China’s Pollution Miracle
The noise surrounding tariffs and trade hides the startling progress the mainland has made in cleaning things up.
Before the pandemic, it was common for television ads on the mainland and Hong Kong to market a profusion of air purifiers, creams and cleansers, even decongestants and surgical masks, to protect skin and lungs from pervasive smog.
Following a record-breaking summer two years ago, finews.asia wrote that achieving net zero in Asia appeared to be a pipe dream given China’s dependence on coal.
Dramatic Decline
We may have been slightly premature in our comment as things have been changing radically, as a graph from a scientific publication, Our World in Data, published in early 2025, indicates.
According to them and based on modeled estimates from the Community Emissions Data System (CEDS), China has reduced sulphur dioxide emissions by more than two-thirds in the last 15 years.
Urban Benefits
For the more numerically literate, that implies a decline to levels of 10 million tons annually from nearly 40 million at its peak.
Moreover, the improvement was particularly pronounced in the mainland’s largest cities.
Critical Drivers
«Putting emissions limits on coal plants and introducing desulphurization technologies that remove SO2 from smokestacks were critical drivers of this decline,» Our World in Data indicated.
That is an abrupt turnaround from the state of things in the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s, when China was playing catch-up, becoming the second-largest C02 emitter in the world behind the US, with a 15 percent share of all emissions since 1750.
Indeed, a set of graphs published shortly afterwards portrays a world that appears to have passed «peak air pollution», with five of six large-scale pollutants now on a downward trend.
Solar Gigawatt
«Global air pollution is now falling, and we can save many lives by accelerating this decline,» they indicate.
There are some other positive takeaways from this somewhat surreptitious new green order. They also said it now takes one day to add 1 gigawatt in solar power capacity (able to power 200,000 homes in the US), while in 2004 it took one year.
In the Mix
Still, there are some caveats. A Visual Capitalist graphic from early April shows that half of all the world’s carbon dioxide emissions came from just 36 companies, and that some major Chinese names, including CHN Energy and Jinneng Group, are in the mix.
Notably, anecdotally, there have been voices in Hong Kong in recent days about the poor air quality over the past week or so, with certain amateur sports events even being cancelled or rescheduled.
No More Ads
The situation, however, is still a far-reaching improvement from the mid-2000s, when the city was blanketed in a thick smog for much of the year.
There is another thing. Those television ads have become a forgotten relic from some bygone, pre-pandemic past. It is something to think about as everyone takes a break from markets, tariffs, and trade for a couple of days.
