Chinese-Language Readers Speak Out on the Emissions Challenge

While the Chinese whine about their air pollution , they throw garbage everywhere . I stayed at a 5-star Le Meridian hotel on the beach in Hainan during New Year Festival . A large fireworks display was left ( burnt out ) untouched on the beach for days afterwards until almost all of the garbage had been sucked into the ocean by the nightly tides . I could not understand it then nor now . This is just one example of how China is drowning under its own litter . There is no excuse for this !

The Chinese do not need to clean up their pollution for the world. They need to do it for themselves. I well recall life in the USA back in the 60s and 70s when our skies were an open sewer. I grew up in the NYC area and remember when it was an exceptional day when you could see much across the Hudson River. I shall never forget driving through Gary, Indiana and seeing plumes or various colored smoke ascending to the sky with one ominous yellow plume descending toward earth. Car trips through Appalachia revealed dead trees killed by acid rain. Finally we got smart and decided to do something about cleaning up our air. We were not then thinking of global warming. We did it so we could breathe cleaner air, suffer less health problems and see our trees spring back to green. We also had to accept less "cheap growth" for betterment of the environment in which we lived. We had to deal with the same apostles of growth at any cost that now can be heard in China. We cleaned up our environment for ourselves, not for the globe. We did not even know the harm we were doing to it. It is now time for the Chinese to make a similar selfish decision and to do something for themselves and their immediate environment.

China has to shut down schools and cities because of air pollution - yet their government says that they are poor and need to burn more coal to develop their economies. This is the epitome of hypocrisy.

"You Americans and Europeans went through the same: economic growth first and environmental cleanup later. China is on the same road as you were! If this is not a carefully dressed innuendo, then what is it? It is like saying when you pollute, it is legal, but when others do it, it is not! Cheap shot! — Jessy Gu, Shanghai"

It was China's choice to pick Mao as a leader. Mao ended crippling was sworn enemy of the West. So, now somehow you want to insist that West must somehow also pay for the bad government that China inflicted on itself.

As the Chinese economy slows, spending on infrastructures and medicine can sustains the growth for years to come.

The argument that we did the same thing - industrialization and pollution followed by clean-up - ignores the fact that we did it a hundred years ago when vastly less was known about health consequences and climate change.

This the first time that I've seen a photo with Chinese military guards wearing protective facemask while on routine duty in Tiananmen Square, though it is by no means the first time for Beijing to have hazardous smog in the past decades. Improvement of awareness is one factor that contributes to this new development, but it may also suggest the mounting pressure in the domestic negotiations between the industrial interest groups and the environment policy-makers.

Yes of course criticism of China is always bad. They have a right to live as the most wealthy no matter what.

Great article, a nice idea to have Chinese readers speak for themselves. It is obvious that like in the US they confront a complex problem. The positive side of smog is that, unlike climate change, it can be felt immediately. It changes people's life and expectations for the future. I encourage our Chinese friends to push for more renewable and research in renewable energies. All countries should do the same, especially those with historical responsibilities. As a Chinese reader mentioned, there is no point having high economic growth if we will have nothing we truly enjoy left to pass on to our kids.

One of the reasons my parents left Britain for Canada in the 50's was the pea-soup fog-pollution. Will this have the same effect on the Chinese.

Bad news today, maybe better in the near term. I was in LA in 1969 and experienced bad smog. I was in Shandong in 2013 when the cloud of smog that had caused a Red Alert in Harbin closing that capital for days rolled south. For 36 hours I was in the worst smog of my life. From my hotel I could not see a smokestack that was less than 500 feet away, although my weather app on my phone told me it was a sunny day. In several months in-country working in North China I never saw a clear day, even at the sea shore.

Where is the good news? In the US we have made real progress in cleaning up or reducing some kinds of pollution. The EPA, sewage treatment plants, the clean waters act, Superfund sites, rising auto emission standards and catalytic converters, reducing smokestack emissions of toxic materials, community recycling. Incremental steps, but our air and water and our environment are much better in many areas than it was. These things CAN be fixed, given the political will to do so.

In China the children and everyone else are at risk from the self-poisoning that pollution causes societies. The government must and will act to become a leader in pollution control and mediation. In China when the government acts, things change fast. China will become a world leader in pollution control and remediation, as they have in so many other areas, such a s solar panel production. It will take perhaps 20 years.

I agree with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi - It is unfair for developing countries to bear the blame for the pollution largely made by developed countries. And the pollution cannot be used to limit their aspiration for more development. China is still a developing country; it is the developed countries who must take the lead.