Wu and parents of her son's classmates raised over 10,000 yuan (1,500 U.S. dollars) to buy a high-end air purifier for their kids at a Beijing primary school earlier this month.
"Too many kids fall ill during the smog and we are left with no other choice," she said.
Health concerns pushed up searches for masks and air purifiers on Alibaba last month by 148.4 percent and 56.5 percent, respectively. Many online sellers even ran out of stock as demand spiked.
A Taobao shop owner told Xinhua that his shop has sold all imported air purifiers in stock. Some shops are even profiteering, hiking prices as people rush to buy.
Zhang Qiang, mother of a seven-year-old boy, was angry when talking about the smog, which has stopped her son from attending school more than three times this month.
She complained on her Sina Weibo microblog account: "Why are so many polluting businesses allowed to run at the cost of Chinese children breathing dirty air?"
Anxious Chinese have even turned to cans of fresh air from Canada, which many in north China's smog hot spots have purchased on Taobao.
FIGHT AGAINST POLLUTION
While infuriating the public, the heavy air pollution puts huge pressure on environmental authorities as well.
According to a report published by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, heavy and chemical industries were the main cause of recent smog across north China.
Optimizing the energy structure has become one of the government's top priorities.
China plans to restructure its energy mix by developing renewable energy sources in a bid to combat air pollution, Xie Zhenhua, China's special representative on climate change, said at a press conference in Beijing.
Xie also stressed that China has been actively developing non-fossil energy over the past decade, with installed capacity of hydropower, wind power and solar power increasing 257 percent, 9,000 percent and nearly 40,000 percent, respectively.
China's State Council pledged earlier this month that China will upgrade coal-fired power plants to cut pollutant discharge by 60 percent before 2020, saving around 100 million tonnes of raw coal and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 180 million tonnes annually.
Experts in the area have also proposed alternative fuels to ease air pollution.
Alternative fuels based on methanol and ethanol would be the next choice to help reduce air pollutant emissions in north China, said Guo Xinyu, vice chairman with the China Alcohol and Ether Fuel Committee.
In November, Beijing's environment authority reported that the capital city's PM2.5 density, an indicator of air pollution, had dropped over 20 percent during the first 10 months of the year from the same period last year.
When told the news, Zhang Qiang looked out the window, stared at the smog-enveloped city and said, "There's much more to do."
