Beijing's environmental authorities imposed fines amounting to $28 million for various infringements against the city's anti-pollution ordinances last year.

The Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau did not offer a comparative full-year figure, or elaborate which industries were fined.  But the state-run news agency Xinhua says the $15 million in pollution fines collected by local authorities over the first nine months of 2015 were almost double the amount levied during the same period in 2014.

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China's Communist Party only recently begun to acknowledge the environmental cost of more than 30 years of unfettered economic expansion throughout the country, according to Reuters. 

In August, Chinese lawmakers passed an amendment to an anti-pollution law in order to grant the state new powers to punish offenders and impose a cap on coal consumption, which experts blame for the smog that regularly engulfs some of China's most cosmopolitan cities.

Beijing's local government said its inspectors are keeping a close watch on some 20,000 sources of pollution among key industries under its supervision.

The bureau said that local authorities last year registered some 181 infringements against the city's regulatory ordinances on water and other areas.  The offenders were ordered to pay a total $11 million in fines.

The city also registered around 2,000 violations against air pollution ordinances in 2015, and collected fines amounting to $6.6 million from the offenders.

The average density of PM2.5 -- airborne particulate matter that penetrates deep into the lungs -- in China's capital rose by some 75.9 percent year-on-year between November and December last year, according to official data quoted by Xinhua.

Experts say toxic air pollution kills around 1.6 million people in China each year.  The smog that frequently smothers Beijing, in particular, has come to symbolize the problem. 

The central government is currently advancing development policies that allow environmental agencies both the technology and the political wherewithal to confront persistent polluters and the corrupt local government officials that protect them.

TagsBeijing Air Pollution, Beijing Air Pollution Fines, China Air Pollution