Only 8 out 74 major cities in China met the air quality standards in 2014, according to the report released by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection on Tuesday.
The report identified north-eastern Hebei as having the most polluted cities in the country, and the northern industrial city of Baoding topped the list.
Unfortunately, China's capital city of Beijing and famous market town Shanghai are still included in the list of the polluted cities even though both showed slight improvement.
The environment ministry based the measurements on the amount of major pollutants such as PM2.5, PM10, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and ozone.
Despite the high number of cities with poor air quality, the environment ministry said that this is a major improvement compared to the previous report that 71 of the 74 of the major cities have poor air quality.
The government attributed the improvement to the shutdown of 8,000 coal-burning factories in Hebei last year, BBC News reported.
Haikou - also known as China's Bali - located in the island province of Hainan, has the best air quality followed by the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, the coastal resort city of Zhoushan, Shenzhen, Huizhou and Zhuhai in southeast Guangdong province, Fuzhou in neighbouring Fujian and Kunming in the southwest, according to the Economic Times.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has set 25 micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5 as the maximum healthy exposure, but China's Hebei is 3 times beyond that at 93 micrograms per cubic meter.
The government plans to continue reducing its coal consumption and will close more coal-burning factories despite the challenges of alternative fuel sources and the poor economy. They are hoping to bring the carbon emission to a healthy level by 2030.
