If the emissions continue to increase large regions of eastern and southeastern China, the Korean Peninsula and Japan will have acid rain falling on them. .
The increasing amount of pollution in China has eventuated because of their heavy reliance on coal, using more than 900m tonnes of the fossil fuel each year. Another reason is that the coal, which China does use, is poor and its industry is inefficient. Although large industries are decreasing their emissions of particulate matter or keeping them steady in China, emissions from domestic cooking and heating fuels is mounting. This rising in domestic emissions is from the small boilers used by households, which are mostly old and extremely inefficient. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping guided China along the path of economic reform. He prescribed the deceptively simple goal to make the GDP per head to be $1 000 by the end of the century. This meant that over the past 10 years China's economy had to relatively triple in size. Therefore they built more power stations and factories which depend primarily on China's own coal, which has an average ash content of 27% and sulphur content of up to 5%. .
China's planners set the price of its dirty coal so far below the world price that factory managers have no motive to use it efficiently and thus produce less pollution. Even if the managers did have the incentive, plenty of ash and sulphur would still be released into the air. .
There are different ways to look at China's pollution. A positive aspect is that China is taking more notice of its environment. The negative points include that smog and fumes threaten food production and the World Bank says that Benxi has the worst air pollution in the world. The effects on the people and on the environment are that China's cities stink of coal, and fumes blow across the land, which poisons the crops and cause acid rain. It has been proven that the stench of coal dust rises 200 meters from the streets below.
