Development gap

The development gap is more pronounced on longer rivers such as the Yangtze, which has Qinghai province at one end and Jiangsu province at the other. Qinghai is more than seven times larger than Jiangsu in area, while Jiangsu's economy is about 30 times that of Qinghai.

Experts believe it is imperative for the central authorities to implement the interprovincial ecological compensation mechanism to help ecologically fragile places like Qinghai－where both the Yellow River and Yangtze start－to step up their efforts in ecological preservation.

In April 2014, Zhejiang suggested that the working mechanism with Anhui be continued, and both sides agreed to increase the compensation to 200 million yuan each year. The water quality benchmark standard was increased by 7 percentage points from the previous level.

Excluding the compensating funds from Zhejiang and the central government, Anhui's expenditure to ensure the Xin'an River water quality met the agreed standards was 8.79 billion yuan at the end of 2016. This mostly went toward village pollution control, urban household rubbish and wastewater treatment, industrial pollution control and the comprehensive treatment and ecological restoration of key watercourses.

Since 2011, the Anhui provincial government has placed greater weight on Huangshan's ecological protection work than on its economic growth in the evaluation of the city government's performance. The changes have had a huge impact on the lives of the Huangshan people.

An awareness of environmental protection is now ingrained in the minds of not only civil servants but all the inhabitants of the city.

The city has shut down more than 170 polluting mills, relocated more than 90 enterprises, and upgraded about 510 industrial projects to meet the strict environmental standards.