I wonder how this compares to the worst smogs experienced in London and elsewhere before the West got its act together with regard to particulate pollution. Apparently the Great Smog of 1952 killed on the order of 10000 people in just a few days. I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.
It really irks me whenever there's a talk about nuclear energy. Nuclear power may have its own set of challenges, but coming from the baseline of coal it's hard to do worse.
I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.
This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc.
I was two years old when this picture was taken in my home-town. I remember summer days in the following years that looked like this, with the brown air leaching colors from the sunlight itself.
The difference with China is that much of the entire country is covered by a blanket of smog & dust. Not just the cities, but much of the countryside as well for hundreds of km. China does things big in a way that's hard to grasp without visiting.
Has there been any long-term research done on the health effects of particulate pollution?
I was in Beijing last winter when the air pollution was nearing record highs, and every time I blew my nose after returning from being outside, it would be full of black mucus. That has to be a wakeup call.
In addition, when I returned to the states (Chicago), even the air around O'Hare Airport - probably one of the more polluted areas in the city - felt so clean to me!
I grew up in Hong Kong. It didn't have the cleanest air in the world but I lived in relative good health. After I left for university I heard things were getting worse and worse although I remained sceptical.
When I returned for work, the air was nowhere near as bad as it is on the mainland now but I simply couldn't survive it. Every day my lungs constricted within minutes (I have asthma.) I realised I could never return to live in my home city as I had intended to.
I was not angered by the existence of the pollution. Things change and China grows on the mainland. What I was angered by was the fact that after the handover, the government was so cowed by their new CCP masters that they wouldn't even tell the truth about the air pollution. You will never hear an HK official admit that the pollution comes from China, yet every single adult citizen who grew up in the city remembers what life was like 15-20 years ago.
China ostensibly has anti-pollution laws. The CCP's colossal corruption keeps them from ever being enforced and entire cities, my hometown amongst them, are now literally poisonous to live in.
Yeah, I live in Japan, roughly 3000km from China, but we also have to deal with China's pollution.
Although not that common, we sometimes get an alert with the weather report that the levels of PM 2.5 particulate matter (overwhelmingly blown over from China) are exceeding government safety standards, and that we may want to consider keeping kids indoors.
I remember we had similar 'smog alerts' a few days a year when I was a little kid in Los Angeles in wthe 1980s, and we couldn't go out to recess. But I think that's like what we are getting here in Japan, at a great distance separated by ocean -- nothing compared to what the Chinese people in Shanghai and Beijing are suffering.
There's a big "movement" by CCP to control this thing. It's mentioned in major party conferences. I heard there's going to be 10 Billion RMB poured into this, and pollution would be considered as evaluation parameter for "party leaders".
However I seriously doubt most of the money will end up in vein or simply stolen.
So "enforcement" is to happen but I have little trust in them.
If you've lived near farms, pulp-n-paper mills or fish processing plants, you will often be told that the stink is the smell of money and you should stop complaining. I expect it was something similar.
I've seen sci-fi depictions of over-industrialized mega-city scapes, but I never thought I'd actually get to see a picture of one. To call that surreal is an understatement.
Is there a level of public outcry regarding the pollution?
I realize that criticism may be somewhat muted given the nature of the PRC government, but I can't imagine a city as large and cosmopolitan as Shanghai merely accepting this level of environmental mismanagement. Unfortunately, articles regarding Beijing/Shanghai pollution usually fail to mention public sentiment above the level of brief individual anecdote ("It's hard to breath on the way to the office" - Chinese citizen, etc.).
My impression here in Beijing is that people are highly dissatisfied with the pollution situation. They don't want lung cancer and they don't want their kids breathing this crap.
That being said, the government is taking steps to address the issue. Specifically, due to an outcry on Weibo last year about having to get PM2.5 numbers from the US embassy's twitter feed and iPhone app (twitter is blocked, but screenshots of the iPhone app were pasted on weibo), the government here has started reporting pollution numbers in major cities around the country. So there's reporting now.
Second, they've forced the state-owned oil companies to retool to start outputting cleaner gasoline, moved big polluting industry out of the cities (steel plants, etc.), closed down barbecue pits, ended the sale of some of the more polluting coal briquettes that used to be common, and are trying to get construction sites to keep the dust down.
All of those steps are helping, but not reversing the trend (so far as I can tell or have heard). There is a push to move from coal-burning power plants to gas-powered power plants, but they need to find the gas (via fracking or other means).
Is there an outcry? There are certainly people posting about the pollution on Weibo, which is China's twitter. There are also plenty of people emigrating to the US, if they can afford it (voting with their feet, even if they can't vote here). But I think for people to do more than that, they'd need to see the government just not giving a damn. So perhaps the attitude is 'wait and see'?
Hope this helps.
By the way, one of my Beijing buddies said of the Shanghai smog: "In Beijing, we call this Tuesday."
