A PRAYER many Chinese say these days when they rise every morning could well be "No, not again."

They are nursing a hope that the weather would be fine, with blue sky, clean air, and most importantly, free of smog. But their wish has turned out to be wishful thinking.

The smog that beset much of China for the past two weeks, with a letup of a few days, is coming back with a vengeance.

On Tuesday a total of 1.3 million square kilometers, or a seventh of China's territory, was shrouded in haze. National meteorologists issued a notice warning the public about the smog, the first time they did so.

Though it still enjoyed some respite due to ocean wind that occasionally blew away the smog, Shanghai wasn't much better off. The city's sky was an ashen gray for a couple of days. The tiny little devils known as PM2.5, airborne particles less than 2.5 micrometers across, claw at the back of people's throats and make them cough, hack heavily.

Use of masks is rapidly on the rise. There is a popular joke that the Mayans' doomsday prophecy that world would come to an end on December 21, 2012, was just a warm-up for the "survivors," for the worst is yet to come.

No escape

Scholar Zhong Nanshan noted that air pollution is more deadly than SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), because no escape is possible, not even by staying indoors.

Given the current trends, it no longer seems fanciful or remote that everyone venturing out in foul weather will have to wear a gas mask.

Talk of the unrelenting haze has elicited some concern from the top leadership. Vice Premier Li Keqiang said a fortnight ago that the lasting, pervasive haze signaled the necessity to jettison the crude economic model. Solutions will take a long time to take effect, "but there must be some action," he said.

The "action" Li urged varies by locality. Zhang Quan, chief of Shanghai's Environmental Protection Bureau, was bombarded by inquiries on Tuesday about the city's response to the prolonged haze at the annual meeting of the local legislature and political advisory body.

In an online exchange with citizens, Zhang said measures are being taken to cut factory emissions and halt infrastructure projects, and in case of severe air pollution, use of official cars will be limited. These measures merit some plaudits, but my opinion is that we risk exaggerating their effectiveness, because they fall short of addressing the root cause of the smog. If things keep getting worse at the current rate, they cannot help much.

The situation on the ground is not at all rosy. The number of cars is still rising on the city's roads, by several hundred a month at the very least, despite the record auction prices of license plates this month, at 75,000 yuan (US$12,058).

In view of the figures, we cannot help being less upbeat than our politicians about the prospect of cleaner air.

A package of "solutions" mulled by many officials calls for shutting down polluting factories and curbing the use of private cars, but as genuine as they sound, their authors would mostly balk at the economic ramifications. At a time of economic slowdown, they are wary of doing anything that exacerbates faltering growth.

If any, the very package is only expedient as economic facts harden and the smog pattern is reinforced over time.

Instead, it should aim at something more sweeping, rather than the piecemeal, transient, bleak approach of "one step forward, two steps back."

One cannot grasp this without an overall view of why Chinese cities are so polluted.

The Financial Times published a commentary on January 27, titled "The sky-high cost of China's sprawling cities," that heaps considerable criticism on the way Chinese cities expand.

Simon Rabinovitch, the author, wrote, "Much of the country's economic growth has been driven by the building of its cities, But ... there is a real risk that China will languish as a country 'with pockets of extreme wealth and an educated middle class, but whose cities teem with enormous slums and suppurate with entrenched social divisions'."

The fatal flaw of China's urbanization, he says, is a rush to "gobble up ever more of the countryside." As building blocks crop up on appropriated farmland, cities grow in size but provision of public transport linking outlying communities with the downtown hasn't caught up. Private cars become the transport of choice for many and a major contributor to haze.

A breakdown of airborne pollutants reveals that normally 80 percent of Shanghai's emissions come from vehicle exhaust, industry and construction. The rest is blown in from neighboring provinces. But this winter the amount of external pollutants has doubled, according to Zhang Quan, the city's environmental chief.

As the sputtering economy gets a boost in the form of resumed industrial projects, suspended previously due to environmental impact, and as more cities aspire to the sleekness of metropolises like Shanghai, they end up caught in a spreading pollution loop, from which none can insulate itself.

Colossal mistake

The dirty air is not just a herald of coming disasters, but also a reminder of a colossal mistake in urban planning.

As Rabinovitch observed, in China mixed-use neighborhoods are few, but they are the trend. Li Kexin, an expert on low-carbon development, argued that the cure for urban diseases is to integrate cities' multiple functions and restrict human activity to a certain area.

The recent official slogan of building a "beautiful China" is realistic only if it conforms to the right model of urbanization, one that favors "compact, smart cities" over reckless urban sprawl, Li told Xinhua in an interview in December.

While the foul air appears to be knocking some sense into politicians, reflection has to go beyond environmental cleanup, curbs on car growth, and closing polluting factories. Any public discussion of what ails our cities is superficial without a mention of the urbanization strategy that got us here.

Rabinovitch ended his piece on a note of pessimism, saying, "China still has time to shift its policies to create happier, more productive cities. But the window is beginning to close."

It often happens that as wounds heal, lessons are quickly forgotten.

Hopefully, this time the pain should be sufficiently intense and lasting to dispel numbness and apathy.