The capital will take 180,000 old vehicles off the road and promote clean energy autos among government departments, the public and the urban cleaning sector, which includes street cleaners and trash collectors, Wang Anshun said at the opening of a session of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, the municipal legislature.

The heating systems of 44,000 old, single-story homes and coal-burning boilers downtown are to be replaced with clean energy, Wang said as he delivered a government work report.

The city will also speed up the promotion of clean energy in rural areas and strictly control dust in construction projects, said Wang.

He vowed to strengthen air quality monitoring and analysis, as well as the release of such information.

The promise of increased transparency, itself coming on the heels of a wave of unusually frank coverage in state media, was accompanied by a call for public comment on the new regulations. From Dexter Roberts at Bloomberg Businessweek:

In another sign that Beijing officials are, for now, leaning toward openness, officials will allow the city’s 20 million residents to weigh in on draft regulations aimed at curbing the Chinese capital’s horrendous air pollution, according to a notice posted Jan. 20 on the Beijing municipal government website. The public can comment on the proposed new measures until Feb. 8, the day before China shuts down for the annual Chinese New Year festival, said the statement issued by the city’s legal affairs office.

“This is important. Now public scrutiny should play a key role in promoting pollution control and enforcement of this rule,” says Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Ma’s environmental advocacy group plans to comment through the online platform that the municipal government has created for this purpose.

Edward Wong argued at The New York Times on Sunday that Beijing’s “extraordinary surge” in air pollution was one of several drivers of growing demands for political input. But Reuters reported a generally unfavorable response to the plans on Sina Weibo:

“These plans are just dreams,” wrote one user.

Others said the phasing out of old cars would make little difference in a city where about 250,000 new cars hit the road every year, albeit with supposedly higher emissions standards.

“These ‘old cars’ are what the ordinary people drive. You people can only dare talk about this subject when you start phasing out all the cars officials drive,” wrote another user.

Other doubts remain about the likely effectiveness of public consultation, enforcement, and of rules targeted only at the city itself. From Yin Yeping at Global Times:

Zhang Yuanxun, a professor of resources and environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that a lack of law enforcement will be a problem.

“The punishments enshrined in the regulations are too strict and broad. It will require many more law enforcement officers to ensure its effective implementation,” he said.

“The old laws were not enforced, not to mention this new one,” he said.

[…] “Also, just restricting the local atmospheric pollution would have little contribution to its improvement if there are no changes in the pollution conditions in the surrounding areas [of Beijing],” [Zhou Rong, climate and energy director of Greenpeace] said.

Wang Yan, a resident working in international trade, said she thinks the new laws should have been launched already.

“I don’t think I’ll offer comments on the new regulation since I doubt if my voice will be heard,” she said, adding targeting street barbecues is ridiculous.

At chinadialogue, Gavin Lohry suggested an additional measure that might help address a range of environmental concerns, from air quality and energy consumption to drainage:

Green roofs – roofs covered with plant vegetation – first gained popularity in Germany and have since been spreading around the world. They help cities reduce storm water runoff, cool the urban environment, absorb air pollution, insulate buildings and increase biodiversity. With enough green roof adoption, Beijing could realise positive impacts on the environment and improved quality of life.

My research on the topic found that in Beijing there is around 93 million square metres of roof space suitable for cost effective green roof adoption. If the cheapest and most basic forms of green roofs covered the suitable roof space, the urban environment would be substantially improved.

Under this scenario air particle pollution could be reduced by as much as 880,000 kilograms every year, equivalent to taking 730,000 cars off the road. The roofs could reduce storm water by 3.5 million cubic metres during large rain events, equivalent to filling the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square with two metres of water or 1,400 Olympic swimming pools.

Any boost to Beijing’s drainage infrastructure would be valuable in the event of more storms like last summer’s, which killed 77 people. But there are no easy solutions: the problems are tangled, often beyond the scope of local government policies, or out of human control entirely. From Jonathan Kaiman at The Guardian:

Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China’s environment at the University of California, San Diego, said that there is no silver bullet for the country’s air pollution. The underlying causes are dynamic and diverse: power plants, small factories, automobile emissions, rampant construction, farmers burning coal for heat. “One of the things about the air quality in Beijing is that it varies a lot more than it used to,” she said.

Beijing’s air quality fluctuates with the weather – a strong wind from the north can blow the smog to sea, she said, while south-eastern winds trap the air against a nearby mountain range, drowning the city in a pea-soup haze.

