Liu Bingren has claimed in his column in Shenzhen’s The Daily Sunshine that the air in Huizhou is clean as the countryside and the water in Red Flower Lake is drinkable after going on a long-distance run there.

Huizhou

Liu said he would move there if the commute could be made more convenient and wondered why more Shenzheners didn’t visit the city. However, Liu’s column contains no data and he doesn’t appear to have done any research.

Considering the state of the air and water in China’s cities, these are extraordinary claims to make. In a list of 47 major China cities earlier this year, Lhasa and Haikou were the only two deemed by the China Environmental Monitoring Center to have good air quality. With a population of just 3.7 million people, it is plausible to claim that Huizhou’s air is cleaner than that in major metropolises. But saying that it’s as clean as the countryside is pushing it.

Even the city’s own propaganda acknowledges that the local economy is largely driven by manufacturing.

We told you in January that the Pearl River Delta had no reason to be smug when looking at the smog in Beijing. The following month, an expert claimed that the air down here was worse than in the capital.

However, Liu’s column is not all bad. He claimed that Huizhou’s West Lake compares favorably to the west lakes of Jiangnan in eastern China, the most famous of which is in Hangzhou. I can tell you from experience, he’s right.