While toxins belch from power plants, children in nearby Beijing compare brands of mask

Based on the most reliable air-pollution index in China, the country’s most polluted city is Xingtai, one of the oldest cities in northern China, with a history stretching back 3,500 years.

It was a major city during the Shang dynasty, two millennia before the birth of Christ. These days it is a friendly, but hopelessly smog-clouded, heavy-industrial city in Hebei province.

A photograph of a couple wearing masks playing ping-pong in the thickest smog you can imagine is one of the defining images of China’s war against pollution in recent years. A war it appears to be losing.

Seven cities in Hebei are numbered among the 10 worst polluted in China, including Shijiazhuang, Baoding, Handan, Tangshanand unlucky old Xingtai, meaning that they are also some of the most polluted cities in the world.

The situation in the air is bad enough, but what’s in the soil and the water is equally worrying.

Xingtai has a population of around seven million people and is 396 kilometres from Beijing. The air tastes of petrol here, even on a relatively clear day.

Since October 16th, a citizen group in Xingtai has run the Xingtai Anti-Pollution Campaign, and in one month it has brought 22 criminal cases against companies it suspects of polluting. Twenty-three people have been arrested.

The lobby group was alerted to three major complaints: one against a company that plates surfaces with metal, which leaked toxic waste into underground water; one against a plastics plant that leaked chemicals into groundwater; and a third against a company that transported dangerous chemicals into another province where disposal fees were cheaper.

Xingtai is also home to Jizhong Energy Resources, which operates coal mines to feed coal power plants that are choking the north China plain. This grim facility, which is actually a cluster of plants and mines, is one of the most heavily polluting factories on the planet.

People in Xingtai are desperate.

Writing on the Sina Weibo network, Shanzhilian 68 called for a boycott of industrial products from Hebei. “Give us back the blue sky. What is the Xingtai mayor doing? We should limit the production or stop production from the factories here. It makes me want to cry when I see on [state broadcaster] CCTV that Xingtai is the most polluted city in China.”

Another online commenter, Xioneweilong, said the pollution was having serious health effects: “In this polluted weather, most of the children in the hospital have tuberculosis. Please get the polluted factories out of Xingtai.”

Beijing’s proximity to the industrial heartland of Hebei province is often given as the reason why pollution is so bad in the capital. In the early winter, the coal-fired power plants start cranking up production to meet increased demand for heating, and the skies turn a yellow-tinged grey.

Poor position

Hebei has very little rain, so the cities of Handan, Shijiazhuang, Baoding and, of course, Xingtai are all in a poor position regarding the flow of air. They all lie east of the Taihang Mountains, and Xingtai is the worst-placed.

continue reading China Today: Xingtai, one of the world’s most polluted cities.