

EU Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik also said that China's serious pollution problems are a business opportunity for European businesses, which have "in the last decades evolved quite far the technological solutions to some of the technology, be it in the water or cleaning up or in the air."


The past three decades have seen breakneck economic growth in China but little official concern about the effect on the country's air, water and soil. Now the government is under pressure from the public to clean up the country's smog-choked cities and filthy rivers, but it has given no timetable and has yet to make clear how far they are willing to go if such measures wipe out jobs or force factories and power plants to close.

"You can deal with air pollution and at the same time still have growth," Potocnik said, adding that the European Union's strict legislation to combat air pollution had achieved results while the bloc continued to grow.




Zeng Juefa, who was the vice director of Hechi city's environmental protection bureau, was given a four-and-a-half-year sentence for delinquency and taking bribes of 45,000 yuan ($7,300), the report said.