Orange Skies in the Morning, Sailor Stay in Bed with a Mask On

My first memory of Beijing was a literal bad taste. Two years ago, on a four-day trip North from Hangzhou, where I was staying for much of the summer, we stepped out of the airport terminal to head to the waiting tour bus and I made the mistake of opening my mouth. I instantly perceived a stale, metallic taste, as if the entire atmosphere had spent too much time in the shut basement of a power plant. This taste followed me around the entire trip, despite our best efforts couldn’t be washed out with water, overly spiced chuar, or even baijiu, and didn’t truly leave my mouth until we landed back in Hangzhou.

This is my sexy face.

So far, we’ve been hit with similar experiences. The AQI on a normal day in Beijing seems to hover in the low three-digits, technically in the ‘Lightly Polluted’ range (according to the Chinese ministry of health – comparisons between countries is difficult due to the different types of particulate matter included and the different calculations used). It's easy for me to tell without even looking at my phone's AQI forecast because the sunlight hitting my white bedsheets, naturally close to white as well, leaves a light orange color. But, for example during the last day of the National Day Golden Week (a week-long state holiday) when pretty much everyone that had a car was in it driving back from vacation, this index jumped up to almost 450 – “severely polluted,” essentially, stay home, board up your windows, and wait for the zombies to come. China watchers (or just people anywhere near a facebook news feed last week) might remember the ’50-lane traffic jam’ from that day. We didn’t leave without industrial-strength 3M masks on our faces, but our throats were still in pain if we made the mistake of breathing in too deeply, visibility was one (admittedly large) Beijing street block, and we developed a cough so common among foreigners in the area that it has its own Chinese name – the 北京咳 (Beijing Ke).

 

Pollution in an outer Beijing suburb

Of course, we all hear legends of the air pollution in China, we’ve seen pictures of 100-yard visibility and masses of people wearing surgical masks, but it’s quite different to actually feel the pollution in person. You may have noticed, if you’ve been following my facebook, that most of my pictures of the trip so far have featured blue skies, infinite visibility, beautiful landscapes, basically the kind of weather that would come from a nice late fall trip to Southern California. Well, readers, do you remember how (if you went to college in places with real winters) on the first non-winter day of the new year, when suddenly the main quads were filled with students basking in the first rays of happiness in months? And how suddenly the entire admissions department’s photo team came crawling out of the woodworks to create that year’s admissions booklets? Well, my pictures so far have about as much to do with the full Beijing experience as your college admissions booklets do with your winter quarter.

Everyone has an air quality
app on their phones....

See, Beijing is the center of a vast plain containing some of the most polluted cities on the planet. Sure, part of the reason that a blanket the color of chaogan often floats over the North China Plain is geographical. When 3000 years ago the city-state of Ji first built a walled settlement in present-day Beijing, those mountains surrounding the city on two sides and decent access to the sea probably seemed like great strategic assets. Well, one industrial revolution later, the prevailing Easterly winds from the ocean work together with the Jundu Mountains and the Xishan Hills to effectively trap much of the locally produced smog in place.

But the real core of the problem stems from the rapid industrialization that China has undergone over the past few decades. Though the primary cause of air pollution in Beijing proper is vehicle exhaust, it is also severely affected by the industrial output of surrounding Hebei province, home of over a quarter of China’s steel output, almost a third of China’s coal-burning, among other fun polluting things. It doesn’t help that Beijing has been pushing its own factories and industrial plants to the province to better the air quality in the capital.

The results are staggering – over a million people are estimated to die prematurely every year in China due to air pollution (for context, that number is roughly 1/7^th of the total death rate). And there doesn’t seem to be much of a chance for any near-term reprieve from the deadly smog. Though China is legally very progressive with regards to environmental legislation, little of the in theory legally binding pollution standards are ever respected. Corruption is rampant (as long as it’s cheaper to buy the inspector than to buy an air filter, this problem will never get solved) and often the central government’s authority is diluted through the massive layers of bureaucracy between the Politburo and local officials. In addition, China is far from being a modern, post-industrial society. It’s GDP per capita is still at most 1/4^th the level of that in Western Europe and the United States, and this type of pollution-heavy, industrial-heavy growth is still the only way homo sapiens has developed to achieve that higher number. It’s hard to convince the small industrial worker in Qinhai Province to care about environmental protection that might slow down economic growth when he’s still living in abject poverty. And, now that the world economic crisis is over, energy-heavy and pollution-heavy industries that China does better than the rest of the world (such as steel) will be roaring strong again.

There is some hope, however (well, at least for Chinese citizens). Smog has gotten better in Beijing, at least, over the past few years, and decreasing dangerous pollution to acceptable levels during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will require more than just short-term shutting off of industry to achieve (winter is traditionally the worst in terms of pollution, both due to temperature inversions due to the surrounding mountains and the peaks in energy demand due to heating requirements). The government does care - the optimistic will say because it doesn't want its people to die, and the cynical can note that the Chinese leaders stuck in Beijing's Zhongnanhai government complex have to send their kids to school in the same deadly smog as the rest of the country (pod-playgrounds notwithstanding). But the long-term “solution” will be the same that dumped all of the pollution on China in the first place. Europe’s industrial revolution culminated with such things as the “Great London Smog” of 1952, which killed 12,000 over a period of only 4 days before industrial capacity was outsourced towards developing countries, most notably China. And China seems ready to repeat this phenomena – labor costs are already too high to support industrial labor in such former industrial hot zones as Shenzhen, and factories in Hebei are already starting to move to the next frontier of development in Africa and South-East Asia. And so the great circle of industrial life continues.

If there’s one, small benefit to this brown mess, it’s that when the wind shifts from West to East and the cold gusts from Mongolia push out the smog over the ocean the city becomes truly magnificent. After a week of construction masks, there are few more uplifting things in the world than walking outside, taking a deep breath, and seeing the impeccably blue sky above you while being lifted up by a strong Northerly breeze. And that weather motivates you like few things in the world to go out and do something. This is the explanation behind my facebook album – the second the weather turns beautiful, plans are made almost by themselves, and we rush towards the parks, the mountains, the natural and man-made beauty which Beijing seems to have in incredible excess… as long as you can see it through the haze.