China targets business over smog

China has repeatedly emphasised the need to control pollution, but has been reluctant to enforce even the paltry measures already announced.

The China Central Television (CCTV) building is seen next to a construction site in the heavy haze in Beijing's central business district. Jason Lee / Reuters

China will tighten environmental legislation and force polluters to pay compensation following renewed blasts of toxic air, the country’s top legislator said yesterday.

Zhang Dejiang said in a report to the ceremonial legislature’s annual session that businesses were responsible for the environmental damage they caused and must be held to account. He said legal revisions were being prepared, but offered no specifics.

Changes are also needed to strictly supervise emissions and control pollution at the source, he said.

January saw air pollution density readings of PM 2.5 particles exceeding 500 micrograms per cubic meter, about 20 times as high as considered safe by the World Health Organisation.

Heavy pollution has lingered over much of northern China through last month and this. Heavy smog has been blamed for disrupting air transport and retarding the growth of crops by blocking out the sun.

China has repeatedly emphasised the need to control pollution, but has been reluctant to enforce even those paltry measures already announced, largely out of a fear of social disruption and increasing the burden on an already slowing economy.

Mr Zhang’s speech to the National People’s Congress is his only national address and is usually scrutinized for any sign of changes to China’s one-party Marxist-Leninist political system – something past leaders have ruled out entirely.

This year’s address offered routine support for the current system, under which the entire nearly 3,000 member parliament meets for only a few days per year, with virtually all legislative business handled by its approximately 175-member standing committee.

“Through practice, we have fully verified that the system of people’s congresses is the fundamental political system that conforms to China’s national conditions,” Mr Zhang said.

Separately, China tested a domestically-produced drone aircraft designed to disperse smog on Saturday, official media reported, in an important step for the country’s domestic aviation industry.

At the opening of an annual parliament meeting last week, the Chinese premier Li Keqiang said that China would“declare war on pollution”.

Almost all Chinese cities monitored for pollution last year failed to meet state standards. The environment has emerged as one of Beijing’s key priorities amid growing public disquiet about urban smog, dwindling and polluted water supplies and the widespread industrial contamination of farmland.

The unmanned aerial vehicle, produced by a subsidiary of the state-owned aviation giant Aviation Industry Corp of China (Avic), disperses fog and smog by releasing a chemical catalyst.

Compared with other methods for spreading catalysts, the use of drones can reduce risks and cut costs, Avic said.

“Even in thick fog the UAV could fly an accurate route,” the Xinhua news agency quoted the engineer Guo Haijun as saying.

The “parafoil” plane, so called because it features a gliding parachute, can carry three times the cargo weight of common planes and could be used to conduct agricultural seeding, emergency rescue and other tasks, the Avic chief executive Ma Yongsheng has been quoted as saying.

State-owned Avic is the unlisted parent company of Shenzhen-listed Aircraft Industry Corp of China. The test occurred at an airport in central China’s Hubei province, local reports said.

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