Beijing residents awoke on Saturday to dense, choking smog after many set off a barrage of fireworks overnight to ring in the Lunar New Year, despite limits and public admonitions against such displays in the congested city. The Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau said harmful particulate matter in the air had hit the second highest level in five years by Saturday morning, China News Service reported. Beijing launched a \u201cwar against pollution\u201d in 2014 as part of a central government promise to reverse damage done by decades of breakneck growth and strengthen powers to shut down and punish polluters. \u201cIn setting off fireworks, be conscious of \u2018setting off the [pollution] index\u2019,\u201d read an editorial in newspaper, the Communist Party mouthpiece. In Beijing, efforts to ease smog included neighbourhood postings asking residents not to light fireworks, fewer approvals for firework stalls and officials being warned to lead by example and abstain from the pyrotechnics. Although state-owned Xinhua reported that purchases of fireworks fell 4.9 per cent in Beijing this year, the measures weren\u2019t enough to avoid a spike in pollution from healthy to hazardous levels in a matter of hours. Beijing\u2019s level of PM2.5, a measure of small particulate matter particularly damaging to health, peaked at 647 micrograms per cubic metre early on Saturday, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said in a statement on its website. That was well beyond the upper limit of 500 on China\u2019s air quality index and double the threshold considered hazardous. The greater region of Beijing, the nearby port city of Tianjin and surrounding Hebei province surpassed peak levels of PM2.5 in 2016, it said. In response, many on the streets of Beijing wore masks to welcome the Year of the Rooster, including paramilitary police stationed at Beijing\u2019s Lama Temple and spectators at outdoor performances. Dispersal of the pollution largely depends on weather conditions, with two cold air fronts likely to help reduce pollution in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region through to Wednesday, the environmental ministry said, before conditions deteriorate again and potentially lead to another heavy bout of pollution.<\/p>\n