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With Asia-Pacific leaders gathering for a summit meeting in Beijing, forecasts that smog would envelop the capital this weekend were bad news not just for China’s leaders, who hoped to present the city in its best light for the occasion, but for officials charged with ensuring clean air.

On Friday, The Economic Daily reported that 24 officials in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province, which encircles Beijing, would be disciplined for their failure to control air pollution levels, and that five leaders of the most-polluting companies in the city would face administrative detention and fines.

Inspection tours, which were carried out on Wednesday by the Ministry of Environmental Protection in Beijing and surrounding regions to check air quality, identified dozens of workplaces in Shijiazhuang in violation of pollution control regulations. The inspection teams found that 33 enterprises in Shijiazhuang had not halted or cut back on production as directed, and that work had continued as usual at 18 construction sites. In addition, the inspectors reported that road dust in the city exceeded acceptable levels, and that the burning of trash and straw was rampant.



In October, in preparation for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Beijing, the government said it would enact stringent air pollution controls in a 200-kilometer, or 124-mile, radius of the capital, reducing traffic and industrial production from Nov. 1 to 12. Shijiazhuang, which is reported to have some of the worst air pollution in China, received special attention.

On Thursday, after the China Meteorological Administration forecast that Beijing would experience smog into Tuesday, the government extended the emergency pollution reduction measures even farther south to include Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province.

In Beijing, state news media reported that the huge number of fireworks that were set off on Tuesday evening in a rehearsal for the planned Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation display might have contributed to an increase in pollution levels.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Environmental Protection designated Henan Province as its next target for closer supervision, after summoning the mayor of Anyang, Ma Linqing, to Beijing to discuss his city’s failures in carrying out pollution regulations.

Henan, the province south of Hebei, is a center for copper-smelting, iron and steel mills, and coking plants. According to the ministry, despite the emergency antipollution measures ordered for this week, some heavily polluting enterprises either continued production as usual or discharged pollutants at night in an effort to hide them.