Average monthly air quality index of Shanghai, China 2016-2017
Air Pollution in Beijing
For years, Beijing has earned a notorious name for having air quality that can prove detrimental to health in China. For the same survey period, Beijing has the worst average air quality among other Chinese cities like Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenyang. Shanghai was relatively doing better than Beijing in terms of air quality, despite with a higher population than Beijing. The Ministry of ecology and environment has stated in 2015 that the main source of air pollution in Shanghai was dust, mobile sources and industrial production, as opposed to motorized vehicles in Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
Causes and tackling
In recent years, air pollution had gradually become the top environmental concern to Chinese citizens. With the emergence of the public’s health concerns, the Chinese government also introduced plans to ease the air pollution, including setting a target for fine particulate matter, the completion of construction and renovation of pollution control facilities, introducing vehicle control, and renewing the fleet of public buses. Since 2001, China has invested over one percent of GDP annually on pollution control, which was worth over 953 billion yuan in 2017.