[…] Beijing has taken significant steps to combat pollution – it invested an estimated $10bn before the 2008 Olympics to raise emissions standards, replace residents’ coal stoves with natural gas heaters, and relocate a ring of steel plants on the city’s outskirts. Yet Beijing still shares its airspace with six surrounding provinces which may not adhere to comparable environmental standards.

“One of the fundamental problems is that the environmental regulators don’t have sufficient authority and resources to overcome the forces that are creating the pollution,” said Alex Wang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on China’s environmental law.

The problem is indeed hardly limited to Beijing, as Peking University professor Pan Xiaochuan angrily pointed out while blasting the term “Beijing Cough” as an “extreme insult” to the city. Other cities have been even more severely affected, and Shanghai has not escaped. From Reuters:

Shanghai, too, is improving public communication of air pollution data, as Angel Hsu describes on her blog:

[… B]y far my favorite innovation Shanghai’s EPB has made so far is in the use of this little air quality mascot to communicate what the various levels of pollution on the normalized AQI index mean. For the most part, things take a sour turn for AQI girl (let’s just call her that, I’m not sure if she has an official name) after the Good (51-100) part of the range. I like how they coordinated her hair color with the official color codes of different pollutant thresholds – it’s a great way for people to automatically remember and understand what the different colors mean. AQI girl also provides a much more people and user-friendly means to calculate air quality, as opposed to other cartoon characters or anime figures that they could gone with.

[…] I can only imagine next will come a video game for AQI girl, that will feature her navigating Shanghai’s polluted streets, having to dodge roadside exhaust coming from tailpipes, all the while remembering to wear her face mask when she sees AQI readings above 150.

The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Spegele and Wayne Ma described the obstacles to implementing deeper and broader solutions. Proposed changes inevitably raise questions of who will pay for them.

Over the long term, drawing down emissions will require costly upgrades to industrial facilities and oil refineries, measures resisted by state-owned companies unable to pass costs on to consumers and local governments that depend on industrial output for revenue.

[…] Though attention over the years has focused on power plants and passenger-car emissions, China’s pollution problems are complex and spread broadly across the economy. Mr. Zhao, of Nanjing University, and a research team studied the effectiveness of Chinese government policies in curbing emissions between 2005 and 2010 and estimated PM2.5 from coal-fired power generation fell roughly 21% as cleaner technologies took hold. Meanwhile, PM2.5 emissions from iron and steel production rose roughly 39% to 2.2 million metric tons, according to the estimates, as output increased.

China is particularly struggling to curb what are known as secondary pollutants, formed when primary pollutants—such as emitted sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, from coal burning and other sources—undergo reactions in the atmosphere. The government has had some success targeting primary pollutants, but analysts say it is just beginning to target secondary pollutant problems, including particulate matter that is harmful to human health.

Spegele also discussed a range of air pollution issues with the Journal’s Deborah Kan:

Officials have been careful to manage expectations, stressing that real change will take years, just as the current situation was years in the making. South China Morning Post’s Li Jing spoke to Qu Geping, whose career in shaping China’s environmental policy included a stint as the country’s first environmental protection administrator from 1987 to 1993. Qu lamented that the present of emergency was foreseen thirty years ago, when China nearly chose a different development path to avoid it. He blames the lost opportunity on government according to “the rule of men”, rather than rule of law.

“I would not call the past 40 years’ efforts of environmental protection a total failure,” he said. “But I have to admit that governments have done far from enough to rein in the wild pursuit of economic growth … and failed to avoid some of the worst pollution scenarios we, as policymakers, had predicted.”

[…] But, Qu said, if the central government had respected a policy that it released in 1983, China could be in a much better place now.

“The State Council published a document that year, stipulating that economic and urban construction should synchronise with environmental protection, so that the three legs of social development could reach a co-ordinated benefit,” he said. “It was a pragmatic and feasible strategy, even more approachable than the notion of ‘sustainable development’ enshrined by the United Nations years later.”

[…] “Why was the strategy never properly implemented?” he said. “I think it is because there was no supervision of governments. It is because the power is still above the law.”

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Post tags: 2008 Beijing Olympics, air pollution, air quality, Beijing, Beijing environment, beijing flood 2012, Chinese Academy of Science, clean air, clean energy, factories, forbidden city, greenpeace, industrial pollution, law enforcement, Ma Jun, PM2.5, power plants, rule of law, Shanghai, state-owned enterprises, steel, Tiananmen Square, Wang Anshun
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A sense of dignified peace is what most visitors take away from China’s 600-year-old royal palace, the Forbidden City, in the heart of Beijing.

