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10.05.17China Sees Difficulty Meeting 2017 Air Quality Targets: Minister
China faces difficulties in meeting its smog-fighting target for 2017, its environmental protection minister said during a visit to four heavily industrialized provinces in northern China, where the country’s air pollution problem is especially...
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09.27.17Chinese Cities Order Steel Output Cuts Earlier Than Expected to Fend off Smog
South China Morning Post
The city of Handan in the top steelmaking province of Hebei has ordered steel mills to halve output a month earlier than expected, according to media reports, the latest city to ramp up efforts to reduce the smog that blankets northern China during...
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08.30.17China’s War on Smog Shakes up Ports; Tianjin Loses, Rivals Benefit
Reuters
China’s war on smog is shaking up the country’s busiest ports, which handle billions of tonnes of cargo a year, forcing Tianjin to overhaul its business as northern rivals snare a greater share of vast coal and iron ore shipments, results show.
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02.13.17‘We Had to Sue’: The Five Lawyers Taking on China’s Authorities over Smog
Guardian
In an unprecedented legal case, a group of Chinese lawyers have charged the governments of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei with failing to protect their citizens from air pollution, which is linked to a third of all deaths in the country
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01.18.17China Cancels 103 Coal Plants, Mindful of Smog and Wasted Capacity
New York Times
China is canceling plans to build more than 100 coal-fired power plants, seeking to rein in runaway, wasteful investment in the sector while moving the country away from one of the dirtiest forms of electricity generation
ChinaFile Recommends
01.10.17Don’t Blame the Weather For China’s Smog
Fortune
China’s air quality has been particularly bad so far this winter. Severe smog or haze episodes have occurred one after another with short breaks in between,
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01.09.17China’s Neighbors Are Getting a Whiff of Its Terrible Pollution
Quartz
Turns out China isn’t the only country choking on its smog. In the first week of 2017, more than half of Chinese cities suffered from air pollution, and 31 of them issued a red alert, which requires measures like limiting car usage and closing...
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01.03.17China Gets Tough on Smog Offenders
CNN
China has slapped millions of dollars worth of fines on alleged offenders for violating anti-pollution rules, according to state media.
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01.02.17China Smog: Millions Start New Year Shrouded by Health Alerts and Travel Chaos
Guardian
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...
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05.12.16The $Mog Economy: Bottled Air Takes off as a Big Business in China
Mashable
Moses Lam was an overworked mortgage broker when he started selling bags of air from Canada on eBay as a joke.
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03.09.16China's Smog-Choked Steel City Readies For Six-Month Flower Show Shutdown
Guardian
Steel mills in Tangshan sent prices rocketing by nearly 20%, ahead of an enforced shutdown later this year.
Green Space
02.29.16
The Odd Shapes of PM2.5
A recent episode of “Approaching Science,” a CCTV documentary series, discussed the smog that’s been choking the mainland for the past few years. The show interviews scientists and laypeople to paint a comprehensive picture of the challenges that...
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02.17.16A New Class of Chinese Migrants
Slate
Pollution is one of the top three reasons cited by wealthy people for leaving the country for good.
Green Space
01.27.16
Kunming’s Stinky Lake, Beijing’s Saving Winds
Lake Dian in Kunming, the capital of southwest China’s Yunnan province, suffered greatly when, in the 1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong called on the Chinese people to “conquer nature” and reclaim land by filling lakes with soil.Nowadays, Dianchi, as it’s...
Green Space
12.22.15
Nu River Saved, Jack Ma Buys Preservation Land
A great piece of news came from China on the night of December 16, that the Yunnan provincial government in southwest China has announced its decision to not develop hydro-electric projects on the Nu River, also known as the Salween (link in Chinese...
Media
12.15.15
The Proletariat Experience of Beijing’s Airpocalypse
On December 8, a Tuesday, a man surnamed Cao piloted his electric scooter along Beijing’s profoundly hazy streets, parking in front of one towering apartment complex after another to deliver packages. Although the government had just issued a “red...
Green Space
12.11.15
Tiananmen Police Don Smog Masks, Wind Makes or Breaks the Blue Sky
Now that Beijing has had its first red alert since institutionalizing its smog alert system in 2013, it was news when the special forces who guard Tiananmen Square were seen, for the first time, wearing face masks to protect them from the smog, too...
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12.11.15Polluted Skies Heighten Challenge for Chinese Government
New York Times
Red has been considered the color of prosperity and good fortune in China for centuries, and it is also the color of the Communist Party.
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12.10.15Amid China’s Smog Worries, One More: Counterfeit Masks
New York Times
The customs authorities in Shanghai have seized nearly 120,000 counterfeit surgical masks.
Green Space
12.08.15
Smog Strike Round II
Not surprisingly, smog yet again strikes back in much of China. Using the automatic weapon of our archive of daily photos of three of China’s major cities, I’d like to share a flashback of Beijing’s air quality throughout the month of November,...
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12.07.15Beijing Issues Air Pollution Red Alert for the First Time
Bloomberg
Beijing issued its most severe smog warning for Tuesday.
Green Space
12.03.15
Smog and Imagination
The last few days of November, air pollution was back in the headlines and social media feeds of millions of Chinese. Here are a few highlights:The creative WeChat post “Beijing Smog: Use Your Imagination When You Go Out,” shows a series of photos...
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12.02.15China's Blast of Fresh Air Quiets Calls for Beijing Mayor's Head
Bloomberg
A cold front that swept choking smog from northern China couldn’t have come sooner for Beijing’s mayor.
Environment
09.17.15
Beijing Welcomes World’s First Smog-Eating Tower
from chinadialogue
Beijingers enjoyed a rare breath of fresh air this week. The city’s smog levels fell to their lowest levels in recent years, as authorities scrambled to shut down factories and curb car use so that China’s Second World War victory military parade...
Environment
05.28.15
Chinese Posters Warn of the Dangers of Smog
from chinadialogue
{slideshow, 16211, 4}An exhibition of smog-inspired posters is touring the polluted cities of northern and eastern China this month to draw attention to the impending environmental disaster.Created by a group of Chinese designers, the 300 posters...
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03.24.15Seeing Through the Smog
China Open Research Network
Potential impacts of the documentary Under the Domes on China’s Civic Participation.
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03.06.15China’s Real Inconvenient Truth: Its Class Divide
Foreign Policy
Solving China's air and water pollution will require addressing the gap between rich urbanites and rural peasants.
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01.22.15Chinese Director’s Film For Greenpeace Shows How Smog Changes Everything
Huffington Post
The film follows families from Hebei, in heavily polluted industrial northern China, and from Beijing, the prosperous Chinese capital next door, that has seen epic pollution emergencies recently.
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10.31.14In War on Smog, Struggling China Steel Mills Adapt to Survive
Reuters
Dozens of steel mills in industrial areas straddling the capital are set to shut from November 1 to cut smog before leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting. China had imposed...
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08.14.14China Tells Citizens to Walk, Bike, and Snitch in “United Struggle” to Breathe Easier
Quartz
The environmental ministry has published a set of guidelines for citizens, which encourage them not only to reduce their personal environmental imprint, but to also turn in polluting and wasteful neighbors.