A majority of Chinese people have yet to be satisfied by the government's efforts to combat air pollution, according to an annual blue book released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) on Friday.
The Blue Book of Public Service evaluates 38 major cities' basic public service capabilities in fields such as air pollution control, reform of the household registration system and housing price control, news site cnr.com reported.
Some 38 percent of respondents said they were not satisfied or very dissatisfied with the government's efforts to combat smog, while 33.65 percent felt "so-so" and only 28.1 percent were satisfied or very satisfied, according to the blue book.
The CASS report found that more than nine cities scored below 50 percent approval for air pollution control. Zhengzhou, capital of Central China's Henan Province, scored 39.80 points, 46.37 points behind top-ranked Lhasa, capital of Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, The Beijing News reported on Friday.
Many cities located in frequently smog-shrouded northern China - including Zhengzhou, Changchun, Beijing, Shijiazhuang and Changsha - scored poorly.
The average concentration of PM2.5 - airborne particulate matter under 2.5 micrometers in size - in Beijing reached 500 micrograms per cubic meter on Friday afternoon, only two days after the lifting of the capital's second smog red alert, the Beijing-based China Business Journal reported on Monday.
The rapid degradation of air quality in Beijing resulted from weather conditions unfavorable to the diffusion of accumulated pollutants and pollutant emissions, said experts with the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
More than half of respondents to surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015 believed the traditional household registration system should be improved, said Liu Zhichang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, as quoted by cnr.com.
The blue book also noted that the current points system for household registration can only serve as a transitional form of the traditional household registration system.
The year 2015 also witnessed a substantial increase in people's satisfaction with housing price controls compared to 2014, said the report. About 40 percent of respondents felt positive about the achievements being made by the government's housing price control policies, for an increase of 7.3 percentage points, year-on-year.
