As the dry, freezing winter air envelops his home, 72-year-old farmer He Wenxiang sits on a bed wearing several layers of clothing including a black fur-collared jacket and a cap. He takes a thermometer off the wall that reads about 14 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit). Despite outside temperatures of minus 1 C (30 F), He runs his gas boiler only occasionally to warm up the radiator in his bedroom.
He is one of several people in his village outside the city of Baoding, in China’s Hebei province south of Beijing, choosing to barely heat their homes because of rising natural gas prices after cash-strapped governments scaled back subsidies designed to drive a transition to clean energy.
In another village nearby, a woman who only gave her surname Song stands in the sun in an alleyway selling used electronics. She said her family pays 8,000 yuan ($1,148) to heat their home for a winter. That is more than one-third of the average annual rural salary in Hebei of 22,022 yuan, according to 2024 figures.
Her family has resorted to only turning on the heat when her children are home.
The combination of impoverished local governments, energy market reforms and a stalling economy weighing on farming income growth is forcing many in rural China to make hard choices about necessities such as heating.
Since 2017, Beijing has steered a transition away from traditional coal heating to natural gas and other cleaner heating methods to curb some of the world’s worst air pollution.
But as demand outpaced available gas supply and infrastructure costs climbed, natural gas prices, already more expensive than coal, soared.
Market-based reforms for gas pricing in 2023 by the government, meant to boost profits for regional gas distributors, have added to the price increases. Local governments initially paid subsidies to consumers but He said they were cancelled a year or two ago, though Hebei province has not formally announced cuts to the payments.
The communications office for Hebei province did not immediately respond to a fax sent by Reuters requesting a comment.
Still, the government does seem aware of the unhappiness with heating affordability.
State-run news agency Xinhua released a video commentary on January 4 on the trade-offs of the coal-to-gas transition in rural heating, saying “people’s real sense of gain” should be how a policy is measured.
Other media have also reported on heating affordability in Hebei, including an article on the Substack service from a Beijing-based former reporter for Xinhua named Zichen Wang and a story by the independently run newspaper the Economic Observer from early January. It does not currently appear on the company’s website.
The coal-to-gas switching programme has improved the air quality in Hebei province, which practically surrounds Beijing, and so-called “airpocalypse” days have become rarer.Cutbacks in coal burning at residential and industrial sites, and emissions reductions by heavy industry have reduced pollution from particulate matter of less than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) – which can lodge in the lungs and enter the bloodstream – by about 30% in and around Beijing from 2020-2025, analysts from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air said.
But those benefits may not be readily apparent to Li, a 70-year-old woman who only gave her surname. She and her husband spend half their yearly 8,000 yuan salary to heat their brick home in a village near Baoding, usually only warming the bedroom. They turn up the heat to no more than 13 C, though the World Health Organization says a safe indoor temperature for adults is at least 18 C (64 F), or several degrees higher for older adults and children.
Standing outside smoking with a friend, He Wenxiang said he could previously keep the heat on for an entire winter for just 500 yuan with coal.
“I support environmental protection, but at this price, I can’t afford to burn gas,” He said.
($1 = 6.9708 Chinese yuan renminbi)