I'm not local but I have friends there. The Chinese were accepting of the pollution at first because of the success they were experiencing on a world stage. They figured that if the politicians and the higher ups could deal with it, then the ordinary citizen can too. Then the average citizen started realizing that the elite didn't actually have to deal with it because they would buy expensive air purifiers for their homes, cars, and work places. There has been more of an outcry against the pollution that is now causing all forms of health problems as of late and despite the heavily authoritarian rule of the regime, the Chinese government is prudent enough to know that a largely dissatisfied citizenry is always a risk. So the various local and national governments are moving, albeit slowly, to try and reduce their pollution levels.
> I realize that criticism may be somewhat muted given the nature of the PRC government
There's no shame in calling a spade a spade. You correctly perceive that the brutally authoritarian PRC government both suppresses criticism and whitewashes press coverage of environmental problems in the country.
As an aside, discussions with other westerners about China feels to me like having brunch with a couple where everyone knows the husband is cheating on the wife. The natural inclination is to engage in heroic effort to make things seem normal--to map the dysfunctional couple's relationship dynamics to that of a normal couple, all in order to preserve the all-important pretense.
I mean, the problem is that there's a bit of a cultural difference between Americans circa-Industrial Revolution, and the Chinese now. So saying that the Chinese will stand up and protest isn't necessarily true. I don't want to speak for all Chinese, but from what I've read -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that there is more of a culture of deference to authority in China. Compare this to Americans, who have a history and pride in rebelling against authority. Now, you might point to China's communist revolution, but realize that with this government came the need for them to propagandize and popularize a love and respect for the government in control, much more so than in the U.S. So back to my original point, protest culture isn't as much of a thing there as it is here, because there's more of a sense of working for the collective good (economic growth of China).
So I'm hoping that there will by outcry, but I think it is unfortunately less likely than it would be in the U.S. due to Chinese culture. I'd also like to here some local insight as well, and I hope I'm proved wrong because it would be awesome if there was a public outcry.
80% of my classmates are in China. There are constant messages about PM level in Shanghai, Beijing in all my classmates' social networks in wechat, renren.
Not yet an outcry, definitively discussions, humors, etc.
I see this as a difficult to fake signal that China's economic growth is more real than some folks in the West would like to believe. It is similar to the challenges faced by industrial cities in the West as they exploited the massive production capacities created during WW II. Generally the reasoning goes, high pollution from lots of power plants / factories is a function of production of those power plants / factories.
You can fake GDP numbers but its not as straight forward to fake this sort of environment.
That said, it would be unfortunate if China doesn't get their act in gear soon and start putting scrubbers on plants and cleaning up their act here.
> China's economic growth is more real than some folks in the West would like to believe
i know that people in general are racist against the chinese for all sorts of reasons, but this is the first time i've heard this one.
does anyone actually doubt china's economic growth? i mean all you have to do is go there and see it. (granted, very, very few 'experts' on china have ever actually been there)
China's growth is being sustained by a development bubble, where they are accumulating the infamous ghost towns. But I've never heard anyone deny the fact that they are doing these things. And, of course, everyone in the US already knows that China makes everything. So I don't know who you are referring to here.
But is it sustainable? Heavy thick smog (indicating the prominent use of coal to generate power) are certainly a negative signal when we have much better power sources.
What's surprising is Shanghai's life expectancy being really hight (over 82). Would like to have someone with some knowledge about the subject expand a bit on the pollution/life expectancy/statictics subject (there will be consequences later? etc)
I remember visiting Shanghai about 10 years ago. It was very vibrant and exciting, and there were cranes everywhere. I thought, "This is like being on the ground floor of a great new metropolis. Wouldn't it be awesome to work here?" I'm glad that things didn't work out that way. There are health consequences for such massive pollution.
The firewall won't bother you (assuming you wish to get around it); it's there for the masses.
Any idiot with a US citizenship can get a tourist visa, lasting a year and having only the requirement "visit Hong Kong (or any other non-China location) every three months" (I was unambitious, and got a two-month one). Someone of my acquaintance says he paid a visa-help company $1000 and got a business visa, good for a year and imposing no requirements.
I have, in the past, had a working visa; if that's what you want, it's generally done by your employer, not you.
Your "I love China" kind of leads me to believe you'd be familiar with this already... what kind of complications have you experienced?
I know someone over in China at the moment and they said that the pollution was so bad this morning that looking out of a window you couldn't see the building next it. Scary thought of how much damage that'd do to your lungs.
According to this article, coal fired stations are no longer the primary source of PM2.5. Road vehicles emit an order of magnitude more particulate matter.
I recall about 20 years ago, Santiago had to implement a system where odd-numbered vehicles were allowed to drive on one day, and even-numbered the next, to cut down on the haze problem.
