution in years had hit.
“Yellow sand goes away and green trees thrive,” it said.
Albee Zhang and Elsie Chen contributed research.