China: Life In Polluted Beijing
Updated: 3:40am UK, Monday 04 March 2013
Until I moved to Beijing, I would never have believed that the same view from the same window at the same time could be so strikingly different 24 hours apart, but on Thursday and Friday this week it was.
On Thursday morning I woke up, peered out of the window of my Beijing apartment and saw almost nothing: the skyline of the city's Central Business District was entirely obscured.
It looked like morning mist. If only it was.
With a glance at an ingenious app on my iPhone called "Beijing Air", the depressing news was delivered: the air quality index was 530.
All you need to know to put that figure in context is that the safe level is 25. Take a look at the chart below to see how Beijing and plenty of other Chinese cities fare compared to New York (London is much the same).
Beijing mornings begin not with a glance at the weather app but air app.
The day's activities are largely governed by the number on the screen. If it's less than 150, that's great news despite the fact that anything above 25 is unhealthy.
If it is between 150 and 250, you know it's bad. Anything more than 300 and plans must be made to avoid all contact with the outdoors.
Sky News has provided me with an air purifier. With Swiss efficiency, it sucks in the dirty air and squirts it out, clean. It's not cheap though (in fact it is unnecessarily expensive) and most of Beijing's 20 million residents can't afford the luxury – not that breathing clean air should be a luxury.
Oddly though, from the Beijingers I have quizzed about the air, I have found just resignation mixed with a good pinch of denial.
Every morning on my 8am walk to work, I pass groups of middle-aged women who gather there for their daily exercise in the city's Ritan Park. In perfect unison and to a typically Chinese tune, they dance. It is a wonderfully Chinese sight.
One morning I stopped to chat to them. I met Madame Wong and her two friends, Luo Chunyan and Wang Shulan.
They were all clearly aware of the bad-air issue; they couldn't really ignore it as it hung all around us.
And yet they seemed resigned to it all.
"We live in this world, and although the air is important, we can't stay indoors all the time, can we?" Lou Chunyan told me. "I think it's fine."
Wang Shulan accepted that it was a worry but wondered what she could do about it.
"We are all used to it," she said. "Our club was formed 6 years ago and we come every day unless it's snowing. Of course we are worried but I feel better when I come out and do exercise. If I stay at home I will feel really uncomfortable."
Madame Wang blamed the number of cars on Beijing's roads.
"I remember 20 years ago when I was working, there were foggy days too. I used to cycle 40 minutes to get to work, but it was never this bad," she recalled.
"Then it was fog, not smog. Nowadays when you say fog, you actually mean smog.
The government has to deal with it ... and the control of cars is the most important thing. As you can see, the heavily polluting factories are now outside the city. It is just the car fumes which are to blame."
The government has introduced measures to stem the problem. Among them, a law that uses car registration plates to determine the days when drivers are allowed onto the city's roads and stricter emissions regulations aimed at taking older cars off the roads.
However, their broad approach seems to be more one of awareness than anything else.
Pollution figures, including the most dangerous PM2.5 (the tiny particles which can be absorbed deep into the lungs), are now published for all to see and the state-run media is reporting the dangers on a regular basis.
That will encourage people to make more of an effort, but it will also draw attention to the problem and could turn pressure back on the unelected Communist rulers.
Last month, we were granted access to the government department responsible for monitoring the air.
The vice-manager of the department is Li Yunting. She knows just how bad the air is: the record-breaking figures flash up on her bank of screens on an hourly basis.
Unusually for a government employee commenting on a sensitive subject, she offered me a personal view of the problem.
"My child is very young. He is three-years-old and I told his grandparents not to take him outside because the air isn't good," she said.
"These days I am thinking of changing my own mask to a more protective one to protect myself against the pollution. I know my friends and lots of citizens are buying the masks to wear outside."
There is now a clear effort by the Chinese government to tackle the issue. They know it is an international embarrassment that could genuinely affect international business in the Chinese capital.
But they are walking a tightrope: by allowing transparency over the issue (state media once referred to it as "fog"; now they admit it's "smog"), they risk a backlash for not doing enough to tackle it.
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