What? But China ratified the Kyoto protocol and pledged to reduce their pollution. This can't be true! It's almost as if the country completely disregarded the treaty to grow their economy at any expense.
I lived in Utah which can get very smoggy due to winter inversions. PM2.5 levels sometimes hit 80 mcg in the winter, often the highest in the country and utterly depressing to live in.
This could amuse me, but it saddens me, of course. The reason this could almost amuse me is that I remember a conversation in 1982 in Taipei, soon after my first visit to China, with a student from France. He too had just been to China, and he thought China was a wonderful place, "Because it has no air pollution." (Compared to 1982 Taiwan, yeah, the P.R.C. had very little pollution because it had very little industrial production. I have never been to France, so I don't know if he was also making a comparison to 1982 France by that comment.) I wish that China (and, for that matter, India) had made it a national development goal to grow in an environmentally friendly way. Once, we didn't know technologies for producing industrial output and raising prosperity without producing quite a bit of pollution along the way, but China (and, again, India) could have learned from the mistakes of other countries and the new technologies they developed to build up output without adding so much to pollution.
Today, Taipei is remarkably clean. I was stunned in 2001, when I last lived there as a permanent resident, by a visitor from Ukraine who arrived in Taiwan after visiting Hong Kong. He commented that he liked Taiwan better than Hong Kong because it was cleaner. I was stunned by that comment because the last time I visited Hong Kong (before retrocession to China), no one would have said so. Hong Kong is downwind of China, and maybe is not as cleaned up anymore now that it is under Chinese rule. Taiwan under democratization has become very clean indeed (although it too is downwind of China). Politicial pluralization through a free press and free elections (an advantage India already has) and effective rule by law (an advantage India is developing) seem all over the world to help countries prosper in a more environmentally sustainable manner. I wish China well in developing democracy and rule by law, and in any event to enjoy clean air sooner rather than later.
[+] [-] Sharlin|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952
[+] [-] saalweachter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|12 years ago|reply
This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc.
I was two years old when this picture was taken in my home-town. I remember summer days in the following years that looked like this, with the brown air leaching colors from the sunlight itself.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/documerica111611/s...
From here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...
It didn't compare to the Great Smog, of course, but for Americans, it's closer to home and of course also closer to the present.
[+] [-] poutine|12 years ago|reply
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2478300/Pictu...
[+] [-] jliechti1|12 years ago|reply
I was in Beijing last winter when the air pollution was nearing record highs, and every time I blew my nose after returning from being outside, it would be full of black mucus. That has to be a wakeup call.
In addition, when I returned to the states (Chicago), even the air around O'Hare Airport - probably one of the more polluted areas in the city - felt so clean to me!
[+] [-] chockablock|12 years ago|reply
Source: Open access journal article linked from the wikipedia page you cited ;) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1241116/pdf/ehp0...
[+] [-] deletes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] johnzim|12 years ago|reply
When I returned for work, the air was nowhere near as bad as it is on the mainland now but I simply couldn't survive it. Every day my lungs constricted within minutes (I have asthma.) I realised I could never return to live in my home city as I had intended to.
I was not angered by the existence of the pollution. Things change and China grows on the mainland. What I was angered by was the fact that after the handover, the government was so cowed by their new CCP masters that they wouldn't even tell the truth about the air pollution. You will never hear an HK official admit that the pollution comes from China, yet every single adult citizen who grew up in the city remembers what life was like 15-20 years ago.
China ostensibly has anti-pollution laws. The CCP's colossal corruption keeps them from ever being enforced and entire cities, my hometown amongst them, are now literally poisonous to live in.
[+] [-] veidr|12 years ago|reply
Although not that common, we sometimes get an alert with the weather report that the levels of PM 2.5 particulate matter (overwhelmingly blown over from China) are exceeding government safety standards, and that we may want to consider keeping kids indoors.
I remember we had similar 'smog alerts' a few days a year when I was a little kid in Los Angeles in wthe 1980s, and we couldn't go out to recess. But I think that's like what we are getting here in Japan, at a great distance separated by ocean -- nothing compared to what the Chinese people in Shanghai and Beijing are suffering.
[+] [-] wang0109|12 years ago|reply
However I seriously doubt most of the money will end up in vein or simply stolen.
So "enforcement" is to happen but I have little trust in them.
[+] [-] da02|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|12 years ago|reply
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2155742/Hell-lid-tak...
I wonder if anyone can cite a source for one of the claims made in the article:
"Also lots of people thought that high smoke output was a sign of high productivity and that coal smoke was good for the lungs and helped crops grow."
[+] [-] huxley|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonSkeptic|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|12 years ago|reply
Great Smog of London documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkx-2mT1-q4
[+] [-] aspensmonster|12 years ago|reply
But at least we have "cheap" consumer goods!
