The daily experience is that the air and water quality is bad, in some places getting marginally better or staying the same, in some cases getting worse.
“How do you reconcile these different pictures of China?” asks Barbara Finamore, founder and director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s China Program. “Both are true at once. It’s something we struggle with all the time.”

I have visited China each year for the past three years. I've been pleasantly surprised to find so much of rural China still has blue skies and clean, running water. I've also been appalled at obvious pollution of large lakes.
Both are true! China has many policies for greening the country which are well in advance of other nations. Even ancient cities are undergoing the process of having pavement blocks pulled up and trees planted along the streets. Forestry planting and street planting of trees is being undertaken in a big way.
In Yunnan province, where there are many ethnic minority groups, the couples are allowed to have more than one child, but firstly before they marry they must plant 50 trees. If all those trees are alive 12 months later they have proved their ability to nurture and may marry. They may then have their first child, but not a second child for 5 years. Should the second child come sooner they are obliged to work for the provincial forestry department to 'green' a hill. In such a way these people are being obliged to take care of their carbon footprint.
The sad thing in western media is that mostly one only hears about the pollution, not the efforts to 'green' the country.
China has a long way to go in the fight against pollution in the cities, but at grass roots level the country people are involved in greening their country.

An excellent article.

May I suggest scrutiny of China’s demand for 1990 benchmark for emission reduction? 1990s is meaningless since China’s rocketing emission escalation bears no relationship to increases by other countries.

Pollution was widespread in the 1990s and primarily concentrated in the heavy industrial centres such as Benxi. Coal was the fuel for domestic and industrial use.

1990s was also a decade before the “opening up” and the next decade of unprecedented economic and industrial expansion. 1990s emissions have no relevance for today’s assessment, not just because of volume, but today’s added power generation carbon emissions, the deadly cocktail of furans, dioxins and a host of deadly air and water pollutants.

China’s coal fired power generation programme started 15 years after the 1990s benchmark. 550 new coal-fired 1gigawatt power stations, lacking effective emission controls are being commissioned at the rate of one every seven to ten days. Failure to factor in this increase is meaningless for any form of effective climate change agreement.

Many are located in remote regions near coalmines or part of expanding energy and industrial bases fuelled by coal delivered by dedicated railways from Inner Mongolia, Mongolia and Xinjiang. Newly developed mines in Xinjiang’s Taklamakan and Kuruktag deserts and the Hami basin will fuel local power stations to feed local industry plus the planned west to east high voltage grid.

While remote and isolated, the emissions from theses energy, coke, and industry bases will contaminate the dust storms that later envelop the eastern cities, Korean Peninsula and ride on the pacific conveyor to the east coast to the US.

Your last paragraph summed it up perfectly.

Rapid growth in wind generation however, is not from Government action. Your comments on power transmission are correct, but it is more about investment and stock exchange action combined with highly profitable incentives available under Kyoto’s CDM scheme. China also quickly found the reactive power compensation technology to smooth the uneven flow of wind-generated power into the grids, was expensive.

part II continues
Arthur Thomas

The current massive urbanization expansion programme will continue with construction of low cost and highly energy inefficient buildings at a rate equivalent to a city 1.7 times the size of Beijing each year. That resultant scale of inefficiencies requires a considerable power generation excess just to make up for the losses and unnecessarily increase carbon emissions.

Arthur Thomas