China Dream

New Year goes dark in China
By Catherine Hardy

The Beijing city government has told officials not to set off fireworks or firecrackers to welcome the Lunar New Year.
The Chinese New Year holiday begins on New Year’s Eve on Friday.
It is normally marked by riotous pyrotechnic displays. 

They are thought to bring good luck and ward off evil spirits.

What has the government said?
The government has tried to limit the use of fireworks in recent years.
The government said officials must “take the lead by not setting off fireworks or firecrackers” in a statement late on Thursday.
“Pro-actively guide family members and friends not to let off or to limit the letting off of fireworks and firecrackers, improve air quality together and get into the action of ensuring blue skies for the capital,” the statement ended.
Other measures
The government has already limited firework sales in Beijing.
Only 511 firework stalls have been approved this year, compared to 719 last year.
None of them are in central Beijing, according to reports.

New Year in China
This year, the Lunar New Year marks the start of the year of the rooster.
It is the largest annual mass migration on Earth. 

Hundreds of mlllions of workers pack trains, buses, aircraft and boats to spend the festival with their families.
For many Chinese people, it is their only holiday of the year.

Are the restrictions only in Beijing?
No.
Other parts of the country are also cracking down.
Central Henan province has banned their use in all cities and towns.
Hebei’s Baoding city is threatening to detain anyone setting off fireworks outside the four days of celebrations.

Why is pollution a problem in China?
Efforts to clean up the skies in China’s northern industrial heartland, which includes Beijing, are being thwarted by coal-burning industry and indoor heating.
Both increase during the winter months, especially in the bitterly-cold north.

Plagues of China

Chinese human rights lawyers set their sights on smog

AFP

BEIJING -- Toxic smog has found itself in the dock in China, as the authorities are taken to court over a problem that has choked entire regions, put public health at risk and forced the closure of schools and roads.
At the helm is a group of human rights lawyers, who despite increasing government hostility to their work on some of China's most sensitive cases, say popular feeling is behind them when it comes to pollution that is literally off the charts.
"Chinese people aren't too concerned about societal problems and things that aren't happening to them personally, but this issue is different: everyone is a victim and is personally influenced by breathing polluted air," lawyer Yu Wensheng told AFP.
He is among a group of six lawyers who began filing their suits in December after a choking cloud of haze descended on China's northeast, affecting some 460 million people.
The campaign comes amid growing public anger over China's bad air, which has fuelled protests and spurred emigration among the wealthy.
Yu, who has defended prominent civil rights lawyers targeted by the government and people detained for supporting Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, said the importance and impact of the pollution suit "far exceeds" his previous human rights cases.
Even acquaintances opposed to Yu's politics and police at a client's detention centre had expressed support, he said, noting it was "very unusual".
However, authorities are trying to muzzle online discussion on the issue and quell discontent by suppressing information on air quality.
In December, a week of thick haze forced cities across the northeast to go on "red alert" for nearly a week, closing schools, factories and construction sites and taking around half of vehicles off the roads.
As visibility dropped and airports cancelled hundreds of flights, people took to social media to vent their rage against a government that had long promised to solve the problem.
But comments about the heavy smog quickly began disappearing from the web.
On Wednesday, the Meteorological Administration also ordered local weather bureaus to stop issuing smog alerts, which authorities said was intended to improve coordination.
A document submitted by Yu's associate to the Beijing Second Intermediate People's Court accused the government of "severe dereliction of duty" in pollution management and sacrificing human health in pursuit of "toxic GDP growth" by turning a blind eye to the excessive emissions of local companies.
The lawyers have little hope of winning or even successfully filing their cases and are viewing the suits as "mostly symbolic", Yu said.
The document asked for authorities to publish an apology online and in the local state-run newspaper for a week, and hand over compensation of 65 yuan (S$13.50) for the price of his smog mask and 9,999 yuan for emotional damages.
He hopes the suits will help keep the issue in the public eye, adding he wants to inspire others to file complaints.
"Our main goal is to raise people's awareness of pollution and wake them up to how the government should bear responsibility for its inaction and ineffectual response," he said.
Notably, China can clear the skies for important occasions such as the 2014 APEC summit or the 2008 Olympics, but does so selectively due to the high economic cost.
"They can do it, but they do not," Yu said.
Another lawyer Ma Wei, who is suing the city of Tianjin, said he has received no official response even weeks after the court was legally required to issue one.
Instead, the public security bureau and other authorities have tried to pressure him to retract his suit.
"I refused and told them, 'I'm doing this so that you can breathe clean air, too,'" he said.
The lawyers are used to harassment. 

Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the country has cracked down on civil rights defenders.
Though the government initially targeted political activists and human rights campaigners, it has increasingly turned its attention to the legal professionals who represent them.
In 2014, authorities imprisoned and tortured Yu for 99 days for allegedly "disturbing public order".
Still, he is not afraid.
"We are lawyers," he said, "but also first and foremost citizens and smog victims ourselves."
"If we do things according to the law and still get detained," he added, "it will be just the thing to show people the true nature of our so-called 'rule of law'."

China Dream: millions start new year shrouded by health alerts and travel chaos

On the first day of 2017 in Beijing pollution climbed as high as 24 times the level recommended by the World Health Organization

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Two men play Chinese chess beside a lake on a heavily polluted day in Beijing on 1 January. 
Millions in China rang in the New Year shrouded in a thick blanket of toxic smog, causing road closures and flight cancellations as 24 cities issued alerts that will last through much of the week.
On the first day of 2017 in Beijing, concentrations of tiny particles that penetrate deep into the lungs climbed as high as 24 times levels recommended by the World Health Organization. 

More than 100 flights were cancelled and all intercity buses were halted at the capital’s airport.

In the neighbouring port city of Tianjin, more than 300 flights were cancelled while the weather forecast warned thick smog will persist until 5 January. 

All of the city’s highways were also shut as low visibility made driving hazardous, effectively trapping residents.
Across northern China 24 cities issued red alerts on Friday and Saturday, while orange alerts persisted in 21 cities through the New Year holiday. 

A red alert is the highest level of a four-tier warning system introduced as part of China’s high-profile war on pollution.
Decades of economic development have made acrid air a common occurrence in nearly all major Chinese cities, with government-owned coal burning power stations and heating plants and steel manufacturing concentrated in northern provinces the main source of pollution.

Beautiful China: Landmark buildings are seen through smog on 1 January in Beijing.

Smog worsens in the winter as coal burning spikes to provide heat for millions of people. 

China declared a “war on pollution” in 2014, but has struggled to deliver the sweeping change many had hoped to see and government inspections routinely find pollutions flouting the law.
“Why didn’t those polluting industries take a rest for the holiday,” one commenter mused on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo.
“New Year’s morning in Beijing, I thought I was blind,” said another, attaching a photo of a window completely darkened with grey haze.
Similar posts appeared on Twitter.

China’s middle class is increasingly less tolerant of the deadly air, and in December tens of thousands of “smog refugees” decamped to clearer skies. 

Top destinations included Australia, Indonesia, Japan and the Maldives.
That bout of smog saw 460 million people, a population greater than North America, breathing toxic air, according to Greenpeace.
As pollution covered swaths of the country on New Year’s Eve, China announced plans to increase coal output to 3.9 billion tonnes by 2020.
A study earlier this year found acrid air is linked to at least one million deaths a year, and contributed to a third of all fatalities in major cities, on par with smoking. 

Another research paper said the smog had shortened life expectancies by five and a half years in parts of China.