But reputations at this stately complex of red walls and dragon-scale roofs, officially called the Palace Museum, have been tarnished in recent months by undignified and culturally painful management mistakes.

Government-appointed officials who run the museum amplified the damage by failing to respond quickly – or not at all – to public questions about stolen and broken valuables, special favors for the rich, and swarming termites.

The wave of blunders began May 8 when a lone burglar slipped past the museum’s supposedly impenetrable alarm and camera systems and snatched valuable cosmetic cases and purses on loan from the Liang Yi Collection in Hong Kong. The thief apparently scaled a 10-meter wall and escaped a security guard’s custody.

One the heels of that gaffe, rumors spread on the Internet that the museum’s newly renovated Jianfu Palace, usually closed to the public, was being used for gatherings of an exclusive club’s ultra-wealthy members.

Perhaps even more mortifying for museum managers was a July 30 microblog posting that quickly went viral with claims that a precious Song Dynasty porcelain plate had been broken during a routine procedure, and the loss had been covered up by museum officials.

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Post tags: Beijing Palace Musuem, China's image, forbidden city
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It was the first theft in 20 years from the historic site, the tourist attraction’s spokesman Feng Nai’en said, adding that security would be increased.

An investigation found that nine pieces all small Western-style gold purses and mirrored compacts covered with jewels made in the 20th century were missing from the temporary exhibition, on loan from the private Liang Yi Museum in Hong Kong.

Two of the missing items were recovered nearby shortly after the theft and were slightly damaged.

State media said on Thursday that police had caught a man called Shi Bokui in an Internet cafe Wednesday night who confessed to the robbery. The China Daily said some of the seven remaining stolen pieces were recovered, but did not give details.

Feng said Wednesday the entire Palace Museum will be checked to see if any other items are missing.

See also a report from Global Times. Xinhua recounts all the past thefts from the Forbidden City.

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Post tags: art theft, forbidden city, museums
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Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

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Post tags: documentaries, forbidden city, Great Wall, Hanging Monastery, history, Leshan Buddha, Mount Wudang, Shi Bao Zhai Temple, Terracotta Army, videos
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Post tags: bloggers, forbidden city, starbucks, traditional culture
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Starbucks coffee shop is gone, the Forbidden City cafe arrives. The glorious Forbidden City is just yesterday’s palace. The cultural complex witnessed the historical origins of the Chinese nation by the rejuvenation of the whole process — this process is the national culture’s beautiful turnaround from rejecting foreign culture to accepting it. Thus, today’s Forbidden City retains the harmony of both the Chinese snuff and the western clock. Earlier, the CCTV anchor Rui Chenggang blogged and protested the existence of Starbucks in the Forbidden City. The whole event raised a hot discussion in China, and even attracted the attention of foreign media. Rui’s point is that he found opening a cafe in the Forbidden City to be in serious conflict with the totem significance of the museum. However, when we just focused on Starbucks while avoiding the conflict between traditional cultural and commercial symbols, the logical basis of the movement to expel the Starbucks became pale and fragile.

(...)
Read the rest of Starbuck Leaves, the Forbidden City Cafe Arrives – Deng Haijian (271 words)

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Post tags: bloggers, forbidden city, nationalism, Rui Chenggang, starbucks, traditional culture
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Part 1:

(...)
Read the rest of Video: Painting and Calligraphy in Chinese Imperial Palace (14 words)

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Post tags: calligraphy, forbidden city, paintings, traditional culture, videos
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Post tags: forbidden city, Tiananmen Square, videos
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Starbucks closed its store in Beijing’s Forbidden City today after months of controversy over the U.S. coffee-shop chain doing business there. The decision followed the Forbidden City’s announcement that it wants to operate all stores inside the former imperial palace, which is now a museum.

“We have respectfully decided to end our lease agreement,” the Seattle coffee chain said. Wang Jinlong, president of Starbucks Greater China, said in a written statement: “We fully respect the decision of Forbidden City to transition to a new mode of concessions service to its museum visitors.”[Full Text]

- Read previous related posts here via CDT
- Read also BBC’s coverage about this issue

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Post tags: forbidden city, foreign companies, starbucks
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A member of China’s parliament has demanded the immediate closure of a Starbucks coffee shop set up inside Beijing’s Forbidden City, the Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.

