The proportion of water with fairly good quality in the country's offshore sea area reached 85 percent last year, up by 3.1 percentage points from 2022, according to an official with the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

Zhang Zhifeng, deputy head of the ministry's Department of Marine Ecology and Environment, said this marked the eighth straight year that China saw the proportion increase. 

China has a four-tier quality system for seawater with Grade I being the best. The quality of seawater can be considered as being fairly good if it reaches Grade II and above.

Zhang noted even more remarkable progress in pollution control in the country's three key sea areas, namely the Bohai Sea, the estuary of the Yangtze River and Hangzhou Bay, and the estuary of the Pearl River.

On average, 67.5 percent of water in the three sea areas was reported to be fairly well last year, increasing by 4.5 percentage points year-on-year from 2022 and 8.8 percentage points from 2020, he noted. 

The achievement was made thanks to a series of measures the ministry rolled out to enhance marine environmental governance.

As of the end of 2023, for instance, the ministry located more than 53,000 sewage outlets that discharge into the sea, and treatment work has been completed in over 16,000 ones of them, he said.