The Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) recently featured a story arguing that “Research ties China’s smog clean-up to hotter and drier conditions in Australia.”

Mainstream commercial media outlets typically set the pace in Australia for repetitive, alarmist variations on stories about China that explicitly or implicitly emphasize the broad “China threat” narrative. But the ABC is also well-practiced in “finding bones in the tofu”, as it turns its attention to China.

The headline on this recent China-smog story plainly offered a way, probably pleasing to many in the audience, for Australia to blame some recent misfortune on those devilishly successful and exceptionally numerous Chinese.

The story’s text, however, was more balanced.

It stressed the unprecedented rapid reduction in air pollution across China, particularly in urban areas. The health benefits for over 1 billion people in China have been vividly positive, which, in turn, highlights how in “India and Bangladesh, air pollution remains a persistent and deadly problem linked to millions of excess deaths each year.”

“Climate experts agree,” the report says, that “it is imperative to reduce the pollution, but acknowledge it will likely increase heating and extreme weather in the South Asian region”. This points to the key emerging problem arising from this exceptional smog reduction.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains that “Aerosols are fine solid or liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere, where they reside typically for days.” Smog characteristically comprises liquid aerosols mixed with particulate matter, for example, from burned fuel of all kinds. Unlike greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere, most aerosols reflect sunlight back into space, producing a cooling effect.

The significant reduction in polluting aerosols in China has reduced this reflective impact. The ABC report goes on to explain that a team of Chinese researchers published a paper in late 2025 “linking Australia’s hot and dry weather in the 2010s to China’s aerosol reductions”.

Today, China has the most advanced, diverse electricity-supply regime in the world. Although coal remains a significant source of energy, its use is decreasing. Meanwhile, green energy sources are growing at a prodigious rate

All of which reminded me how, around 25 years ago, I purchased my first flat in Hong Kong. It was located in Sham Shui Po, in a new high-rise block of flats built there after the relocation of Hong Kong’s primary airport to Chek Lap Kok. The view was exceptional at that time, as all the surrounding buildings were still 10 stories or fewer. We could clearly see the skyline of Hong Kong Island and watch the New Year’s fireworks over Victoria Harbour.

That is, we could see all this when the smog cleared. And at that time, the smog was growing more shocking every year.

Langham Place in Mong Kok was completed in 2005. At 255 meters, it was the tallest building in Kowloon. It looked most impressive. And it was within walking distance of home. Yet, when the smog was at its worst, it was, looking from our flat, invisible to the naked eye.

It was plain that the smog was mainly drifting southward, on a daily basis, from the beating industrial heart of the Pearl River Delta (PRD). Outside the typhoon season, Hong Kong is not a very windy city, so smog tends to linger. Hong Kong’s natural, seaside, tropical high humidity amplified the adverse impact.

As it happens, at about this time, I discovered one of the primary sources of this intense level of air pollution. We took a ferry and bus trip to Zhaoqing in Guangdong province. Along the way, we passed through a small rural town that, as the PRD became a manufacturing powerhouse, had been converted into a production center for huge, portable diesel-powered generators. We saw hundreds of them as we drove through.

These units were normally built inside 40-foot shipping containers. That way, they could be readily delivered to factories using the same trucks that had once moved them from dockside container terminals. Due to the huge demand for power and the fixed power system’s inability to supply enough electricity, thousands of these portable generators, burning low-cost, high-polluting diesel fuel, were delivered to manufacturers across the PRD. The prevailing north-to-south airstream did the rest.

The pollution solution was, however, already being developed on the drawing board, at least, even when the smog blight was at its worst. The immense demand for electricity meant that planning to expand the supply system was already underway.

Today, China has the most advanced, diverse electricity-supply regime in the world. Although coal remains a significant source of energy, its use is decreasing. Meanwhile, green energy sources are growing at a prodigious rate. Bloomberg reported in September that, in the first six months of 2025, “China installed more solar panels than Germany, France, and Spain have added in their entire combined history.” China has also fostered explosive growth in pollution-reducing electric cars, buses, and smaller commercial vehicles for more than a decade.

One can see the impact today from that flat in Sham Shui Po, looking south. The regular tropical haze remains, but the worst of the terrible smog from 20 years ago has now essentially vanished.

Meanwhile, an international report recently found that India still hosts 83 of the top 100 most air-polluted cities globally. Fortunately, China has demonstrated to the world — and especially to the Global South — that credible ways exist to reduce health-threatening smog levels by conspicuous amounts.

The author is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.