Evolution and Control of Air Pollution in China over the Past 75 Years: An Analytical Framework Based on the Multi-Dimensional Urbanization

China’s approach to air pollution control has been shown successful in East Asian countries and even elsewhere in the world. The analysis of the evolution and control of air pollution in China over the past 75 years can be used as a reference for developing countries suffering from air pollution resulting from urbanization. Based on the sorting and mining of relevant indicators, data and policy texts from the areas of population, economy, space and social urbanization, the findings suggest that the presence of air pollution and its changing forms indeed have complex interactive relationships with the process of urbanization. Specifically: (1) the feature of air pollution has changed from “single pollutant and pollution source to multiple pollutants and pollution source, local pollution to regional pollution, light pollution to heavy compound pollution” as a result of urbanization, the emphasizing of construction and the neglect of governance, the emphasizing of economics and the neglect of ecology, and the emphasizing of immediate interests over long-term interests; (2) the interactive relationship between air pollution and urbanization has also gone through three stages from being irrelevant each other to “urbanization determines air pollution” and then “air pollution restricts urbanization”; (3) this has forced air pollution control to shift from the traditional “treating symptoms” to “high-quality urbanization”, thus promoting air pollution and urbanization to move “from confrontation to unification”. Therefore, air pollution control is not a simple technical issue; one of the keys lies in exploring how to adjust the urbanization model, so as to achieve the “win–win” of urbanization and air pollution control.