China’s Smog Problem Means No Fireworks for New Year Celebrations

With the arrival of Chinese New Year on Monday, 1.3 billion revelers in China are bringing in the Year of the Monkey by eating lucky noodles and dumplings, watching lion dances and dragon parades, and visiting relatives. And then there are the colorful fireworks displays and strings of firecrackers, a tradition since the 12th century, when pyrotechnics were first invented in the country.

But tradition is being broken in nearly 140 cities, including the country’s biggest metropolis, Shanghai, thanks to an unpleasant modern reality: air pollution. Roughly 550 other locales, including the capital, Beijing, have limited where and when pyrotechnics can be set off.

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The strict ban on fireworks in Shanghai went into effect on Jan. 1—even Disneyland Shanghai has been impacted by it. But in case the nearly 14.5 million residents of Shanghai didn’t think it applied to Chinese New Year, on Friday government officials in the city threatened folks with fines of up to $75 if they violated the prohibition. To keep people from lighting bottle rockets or firecrackers, officials also announced that 300,000 volunteers had been recruited to enforce the law.

Although smoggy conditions in China have made oxygen masks high fashion, some people haven’t taken too kindly to the change. “It is such a pity! Our tradition that had survived thousands of years was suddenly abolished,” wrote a Weibo user named LaonaV, according to Xinhua News Service.

Yet with smog red-alert days the norm—and about 1.6 million people per year in China dying from the effects of breathing polluted air—sulfur- and nitrate-containing fireworks are losing popularity. A poll by the Shanghai Municipal Bureau showed that about 90 percent of residents supported the ban. Some people in Beijing, fed up with inhaling toxic air, are also in favor of the prohibition.

“Everyone around me has seen on TV or heard the radio the last few years, so we know what it does to pollution,” 74-year-old Beijing resident Wang Liwei told the South China Morning Post. “My children and grandchildren don’t shoot as many as we used to, and that’s not a problem. Why do you have to go crazy with it?”

Fu Qingyan, deputy director of the Shanghai Environment Monitoring Center, said in a statement that the ban reflects the population’s concerns about the environment, and that a reduction in fireworks has improved air quality. “The city’s air quality during Chinese New Year has improved remarkably since 2013 as more and more people become environment-conscious and stopped buying firecrackers,” said Fu. Although measurements from some monitoring stations indicated healthier air quality in parts of the metropolis, overall, the Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau reported no significant improvement on Sunday and Monday.

Xinhua reported that Beijing had cleaned up about 34 percent less debris from fireworks this year compared with 2015. A study last year by researchers at Shanghai Jiaotong University found, however, that setting off just three firecrackers causes air quality to rise to unhealthy levels, which might help explain why air quality in the Chinese capital, which only called for a reduction in pyrotechnics, is now suffering.

Beijing-based journalist Cate Cadell tweeted a sobering image of the city’s Air Quality Index measurements. As the New Year celebrations in the city intensified, the rating soared into the “Hazardous” range. Of course, after the smoke from millions of firecrackers and bottle rockets blows away, residents will still have to deal with air polluted by factory emissions, car exhaust, and burning coal.