China's general environment monitoring station released a report on the sound environment in cities nationwide in 2003. According to the report, the nation's urban road traffic sound environment quality is good or relatively good and that in urban areas is relatively good or lightly polluted.

The cities seriously polluted in terms of traffic noise and environmental noise of urban area account for 3.2 percent and 0.6 percent respectively of the total surveyed. About 1 percent of the population is living in heavily polluted areas.

The report was based on monitoring over the road traffic noise in 401 cities and over the environmental noise of urban area in 352 cities.

Among the 401 cities, 13 cities or 3.2 percent of the total surveyed are heavily polluted; 21 or 5.2 percent are moderately polluted and 50 or 12.5 percent are lightly polluted.

The urban road traffic sound environment is relatively good in 141 cities, or 35.2 percent of the total; while that in 176 cities or 43.9 percent, is good.

The year 2003 saw great improvement in the road traffic sound environment in state-controlled cities as the proportion of cities with good environment was 5.8 percentage points higher than in 2002.

The top 10 cities are Luoyang in central China's Henan Province; Nantong in east China's Jiangsu Province; Lhasa in Tibet Autonomous Region; Guilin in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region; Zhuhai in Guangdong Province; Chongqing Municipality; Lianyungang in Jiangsu; Hefei in Anhui Province; Zhanjiang in Guangdong and Shenyang in northeastern Liaoning Province.

By People's Daily Online