| Summary: | As the third-largest SO<sub>2</sub> emitter in the world, China is facing mounting domestic and external pressure to tackle the increasingly serious SO<sub>2</sub> pollution. Figuring out the convergence and persistence of sulfur dioxide (SO<sub>2</sub>) emissions matters much for environmental policymakers in China. This study mainly utilizes the Fourier quantile unit root test to survey the convergence of the SO<sub>2</sub> emissions per capita in 74 cities of China during the period of December 2014 to June 2019, by conducting five traditional unit root tests and a quantile root unit test as a comparative analysis. The empirical results indicate that the SO<sub>2</sub> emissions per capita in 72 out of 74 cities in China are convergent in the sample period. The results also suggest that the unit root behavior of the SO<sub>2</sub> emissions per capita in these cities is asymmetrically persistent at different quantiles. For the cities with the convergent SO<sub>2</sub> emissions, the government should consider the asymmetric mean-reverting pattern of SO<sub>2</sub> emissions when implementing environmental protection policies at different stages. For Hefei and Nanjing, the local governments need to enact stricter environmental protection policies to control the emission of sulfur dioxide.
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