Two months after a television host launched an online campaign to evict Starbucks Corp. from the former home of Chinese emperors, the seven-year-old store has had its logo removed but otherwise it’s business as usual, the agency said…

In response to the online boycott, the Palace Museum management had promised to seek a solution with Starbucks by the end of June, Xinhua said. The rent paid by Starbucks is used for maintenance of the palace, it added, citing museum. [Full Text]

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Post tags: forbidden city, nationalism, NPC 2007, starbucks
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Starbucks could be banished from Beijing’s fabled Forbidden City amid complaints that the presence of the ubiquitous US coffee shop chain in the former imperial palace constitutes an “affront to Chinese culture”.

China’s official media said on Thursday that a low-key Starbucks outlet near the rear of the sprawling Palace Museum site might be removed following online protests sparked by a patriotic polemic published by a TV anchorman on his personal blog.

The controversy surrounding Starbucks’ presence in the Forbidden City highlights the risks to foreign companies of offending Chinese nationalist sentiment.

State media said this week that a Russian TV commercial for Wrigley’s chewing gum that used China’s national anthem had “harmed the dignity” of the country, upset internet users and caused a drop in sales in at least one Chinese city. [Full Text]

Technorati Tags: China, Starbucks

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Post tags: bloggers, forbidden city, nationalism, starbucks
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Whereas CCTV host urges Starbucks to get out of the Forbidden City, Luqiu Luwei(闾丘露薇), Phoenix TV reporter, asks in her blog: how did Starbucks enter the Forbidden City? (in translation):

It seems to be a big story now. Of course, it is good to see people care about the protection of the Forbidden City. But the question is, when we are [demanding] Starbucks to get out of the Forbidden City, why don’t we just reflect how did Starbucks get into the Forbidden City?

I think it is a question of management of the Forbidden City. If we want accountability, should we not expect the management to consider not only rental income, but also questions like how to ensure harmonious environment?…[Full Text]

Also read the original Chinese post here.

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Post tags: forbidden city, starbucks
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At a May ceremony inside the Forbidden City, Hong Kong real estate tycoon Ronnie Chan”whose China Heritage Fund (CHF) bankrolled the rebuilding of the Jianfugong Garden”profusely thanks the Chinese government officials in attendance. Now that work is complete, Chan says, he is “handing the garden back” to Gugong (the Forbidden City’s Chinese name). Senior functionaries seated in the front row nod graciously. And somehow the moment, rife with order and bureaucracy, reminds me of the 1997 ceremony when Hong Kong was “handed back” to the mainland.

The event, held on a hot, windless Beijing afternoon, feels long and ponderous, so I’m relieved when Calvin Tsao, the New York architect responsible for the project’s interiors, offers to take me on a tour. The rebuilt Jianfugong Garden is a small portion of the Forbidden City, the ancient home of China’s emperors, a sprawling 178-acre complex dating back to 1420 and comprising more than 800 buildings and 8,000 rooms. According to UNESCO, the Forbidden City is the largest collection of preserved wooden structures in the world. [Full text]

- Read more about the reconstructed garden, via People’s Daily.

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Post tags: cultural preservation, forbidden city, historical legacy
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When a tourist from Beijing accompanied a Chinese friend to the Forbidden City, they were not allowed to enter two shops in the Forbidden City. The shops claimed they only welcomed foreign tourists, not Chinese ones. Given that all shops aim to promote themselves to bring in more customers, why did this happen?

These two shops are located east of Shenwu Gate and next to the Zhenfei(珍妃) Well respectively. After been repeatedly asked to reveal identity, the journalist finally entered into the shops by saying he was looking for his foreign friends. [Full Text]

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Post tags: forbidden city, tourists
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Anyone who has visited Beijing in the last few years knows that the Forbidden City, the ancient home of China’s emperors, is in the midst of a total restoration. Plans call for work to be completed by 2020, in time to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the imperial compound.

The refurbishment is part of Beijing’s selective preservation work in advance of the 2008 Olympics. Heavily visited historic sites like the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven are undergoing multimillion-dollar face-lifts, even as a few ancient residential neighborhoods are being bulldozed for new development. One such neighborhood, Qianmen, is less than a mile from the Forbidden City.

The scope of the work inside the high gray walls of the Forbidden City is displayed in the office of Jin Hongkui, the deputy director of the Palace Museum, as the imperial compound is formally known. [Full Text]

(...)
Read the rest of Restored, an Emperor’s Lair Will Be Forbidden No More – Jim Yardley (19 words)

© Michael Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, forbidden city, historical sites, qing dynasty
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