Page 24 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
ASIA / PACIFIC
January 16, 2017
China’s poorest, trying to stay warm, add greatly to smog
FREE HEAT. A villager surnamed Shen, right, top
photo, and another wait to pick up coal that falls from
overfilled coal trucks tumbling down an uneven junc-
tion near the Shougang steel factory in Qianan, in
northern China’s Hebei province. Across vast swathes
of northern China, particularly in the poor countryside,
residents still go to great lengths to acquire and burn
coal for warmth despite government efforts to ban the
practice and introduce cleaner — but costlier —
types of coal or electrical heating. In the bottom photo,
Yao Junhua, a 61-year-old farmer, prepares to burn
coal to heat his home near Qianan. (AP Photos/Ng
Han Guan)
By Gerry Shih
The Associated Press
Q
IAN’AN, China — An overloaded
coal truck rumbles down from the
steel factory and hits a bump,
sending chunks of its black cargo
skittering and click-clicking along the
asphalt. Waiting by the roadside, a farmer
swaddled in thick, cotton-padded winter
clothing scrambles into onrushing traffic
to pick up the pieces.
Four hours a day, four days a week, the
villager, whose surname is Shen, comes to
a spot near her home where a never-ending
procession of coal trucks runs into uneven
pavement. A thousand little bumps in the
road keep Shen and her husband from
freezing in winter.
“If I don’t come out here, I stay cold,”
Shen says as she drops a few more
recovered chunks into a sooty burlap sack.
In one winter, Shen says, she could burn
more than 2 tons of coal, worth more than
1,800 yuan ($260).
Across vast swaths of northern China’s
countryside, residents go to great lengths
to burn untreated coal in home stoves de-
spite government efforts to ban the prac-
tice and introduce cleaner — but costlier —
types of coal or electrical heating.
That dependence represents one of
many challenges facing Beijing as it tries
to curb the choking smog that’s become a
flashpoint for public discontent with the
ruling Communist Party.
Experts say coal-fired power plants and
steel and cement mills are the main contri-
butors to year-round smog, but household
coal-burning in rural areas is a major
cause of the spike in pollution during
winter, when thick, gray soup-like clouds
of dust smother Chinese cities, often
forcing highways and airports to close.
Middle-class Chinese have complained
vociferously as smog blanketed Beijing
over the New Year period. A picture of a
high-speed train stained a deep brown
after passing through smoggy regions
went viral on social media, as did a blog
post by a Beijing banker who railed
against government corruption and
propaganda and pleaded with officials to
take action for the sake of their children.
In June, a team of researchers from
Princeton, the University of California,
Berkeley, and Peking and Tsinghua
universities in Beijing published a study
that found household coal use in winter
contributed more small and deadly air
particles than industrial sources, some of
which are outfitted with carbon-capture
technologies.
Authorities in Hebei province, which
q
Choked by smog, Beijing
creates environmental police
BEIJING (AP) — Officials in Beijing are
creating a new environmental police squad
in the latest effort to fight China’s
persistent problems with heavy smog.
According to state media, Beijing’s
acting mayor said the new police force will
focus on open-air barbecues, garbage
incineration, and the burning of wood and
other biomass.
Beijing and dozens of cities in China
spend many winter days under a thick,
gray haze, caused chiefly by thousands of
coal-burning factories and a surplus of
older, inefficient vehicles.
Government-issued “red alerts” on the
worst days come with emergency
measures that can include shutting down
highways, restricting vehicles, or ordering
factories to curtail production. But
enforcement remains an issue.
China’s environmental ministry has
acknowledged that its inspection teams
found companies resuming production
despite a government ban.
surrounds Beijing, announced in Septem-
ber that they would ban household coal-
burning in nearly 4,000 villages near the
capital by late 2017, according to state
media. The official Xinhua News Agency
recently quoted a Beijing official saying
coal-burning furnaces for heating have
now been completely removed from the
city’s urban districts.
But in rural Qian’an, 140 miles from
Beijing, in Hebei, China’s largest steel-
making region, the riverside road where
Shen scavenges for coal is a reminder of
the challenges. Up the road is a sprawling
factory owned by the Shougang Group, one
of China’s largest steelmakers — and
polluters.
The other direction opens up into the
poplar-lined countryside, where elderly
and poor residents burn coal in shallow
underground hearths. The government is
encouraging them to use cleaner coal bri-
quettes that burn at lower temperatures,
but villagers dismiss those as hard to light
and lacking in heat.
While residents in poor parts of Beijing
get subsidies for using cleaner-burning
coal or switching to electricity, such
incentives are unheard of in some other
parts of the country.
“We ordinary people are comparatively
poor,” says Yao Junhua, a 61-year-old
farmer who lives in a village of single-story
homes separated by half-built brick walls
and stacks of dried cornstalks. “We want to
buy a few pieces of good coal, save some
money. We don’t want to spend money on
coal we can’t light.”
Burning coal has been blamed for the
tiny, toxic PM2.5 particles that caused an
estimated 366,000 premature deaths in
China in 2013, according to an August
study by Wang Shuxiao, an environmental
expert at Tsinghua University.
Wang said cleaner coal would theo-
retically emit 50 to 80 percent fewer
particles than untreated coal, but the
process of switching is slow. She said it’s
taken Beijing, the prosperous capital, close
to two decades to phase out more polluting
heating methods.
“The switch is happening. It’s just not
happening as fast as we want,” Wang said.
The government has sought to clamp
down on the market. At the Guo Zhuang
coal shop in Qian’an, a large yard was
empty except a few small piles of coal
half-covered by tarps.
Market supply has been meager and
prices have risen since authorities cracked
down on the sale of coal for private use in
recent months, said a worker surnamed Lu
who spoke only after making sure that
visitors were not investigators from the
environmental protection bureau.
“Look around — we don’t have much and
it’s not because we are selling it all,” she
said.
On a nearby wall was an October gov-
ernment notice forbidding “unauthorized”
coal sales, but coal still made its way to
homes. As she spoke, Lu’s brother-in-law
filled a small truckload and drove off to the
home of a relative Lu said was bedridden
and needed heat.
Some villagers are unconvinced that the
coal they burn contributes much to the
country’s air-quality problems.
“Look at our chimney. That little bit of
smoke is called pollution?” says Yao, the
villager. “Look at the steel mill. How much
coal does it burn a day? The 400
households in our little village, how much
coal do we burn?”
The Associated Press was unable to
reach Shougang Group using phone
numbers listed on its website and e-mail.
On the country road outside the steel
mill, its smokestacks rising out of the haze,
Shen the coal scavenger says her 65-year-
old husband did construction work but is
now too old. Her daughter recently
married and moved to a city but can’t help
them because she is saving for a house and
a car.
Scavenging coal keeps them warm, and
sometimes they have enough leftover to
sell, Shen says as another truck hits a
bump and drops pieces of coal.
“These things are precious,” she says.
Then she scurries back into traffic.