China Reform Monitor: No. 1159

April 10:

At Nepal’s request, China is planning to build a rail link through Mt. Everest as a shortcut to the Indian market. “The line will probably go through Qomolangma (Nepal) so that workers may have to dig some very long tunnels. If the proposal becomes a reality, bilateral trade, especially in agricultural products, will get a strong boost,” said a Chinese rail expert in comments carried by the Times of India. The project, which will be completed by 2020, was discussed during China’s foreign minister Wang Yi’s visit to Kathmandu in December. Last August, China completed a 253-kilometer railway line between Lhasa and Xigaze, Tibet’s second largest city. In March, Beijing agreed to extend a $145 million grant to upgrade the 71-mile road linking Kathmandu with the Tibetan border.

April 13:

Nepal’s investment board has cleared China’s state-owned Three Gorges International Corp to build a long-delayed $1.6 billion new hydropower project – the country’s single biggest foreign investment. The dam on the West Seti River in northwest Nepal will be completed in 2022, Reuters reports. Nepal’s parliament first approved the project in 2012, but Three Gorges – China’s biggest hydropower developer and operator of the Yangtze River Three Gorges Dam – has been awaiting the investment board’s approval. Last year Nepal, which suffered chronic power shortages, approved two major Indian hydropower projects worth a combined $2.4 billion.

Around 10,000 residents of Heyuan, Guangdong have protested against a new coal-fired power plant, the South China Morning Post reports. Shenzhen Energy, whose major shareholder is the Shenzhen government, is spending 8 billion yuan on the plant, which will generate 11 billion kWh annually. The demonstration began at 8am with a sit-in outside city government offices by thousands of people wearing masks and stickers denouncing the plant. At around 10am police dispersed the crowd, sending the protesters into the streets, where their numbers swelled to around 10,000 before noon. The crowd then marched through the city chanting, “Give me back my blue sky” and “Go away power plant” before rallying again near the government office. Last month, residents collected more than 30,000 signatures against the project. Heyuan, home to the Xinfengjiang Reservoir that supplies water to Hong Kong, already has one coal-fired plant.

April 16:

China, Iran’s biggest oil customer, will triple its investment in Iran’s oil industry from 20 to 60 billion Euros, Iran’s Minister of Petroleum Bizhan Namdar Zangeneh said after returning from Beijing. Sinopec has invested $2 billion to produce 75,000 bpd of crude oil from Iran’s giant Yadavaran oil field and China National Petroleum Company has signed a $2 billion contract with Iran to produce 120,000 bpd of oil from the North Azadegan field, Iranian official government news agency IRNA reports.

April 21:

More than 90 percent of 360 Chinese cities failed to meet national air quality standards in the first three months of this year, according to a report by Greenpeace East Asia. Although interior provinces were the most polluted, cities on the eastern and southern coasts also had dire levels of fine pollutants. Researchers ranked each province and city after looking at levels of fine particulate matter called PM2.5, which can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Air monitors took hourly readings of PM2.5 levels and of other pollutants. The average concentration of PM2.5 was 66 micrograms per cubic meter. Tibet and Hainan were the only provinces that met China’s air quality standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter. Coal dependent Henan, Hubei, Hebei, Beijing, and Shandong were the most polluted provinces. Beijing’s average PM2.5 level was 92.4 micrograms per cubic meter – nearly four times the World Health Organization’s recommended limit, the New York Times reports.

[Editor’s Note: A report by Peking University has called into question the government’s air-monitoring methodology used in the Greenpeace study. It claimed the air monitors and data collection failed to account for wind and weather patterns when calculating PM2.5 levels. Windy months might give a false impression that PM2.5 levels have dropped. According to Beida, if weather patterns were taken into account, average PM2.5 levels in 2013 and 2014 were worse than in the two previous years.]