Beijing and its neighboring Hebei Province have the worst air quality in China in July, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said on Thursday.

The Chinese capital ranked the ninth among the nation's ten cities with the worst air.

Eight of the ten most polluted cities are in Hebei Province, namely Xingtai, Hengshui, Baoding, Tangshan, Shijiazhuang, Handan, langfang and Cangzhou.

Jinan, capital of east China's Shandong Province, ranked the fifth.

Monitoring data shows that the percentage of the days recorded with excellent or good air quality in 13 cities across the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region was 54.4 percent, a decrease of 0.4 percentage points year on year.

The percentage for Beijing was 31 percent with a drop of 4.5 percentage points. Ozone and PM 2.5 were the two primary pollutants.

On the whole, nationwide air quality improved, said Luo Yi, director general of the ministry's department of environmental monitoring.

A total of 74 Chinese cities are regularly ranked in this monthly survey. The cities of Haikou, Zhuhai and Zhoushan, mainly in the country's southern or eastern coastal regions, topped the list of 10 cities with the best air quality.

They were followed by Guiyang, Lishui, Lhasa, Nanning, Xiamen, Kunming and Zhongshan.

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