Big Smog is a blog that gives you local Beijing news that might just affect your life.
In the lead up to Chinese New Year, the Beijing authorities have been putting up notices around the city’s residential areas showing this year’s rules on fireworks and firecrackers. For residents inside the fifth ring road, the use of fireworks is banned except for the first 15 days of the Chinese New Year (February 19 – March 6). For those of us going out of our minds during those 15 days, there will be a brief daily respite for sleep – if you can get the ringing out of your ears that is – between midnight and 7am when the noisy little bastards are banned again. Luckily (or worryingly) for most of us, the notices have reminded residents not to throw or direct fireworks at crowds of people or cars.
One of the posters found in Gulou
Some of the notices also decree that revelers are only allowed to buy fireworks from three official manufacturers: Panda, Yunyun and Yanlong, while the period of sales has been shortened from the usual 20 to 11 days: February 13 to 23. The shorter period is intended to help fight the smog – exacerbated by ash and sulfur from the pyrotechnics last year – by limiting the number of fireworks sold. But that’s only factoring in the officially sanctioned bangers. Fireworks and firecrackers are traditionally used to scare of evil spirits for the beginning of the New Year and if they’ve missed out on the sales window, people are going to have to get them somewhere, or risk a dark cloud hanging over their family for the entire year of the sheep.
Illegal fireworks, which don’t adhere to such pedestrian concepts as safety, are traditionally sold outside of the fifth ring road. These ones get a much bigger bang than the relatively subdued official crackers, but the wide-ranging time delays for their fuses usually instigate a fun game of Russian roulette. In response, a police crackdown on illegal fireworks started last October and, according to China Daily, 4,270 boxes were confiscated by the end of 2014. Meanwhile, as with most police campaigns in China, one only has to look at Xinjiang to see a crackdown get turbocharged. In a bid to cut off would-be terrorists from their munitions, people now have to show their ID when buying fireworks.
Let’s take a moment to think about the poor blighters living outside the fifth ring. Not only do they live out in the sticks, they now potentially have the inner city population coming to visit with fistfuls of homemade and untested miniature explosives. If you do happen to live out there, the regulations are a little more flexible. As with other years, outer Beijing's local authorities make their own rules on restricting fireworks. But, if Beijing's PM2.5 rating is high, the rules for within the fifth ring will apply to all of Beijing's municipality.
Why is Chinese New Year called Spring Festival? See the That's Online Explainer for the answer:
.jpg)
0 User Comments