A leading Beijing-based oil company has run afoul of the head of China's top environmental body during a surprise inspection on Tuesday, which came as China's authorities mount efforts to crack down on pollution lawbreaker.
It took nearly 20 minutes for staffers at the Sinopec Beijing Yanshan Co to try, and fail, to provide data on environmental protection to the visiting head of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), Chen Jining, on Tuesday as he examined regional responsive measures on coping with pollution.
Chen noted that the company should pay more serious attention to environmental protection, and familiarize itself with the data-analyzing system.
Meanwhile, a special inspection in seven cities in northern China organized by the MEP has caught businesses faking their monitoring data amid suspected opportunism.
Many industrial plants have been deceiving the authorities, restoring cancelled production lines after inspection, fabricating real-time monitoring data, or refusing officials' inspection, according to a statement released on MEP's website on Monday.
The inspection report comes as northern China has been blanketed in heavy smog, and Beijing upgraded its smog alert from yellow to orange on Monday.
The smog is expected to last for a week, covering many cities in northern and central China, including Tianjin Municipality and Zhengzhou, capital of Central China's Henan Province.
This round of smog was mainly produced by pollutants emitted by businesses, the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau said.
According to the ministry, three cement plants in Tangshan, North China's Hebei Province, failed to shut down their businesses during the orange alert, and one of them closed a production line but restored it after the inspection team left.
One materials company in Anyang, Central China's Henan Province rigged their sulfur dioxide data, a heating company in Xingtai, Hebei manually set its pollutant emission data to a certain range, and a printing company in Beijing produced fake records in order to handle the inspection team, the statement said.
On Saturday, government authorities from Beijing, Hebei, Tianjin and Shanxi Province were called in for talks with the MEP over the deteriorating air quality in North China, the first such move from the MEP, Legal Daily reported Tuesday.
In order to cope with the most recent round of air pollution, Beijing authorities have also dispatched 77 inspection teams made up of 290 people since Saturday, The Beijing News reported.
