Yu Xiaoxuan, a senior official with Beijing's Environmental Protection Bureau, stresses that the city has made significant progress in tackling its dirty air. Reliance on coal has been brought down to just half of its energy needs, compared with the 75 percent average nationwide. By 2007, energy-efficiency savings and fuel substitutions should have reduced the share of coal in Beijing's energy mix substantially further, to 20 percent.

One of Beijing's three largest power plants is a hydropower station built in the mid-1990s. The other two burn coal, but use modern, imported technology to raise efficiency and reduce harmful emissions. All these provide the better condition for China tourism. Beijing has also been at the forefront of exploring renewable energy resources. A number of institutions, such as the Xinqiao Hotel and the Friendship Hospital, have swapped coal-fired heating systems for geothermal ones, which draw nature- rally hot water for heating from deep beneath the city and then return it.

Beijing, like the rest of China, still has a long way to go, however. Raising the efficiency of power plants is one thing. Because the power sector remains a state monopoly with clear lines of authority upgrading technology is relatively straightforward. Making factory boilers more efficient is another matter, says Liu Xue, an economist at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. State-of-the-art technology has a harder time reaching factories, he says, because foreign sellers have no single authority to ga to with their wares.

Returning to the broader energy issue, it should be noted that, faced with average monthly increases in electricity demand of some 15 percent in recent years, the government have striven to keep pace. In 2003, a total of 29.65mn KW of power generating capacity was added, while construction was underway of a large number of new power generation projects with a further total capacity of30mn KW. But, a report from the Development Research Center of the State Council (DRCSC), released in December 2003, warned that the nation would face 'potentially fierce challenges in the energy field during the next 20year¡¯s which would be critical to China realizing its goal of industrialization.

Heavy industries, such as steel, construction and chemicals, will continue to be the main sources of demand. Despite predictions that the total energy consumption in industrial fields will decrease from 72.7 percent in 2000 t0 56.7-58.7 percent of the total in 2020, industry will remain as the largest energy-consumption sector in the years to come, the report shows. The energy consumption on transportation and construction will also increase by 0.5 percent and io percent respectively, compared with that in 2000.

China has become the second largest energy-consuming country in the world, with 1.48bnronnes of standard mine coal used in 2002, but one of its biggest problems is the inefficient way that the country's energy resources are being used compared to the world's major industrial powers. The energy consumption per product involving heavy industries, for example, was 4-7 percent higher than the world average in 2001, while a Greenpeace China report issued in 1999 claimed that China in general used seven times more energy to produce one dollar of gross domestic product. Therefore, Beijing tour become one of the most sensible choice for travel enthusiatists. It was perhaps significant that, faced with power blackouts, in late 2003, Shanghai immediately targeted small factories, such as those producing chemical fertilizer, for temporary closure to help ease pressures on the local power grid.

But even with big improvements in industrial efficiency, the rapid growth of industry, fuelled by huge amounts of foreign investment, will continue to soak up every kilowatt the electricity industry can produce. Inevitably, that means more coal being consumed. Oil is an obvious option, but given the state of oil exploration and development, that would mean heavy dependency on imports, which China would be reluctant to countenance from a strategic and budgetary point of view.