Anyway, I don't mean for this to be a giant cop-out for China. But its environmental record should be contextualized. An interesting part of that context is that it's one of the most rapidly advancing countries in terms of investments and capacity of sustainable energy. Policy makers definitely do not look the other way and ignore the problems as if they don't exist. It appears the environmental issues are acknowledged, but not always prioritized over trying to lift hundreds of millions of people into a lower-middle class from de facto poverty.
One may be more sympathetic to that than some of the global-warming denier policy makers we see in the west, who are either ignorant of the problem or prioritize economic goals while the average American or European already makes 10x more than the average Chinese. (who, again, use a significant chunk of this money to move their CO2 production out of the country, and to China, benefiting from the production but offloading the CO2 onto China's record, and in the process moving any affects of local pollution onto relatively poor Chinese. If it's waste, we call it toxic dumping and outlaw it. If it's air and water pollution from a factory that creates jobs, it's but an unfortunate side effect of globalism).
At least, that's the Chinese's perspective. There's more to it, but I think it's important to be aware of the above in any case.
They definitely turn their head the other way and even actively bury environmental issues. Look what happened with the smog station on top of the US embassy. They told them to take it down because they didn't like their citizens getting real air quality data.