FROM my apartment window I can see 217 industrial smoke stacks - that is when a north wind blows away the grey haze which usually envelops the Chinese capital and its 11 million citizens. The nearest chimneys pump out smoke and fumes from a printing and dying mill, a pharmaceutical plant and several chemical factories.
In Xian in central China a municipal official told me that the new airport had been built an hour's drive outside town to avoid the constant city smog. Until recently the north eastern city of Benxi was so polluted it regularly disappeared from satellite photographs. Air pollution is said to contribute to 25 per cent of all deaths in China.
But now, thanks partly to the emergence of an aggressive green movement, China is confronting environmental devastation of historic proportions, and taking steps to clean up the its air and water.
Yesterday Mr Chen Yaobang, vice minister in charge of planning, detailed a national drive against pollution and ecological contamination at a Beijing conference. Last week the government announced that since August authorities have shut down nearly 50.000 severely polluting enterprises.
Earlier attempts to curb pollution in the 1980s were defeated when factories paid low fines or re opened shortly after being closed down. This time more than 20,000 environment officials were sent out across the country to close down offending factories.
The most potent symbol for environmentalists is the river Huai which runs into the East China Sea north of Shanghai. Its banks are lined with paper mills, wineries, dyeing plants and tanneries and the effluent has made the water 59 putrid it cannot be used for irrigation. Angry residents had to stop their tradition of steeping tea in the river to sweeten it.
Mr Song Jian, a state environmentalist, visited sites along the river earlier this year and challenged officials to drink a cup of its water. Looking at the yellow foam and black lumps of toxic sludge, no one would.
The authorities decided to show they were serious in the case of the Huai. Beijing allocated the equivalent of £750 million for a massive clean up. It ordered the closure of 999 factories, mostly small concerns with no waste treatment equipment. The Chinese media report most of the factories are still closed.
Mr Laing Congjie, an independent environmentalist in Beijing, said recently that he was not optimistic that environmentalists were getting the upper hand.
Earlier this year President Jiang Zemin denounced the old ways of creating wealth first and cleaning up afterwards as "wrong and harmful". The leadership has tolerated the emergence of green activists like the students who organised rallies in Beijing Forestry College this year to "Save the Monkey".
The Yunan Golden Monkey on the slopes of the Tibetan plateau was threatened with extinction by logging. A provincial government photographer, Xi Zhinong, mounted a crusade to save the monkeys and won sympathy at the top. The area will now become a wildlife refuge.
The only approved green body is the Friends of Nature, formed in 1993 to revitalise Taoist environmental consciousness. Criticism of Beijing's pet project, the Three Gorges Dam, is still not permitted. But clean up initiatives by residents and students have been encouraged, and the official media have assigned journalists to cover environmental stories - like the award of 600,000 yuan (£50,000) to villagers whose ducks were killed by pollution from a brewery.
The man cause of air pollution in China is coal. One of the most common urban sights is that of cyclists hauling carts piled with round coal briquettes for use in cooking. The coal contains large amounts of sulphur, and coal dust has become a winter hazard in every urban area. Few people jog in Beijing in winter. The air breathed in Chinese cities exceeds World Health Organisation levels by multiples of four to lo.
Carbon dioxide from the coal contributes to global warming, but on a per capita basis China is still less of an offender than the United States. An American contributes seven times as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere than a Chinese. However, if China keeps growing at 8.5 per cent a year, it will produce three times as much carbon dioxide as the US, according to the Stockholm Environment Institute.
But 1996 will be known as the year the green movement won its first victories. Among the chimney stacks visible from my apartment, a small number no longer emit smoke. These are in the industrial suburb of Tangshan, where residents won a remarkable victory in recent months. In May 700 people blockaded a noxious tyre recycling factory, and paraded a pedicart around the streets broadcasting quotes from president Jiang on the environment. Local officials quickly issued an order to shut the factory down.