China closes 35 polluting factories after spot checks

Thirty-five factories in China's Huaihe River Valley were closed and production was temporarily halted at another 198 plants on Thursday after large-scale spot inspections identified failures to meet state-set emission standards, Xinhua news agency reported.

It said inspections from midnight to 0700 AM on 1st January covered 1,300 factories with daily wastewater emissions of more than 100 tons each.

The inspections took place in Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu and Shandong provinces.

On the positive side, the inspection showed that 99 per cent of the valley's factories were meeting emission standards, Xinhua said.

"Generally speaking, the result of the inspection meets the requirement of the State Council," the director of the monitoring and environmental management department of the National Environmental Protection Agency, Lu Xinyuan, told the agency.

The spot inspections, codenamed Operation Zero Hour, involved more than 3,100 law-enforcement officers.

Paper strips were used to seal the door of closed factories in some provinces, Xinhua said.

China had demanded that all factories in the Huaihe River Valley meet emission standards at the end of 1997 or face closure or stop production.

"The aim of the Operation Zero Hour is to implement the central government's regulations, and to ensure the completion of the first phase of the Huaihe River anti-pollution war," Xinhua said.

The river valley extends 270,000 square kilometres -- slightly larger than Great Britain -- and has a population of 150 million.

The valley has become one of the country's most seriously polluted regions during the past decade, Xinhua said.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.