The Ministry of Environmental Protection admits that it will cost 1.75 trillion yuan to control serious air pollution.

Chinese officials admitted at an environmental forum in Guangdong that China ranks first in the world in almost all categories of air pollution, including sulfur dioxide and nitric oxide, as well as carbon emissions, according to Hong Kong media.

Experts also pointed out that the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region is one of the most polluted areas in the world, Hong Kong media reported on December 6.

Wang Jinnan, chief engineer of the Environmental Planning Institute of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, was quoted as saying that an investment of 1.75 trillion yuan was needed to achieve China's pollution reduction target by next year, but the investment gap posed a huge obstacle to this action.

"almost all pollutant emission targets and carbon dioxide emission targets are the first in the world, and the pressure of the whole atmosphere is unprecedented," Wang Jinnan said at the 2016 Summit of China's listed Environmental Protection companies. "

He said that a large number of pollutants are discharged in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, which directly results in an increase in pm2.5. Nationwide, visibility has decreased by an average of about 50 kilometers in recent decades, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has become one of the most polluted areas in the world.

Lei Wen, an official of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that over the past 10 years, the state has invested huge manpower and material resources in energy conservation, emission reduction and environmental protection, and achieved remarkable results, but on the whole, the production mode of high input, high emission and high pollution has not been fundamentally changed.

China's total industrial output surpassed that of the United States in 2011 to become the largest in the world, but factories that do not strictly enforce environmental standards have become the main cause of pollution.

Although most of China's coal-fired power plants are equipped with state-of-the-art filters, coal burning in factories is not well regulated and they continue to discharge pollutants into the atmosphere, Levin said.

According to Saadi Research Institute, a subsidiary of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, coal consumption in the non-electric industry accounted for about 46% of the country's total coal consumption in 2015, and the environmental standards of these industrial furnaces are not as stringent as those of the thermal power industry.

Wang Jinnan also said that insufficient investment in environmental protection is still a prominent problem. The central government has pledged to invest about 1.5 per cent of gdp in environmental protection, but not so high in recent years, about 1 per cent.