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A total of 104 cities in 20 provinces in and near China's two largest industrial clusters - the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and the Yangtze River Delta region - fell victim to heavy smog that reduced visibility to less than 10 meters in some places, according to the Environmental Protection Ministry.
The situation will gradually improve from Sunday after wind blows away dirty air, the National Meteorological Center of China Meteorological Administration said on Sunday.
This was the second time heavy smog has covered so many cities this year. Thick haze shrouded many cities for more than 20 days in January, affecting more than 600 million people in 17 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions.
China is experiencing what developed countries experienced about 20 to 30 years ago, when smoggy and hazy weather caused by fast urbanization and an unreasonable urban layout frequently occurred, said Peng Yingdeng, an environmental impact assessment expert from the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
"If urban planning does not take the diffusion of pollutants into consideration, smog will plague China for at least another 10 to 20 years," he said.
The latest wave of smog, which first swept into Shanghai and Jiangsu province on Dec 1, has caused at least four car accidents due to low visibility, claiming six lives nationwide. The most serious accident was in Jiangsu on Dec 4, which involved almost 20 vehicles and left three dead and many injured.
The World Health Organization has a safety guideline of 25 for PM2.5, particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns that can go deep into the lungs.
Policies have been issued in the past few months, including a vow to cut PM2.5 levels in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster by 25 percent by 2017 from 2012 levels.
Sui Xiaochan, head of the environmental emergency and accident investigation center at the Environmental Protection Ministry, headed a team to inspect Tianjin late last month.
"Stop the car right away and take a photo of that chimney," Sui Xiaochan told the driver, pointing at a chimney some 200 meters away that was giving off thick black smoke.
Ten minutes later, the car stopped outside the chimney, located in a residential district of Tianjin, and Sui and her colleagues soon found themselves inside a coal-fired heating station, built right in the middle of a residential community called Yibaibeili.
Several coal stockpiles stood in the open space between two residential blocks, where in most Chinese communities, a small garden is usually located. The coal was stacked so close to the buildings that one could easily have opened a window and picked up a lump.
It was a heavily polluted day, with PM2.5 readings higher than 300 micrograms per cubic meter, meaning that the level of fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns, fine enough to penetrate the lungs, was high enough to pose a serious health risk. The World Health Organization's safe limit is 25.
The coal, a potential source of dust pollution, lay uncovered and open to the elements. An elderly woman walked slowly past the piles. She was carrying an infant, but neither of them wore protective masks.
Sui asked her assistant to take photos of the stockpiles and of the chimney, which was slightly taller than the six-story building it stood beside. Then she took out her handbook and wrote down the name of the community and the address of the heating station.
Collecting the evidence had taken less than five minutes. We returned to the car and drove away before any of the security staff had even noticed us.
Sui, a bustling woman in her 50s, is head of the environmental emergency and accident investigation center at the Environmental Protection Ministry in Beijing. The department is charged with dealing with environmental emergencies and pollution inspections.
The pollution sources she chases and the notes she makes will help the ministry evaluate the local government's performance in the control of toxic emissions from a wide range of airborne pollution sources. Sui's work has been bolstered by the new policies issued in September, aimed at "bringing a visible change" to air quality nationwide by 2017.
The ministry's inspection campaign, which runs from October to March, targets sources of airborne pollution and has been timed to coincide with the Chinese winter, when extensive use of coal-fired heating causes levels of haze and smog to climb steeply.
The inspection is mainly focused on the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster, one of China's most-polluted areas. Cities within the cluster usually occupy six or seven places on the list of the "10 most polluted cities of the month" released by the ministry every four weeks.
