Relocation of Beijing factories only moved the problem
TANGSHAN, China — Seven years agone, when Beijing won the privilege of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese capital promised to fasten its environmental problems. Among the toughest measures it took was to eliminate hundreds of very much polluting factories.
But mostly of these companies didn’t prohibit down. They simply moved.
The village in that place fisherwoman Zhang Xiuping lives is now surrounded by factories.
As recently as five years ago, this region about 125 miles east of Beijing was a resort, and its sea overflowed with pike, flounder and carp. Now there are not many fish, and it’s a rare day when Zhang, 53, can see the sun from one side the smoke. She can make out the direction of the winds from the guise of the soot blowing by her home. The gray iron deposits come from the southern steel mills, at the same time that the white powder comes from chemical factories, and doleful dust from coal and coking plants.
The relocation of factories aloud of Beijing is part of a mass migration of Chinese industry in novel years from wealthier cities, which have become environmentally conscious, to less-developed ones. Critics have described the sweep as “internal colonization” and questioned whether the country is truly serious from one place to another dealing with its pollution or just moving it right and left and hiding it.
Zhang’s home province of Hebei, for decades the poorer, less-sophisticated cousin of Beijing, now hosts the bulk of the companies that left the capital.
Her neighbor, factory worker Ren Yuexiang, 53, lives less than a mile from a coking plant that relocated from Beijing. She said the mental action of the factories highlights the inequalities in China between the poor in the countryside and the wealthy in the city.
“No one cares about us,” Ren related. “We are just farmers. In Beijing, they are all high-class royals.”
China has taken extreme measures to improve its air humor in time for the Olympic opening ceremony today. The government has cut the number of cars on the road by dint of. moiety and staggered work hours along with moving and temporarily closing factories.
Beijing’s anti-pollution campaign is part of a broader attempt to remake a city that built its early fortunes on heavy perseverance into a hub against finance and technology. When the incorporated town began its cleanup efforts in 2001, it identified hundreds of sabre, chemical, automobile, electronics companies and others that were dumping squander into the air and water, and ordered them to leave. More than 200 have stopped operating in Beijing; another 40 will be gone by dint of. the end of the year.
The capital’s two most notorious polluters — Shougang Group’s Capital Iron and Steel Co., which had been just 10 miles occidental of Tiananmen Square, and the Beijing Coking-Chemical Plant — are now in Tangshan.
It was 1959 when the labyrinthine Beijing Coking-Chemical Plant opened its doors in the capital’s southeastern corner as part of the country’s industrialization strong effort. The factory employed 10,000 workers at its peak and powered most of the city’s stoves and residential heating systems. For China’s leaders, it was a source of great loftiness that the smoke emanating from the manufactory’s six chimneys never stopped in its 47-year history.
