Shanghai police said yesterday they have been working in close cooperation with their colleagues in neighboring Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces to prevent illegal fireworks being smuggled into the city.
"We are working to establish checkpoints on all major routes into Shanghai, including roads and docks," Shan Xuewei, a deputy department director at the city's public security bureau, told a press conference yesterday.
"We hope to close all points of entry into the city for illegal fireworks and firecrackers," the official said.
Police in Jiading, a northwestern district that borders Jiangsu, said that they have beefed up security with the help of members of the public.
"A total of 17 checkpoints, which will operate around the clock, have been set up on roads around the district to check vehicles," an unnamed official said in a statement.
"Anyone transporting fireworks and firecrackers must first obtain a license from their local fire authority," Shan said.
Under strict regulations introduced at the start of the year, the lighting of fireworks and firecrackers — which has for centuries been linked with the Chinese New Year celebrations — has been banned at all locations within Shanghai's Outer Ring Road.
Police in Jinshan, a southwestern district that borders Zhejiang, said yesterday that they have been working with colleagues in the cities of Pinghu and Jiaxing to curb the movement of bangers and squibs across the city line.
"Most of the 800 boxes of illegal fireworks and firecrackers (confiscated since the start of the year) were carried into Shanghai from wholesalers in those two cities," Jinshan police said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau said yesterday that it had further trimmed — to 77 — the number of shops that have been granted licenses to sell fireworks.
All of them are located outside the city's Outer Ring Road, it said.
As of the end of last month, 211 people had been punished for violating the new firework rules, while about 30,000 boxes of illegal goods had been confiscated, police said.
