City told to correct problems of false air data

China's top environmental watchdog reiterated its zero-tolerance policy against falsifying environmental monitoring data on Monday, summoning the head of Linfen, Shanxi province, after discovering that air quality monitoring had been altered for almost a year.

Six automatic air quality monitoring stations in Linfen were tampered with more than 100 times from April 2017 to March this year, resulting in severely inaccurate monitoring data.

It was an intentional criminal activity that was well organized and planned, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said, as it summoned Liu, according to a statement from the ministry.