Coal Bans, Straw Burning Bans: Why Are Farmers Always Subjected to a One-Size-Fits-All Approach?

Thereafter Hebei began rolling out coal-to-gas and coal-to-electricity conversions on a massive scale, at one point creating the absurd situation of natural gas shortages in which farmers were forbidden from burning coal yet had no gas to burn. This was the case in 2016. By the winter of 2017, the final year of the Ten Air Measures, the situation worsened: at the end of November, Hebei issued an orange alert on natural gas supply, with a shortfall of 10–20% province-wide, and some cities had to suspend gas supply to industrial enterprises and vehicle fuelling services.

My family lives on the edge of a county seat in southern Hebei, effectively the urban-rural fringe. That year our kitchen lost its gas supply, and my mother had to make do with an induction hob for stews. But at least the town did not suspend district heating. Relatives still living in our home village were not so fortunate. No natural gas, no burning coal permitted, cooking done on an induction hob, and heating limited to Little Sun portable heaters and electric blankets.

The reason I care about these issues is that in the years after the Ten Air Measures came into effect, I was an environmental journalist and lived through the peak of the pollution crackdown—powerful environmental policies rolled out one after another, environmental inspection teams sweeping through with lightning efficiency, environmental organisations exposing factory after factory of illegal dumping and bringing case after stirring case of public-interest litigation, and experts producing a mountain of research on source apportionment, health impacts, and governance mechanisms for air pollution… I believed that with the government wielding such thunderous force to tackle the air, with the attention of the media, public-interest organisations, and the whole of society, properly resolving the winter heating problem for North China’s farmers could not possibly take more than two or three years.

But I never expected that nearly a decade later, not even a news headline needs changing. If there is a change, it is this: articles are deleted faster than ever. The Farmer’s Daily piece published on Minor Cold, speaking up for Hebei’s farmers, was scrubbed from the entire internet the next day.

This is also why, when nearly at the same moment Beijing produced a dazzling “blue sky scorecard”—with the 2025 PM2.5 concentration falling from 89.5 µg/m³ in 2013 to 27 µg/m³, and multiple indicators reaching their best levels since monitoring began—I felt both relief and a chill at my heart.

II. Clean Heating: Easy to Know, Hard to Do

In 2018 the Shandong Provincial Government issued the Shandong Province Winter Clean Heating Plan (2018–2022), setting a target of 75% average clean heating coverage across the province’s rural areas by 2022. A local environmental organisation, Green Action Qilu, decided to find out what that 75% target actually meant on the ground.

After several years of field visits, they found that although Shandong had officially “completed” its clean heating upgrade programme, it had proven extremely difficult to sustain once subsidy tapering set in. Across the province, problems such as delayed subsidy payments and non-compliance with the subsidy policy had emerged, leading many farmers to stop using clean heating equipment. After analysing more than 500 valid questionnaires, they found that of the households surveyed that had completed clean heating upgrades, close to one in six had already abandoned or planned to abandon them—the main reason being the high cost of heating. If subsidies were discontinued altogether, 41.6% of users said they might give up as well.

It is not only farmers who can no longer keep up; the government itself seems unable to sustain its procurement of clean coal. By searching government procurement websites, Green Action Qilu found that local governments at all levels across Shandong have been scaling back their clean coal purchases in recent years. Meanwhile, a district in Weihai that had once more than 40 residential loose coal depots shut them all down as part of air-quality governance, only to reopen 17 of them.

The reasons farmers abandon clean heating go beyond high prices. Clean heating is not limited to natural gas; renewables such as solar power are considered a cheaper, cleaner option. Yet when Green Action Qilu conducted door-to-door surveys in one village, they found that two-thirds of the state-subsidised solar thermal units with electric backup heating had already been abandoned, and one-third sold as scrap, because the quality was so poor that they produced the embarrassing situation of being warm when the sun shone (at which point heating was barely needed anyway) and failing to provide warmth when it did not.

The same picture emerged in other villages, and once the equipment broke down, nobody would repair it. In the end, villagers had no choice but to go back to coal stoves—not only could they pipe the heat into the kang to warm the sleeping platform, but they could also boil water and cook on them, giving them far more everyday uses.

“These state-subsidised products are not three-no products—no manufacturer, no production licence, no quality certificate—yet 50% of them were useless in the first year alone, and by the second and third years nobody was using them,” said Guo Yongqi, the organisation’s director. “Because of poor product quality, you constantly get leaks, drips, seepage, and burst pipes; installed on a rooftop, they actually pose a hazard. The branded manufacturers are better—their product quality and installation are sound, and their after-sales service is comparatively responsible.”

Records on government procurement websites show that between 2019 and 2021, solar thermal heating projects with electric backup, channelled through the government procurement system across various parts of Shandong, numbered 11 in total, covering nearly 30,000 households, with a cumulative tender value of approximately 145 million yuan. However, all 11 winning bids went to small and medium-sized local enterprises; not a single major industry leader was among them. In response, Green Action Qilu has called out: rural areas should not be turned into dumping grounds for substandard goods.

Compared with eight or nine years ago, when Hebei’s farmers had no gas to burn at all, things have at least improved this year—there is at least gas to burn, even if subsidies have shrunk and it means paying more out of pocket.

According to the Farmer’s Daily article that was later deleted, natural gas prices in rural Hebei range from 3.15 to 3.4 yuan per cubic metre, meaning winter heating for a 100 square-metre home costs roughly 5,000 to 10,000 yuan. In Beijing, by contrast, several heating options are available, and the annual charges for a 100 square-metre home are: coal-fired boiler (direct supply), 1,650 yuan; coal-fired boiler (indirect supply), 1,900 yuan; gas/oil/electric boiler, 3,000 yuan. (Yes, centralised coal-burning is permitted, because there are end-of-pipe measures to treat pollutant emissions—loose coal, however, is not.)

Moreover, according to government statistics, in 2024 the average disposable income of urban residents in Beijing was 92,464 yuan, while that of rural residents in Hebei was 22,022 yuan.

Set against the breathtaking speed of Beijing’s PM2.5 decline and the generous heating supply to urban residents, our national conversation is still mired in the question of whether a farmer a hundred kilometres away even deserves to have heating in winter. The gulf is so absurd that one feels the two sides of this country are living in different eras.

III. Straw Can’t Be Burned, Either

IV. Who Should Pay the Price of the Green Transition?

On the matter of how farmers should heat their homes, there is already no shortage of policy documents, technologies, and research findings. What we need more than anything is a return to common sense, and to humanity.