14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that the old saying that desperate times call for desperate measures is very much true. Thus, news from China says that a man living in this country has filed a lawsuit against the country's government over the latter's failure to solve the ongoing air pollution crisis.
Local media reports say that the man whose decision to sue the Chinese government is now making headlines is called Li Guixin. He currently lives in the northern city of Shijiazhuang.
This region has experienced several spikes in air concentrations of various pollutants over the past few months, Radio Free Asia tells us.
What Li Guixin is upset about is the fact that authorities have until now failed to do their job to clean up the smog and thus make life more bearable for the city's residents.
Besides, the man claims that they have not even showed any signs of at least trying to implement measures that would translate into an improvement in air quality in the area, the same source details.
By the looks of it, what Li Guixin wants is that the local government in Shijiazhuang offer him compensation for things that he was forced to buy in order to be able to cope with the air pollution crisis.
These items are face masks, an air purifier, and even a treadmill that the man says he had to buy to be able to exercise indoors whenever air pollution levels upped to such an extent that he could not go outside.
“The reason that I'm calling for administrative compensation is to let people see that we're the real victims of all this smog,” Li Guixin reportedly told the press in a recent interview.
“These economic losses should be borne by the government and the environmental departments because the government is the recipient of corporate taxes, it is a beneficiary,” he went on to argue.
For the time being, it is unclear whether Li Guixin's case against the Chinese government is to actually be heard in court sometime in the future.
This is because, for the time being, Chinese courts are not obliged to accept lawsuits and might choose to shun Li Guixin's case.
News of this man's filing a lawsuit against the Chinese government over smog comes shortly after researchers announced that, according to evidence at hand, China's air pollution crisis was not all that different from a nuclear winter and could therefore greatly affect the country's agricultural industry and its food supply.