Over a half of 40,000 Chinese enterprises in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region have been found to be in violation of environmental regulations during the country's strictest-ever campaign against pollution over the past five months.
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, the government has carried out a campaign to strictly enforce regulations on pollution. And since 2016, there have been four rounds of environmental inspections nationwide to monitor production and deal with pollution problems.
According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, inspections of the enterprises in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and surrounding cities found that 22,832 of 41,928 enterprises have environmental problems, accounting for 54.5 percent of the total.
Among them, 7,180 were found to be causing pollution, 67 releasing excessive emissions, 2,480 failing to install waste treatment facilities, and four were suspected of faking monitoring data.
Violations were concentrated in Baoding in Hebei, and Huaxian county and Puyang in Central China's Henan Province, where 391, 166 and 76 enterprises havE been busted respectively.
The ministry previously warned that Beijing's smog is expected to arrive earlier this year, which has already returned to the capital city in early September.
Air quality in the capital started to worsen Saturday morning, with PM 2.5 density reaching 176 micrograms per cubic meter of air, indicating heavy air pollution, according to data from the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Monitoring Center.
Wang Shuyang, a professor at the School of Environment of Tsinghua University, told the People's Daily that the pollution was caused by poor meteorological conditions and increasing air pollutants.
