[jdietrich]

The air quality in China is objectively terrible, but I do think that the government are serious about fixing it. China is now the biggest market for electric vehicles and photovoltaic panels by a considerable margin. The issue is being talked about quite openly on Chinese social media, which suggests that the Party have a great deal of confidence.

[seanmcdirmid]

While I’ll admit the current thrust is promising, a lot of it is extremely fragile. The electric vehicle push is completely incentive drive of course; e.g. why Beijing has so many Tesla’s these days despite the 2X markup has to do with the separate EV allocation in its plate lottery. Is that economically sustainable? Who knows. Solar is even more precarious as the country still lacks to the grid to move it from West to East where it is needed. LanZhou has cleaned up nicely, but it isn’t helping anything in Hebei much.

The current push to cleanup air pollution has hit some walls in being too harsh. China lacks rule of law at the local level, factory owners commonly skirt regulations, so what does happen is very heavy handed (close all factories that do X vs. just the ones that are out of compliance). They actually had to let up on the campaign after CNY this year because too much production was taken offline.