[+] [-] jkimmel|12 years ago|reply
I realize that criticism may be somewhat muted given the nature of the PRC government, but I can't imagine a city as large and cosmopolitan as Shanghai merely accepting this level of environmental mismanagement. Unfortunately, articles regarding Beijing/Shanghai pollution usually fail to mention public sentiment above the level of brief individual anecdote ("It's hard to breath on the way to the office" - Chinese citizen, etc.).
Perhaps someone local could provide some insight?
[+] [-] petermcd|12 years ago|reply
My impression here in Beijing is that people are highly dissatisfied with the pollution situation. They don't want lung cancer and they don't want their kids breathing this crap.
That being said, the government is taking steps to address the issue. Specifically, due to an outcry on Weibo last year about having to get PM2.5 numbers from the US embassy's twitter feed and iPhone app (twitter is blocked, but screenshots of the iPhone app were pasted on weibo), the government here has started reporting pollution numbers in major cities around the country. So there's reporting now.
Second, they've forced the state-owned oil companies to retool to start outputting cleaner gasoline, moved big polluting industry out of the cities (steel plants, etc.), closed down barbecue pits, ended the sale of some of the more polluting coal briquettes that used to be common, and are trying to get construction sites to keep the dust down.
All of those steps are helping, but not reversing the trend (so far as I can tell or have heard). There is a push to move from coal-burning power plants to gas-powered power plants, but they need to find the gas (via fracking or other means).
Is there an outcry? There are certainly people posting about the pollution on Weibo, which is China's twitter. There are also plenty of people emigrating to the US, if they can afford it (voting with their feet, even if they can't vote here). But I think for people to do more than that, they'd need to see the government just not giving a damn. So perhaps the attitude is 'wait and see'?
Hope this helps.
By the way, one of my Beijing buddies said of the Shanghai smog: "In Beijing, we call this Tuesday."
[+] [-] jadoint|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
There's no shame in calling a spade a spade. You correctly perceive that the brutally authoritarian PRC government both suppresses criticism and whitewashes press coverage of environmental problems in the country.
As an aside, discussions with other westerners about China feels to me like having brunch with a couple where everyone knows the husband is cheating on the wife. The natural inclination is to engage in heroic effort to make things seem normal--to map the dysfunctional couple's relationship dynamics to that of a normal couple, all in order to preserve the all-important pretense.
[+] [-] dylandrop|12 years ago|reply
So I'm hoping that there will by outcry, but I think it is unfortunately less likely than it would be in the U.S. due to Chinese culture. I'd also like to here some local insight as well, and I hope I'm proved wrong because it would be awesome if there was a public outcry.
[+] [-] tonyplee|12 years ago|reply
Not yet an outcry, definitively discussions, humors, etc.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
You can fake GDP numbers but its not as straight forward to fake this sort of environment.
That said, it would be unfortunate if China doesn't get their act in gear soon and start putting scrubbers on plants and cleaning up their act here.
[+] [-] beachstartup|12 years ago|reply
i know that people in general are racist against the chinese for all sorts of reasons, but this is the first time i've heard this one.
does anyone actually doubt china's economic growth? i mean all you have to do is go there and see it. (granted, very, very few 'experts' on china have ever actually been there)
[+] [-] aryastark|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revelation|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riquito|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
Has to take years off your life to be breathing that.
[+] [-] yk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deletes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Guillaume86|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haosdent|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlundqvist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|12 years ago|reply
One? Ten? A pack? Two packs? Fifty packs?
Or do we not have enough data to even guess?
[+] [-] biesnecker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewrudy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewrudy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|12 years ago|reply
The firewall won't bother you (assuming you wish to get around it); it's there for the masses.
Any idiot with a US citizenship can get a tourist visa, lasting a year and having only the requirement "visit Hong Kong (or any other non-China location) every three months" (I was unambitious, and got a two-month one). Someone of my acquaintance says he paid a visa-help company $1000 and got a business visa, good for a year and imposing no requirements.
I have, in the past, had a working visa; if that's what you want, it's generally done by your employer, not you.
Your "I love China" kind of leads me to believe you'd be familiar with this already... what kind of complications have you experienced?
[+] [-] nicholassmith|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcas|12 years ago|reply
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-30/beijing-air-akin-to...
[+] [-] teyc|12 years ago|reply
According to this article, coal fired stations are no longer the primary source of PM2.5. Road vehicles emit an order of magnitude more particulate matter.
I recall about 20 years ago, Santiago had to implement a system where odd-numbered vehicles were allowed to drive on one day, and even-numbered the next, to cut down on the haze problem.
Perhaps electric vehicles are the way to go.
[+] [-] JonFish85|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jread|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javindo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
Today, Taipei is remarkably clean. I was stunned in 2001, when I last lived there as a permanent resident, by a visitor from Ukraine who arrived in Taiwan after visiting Hong Kong. He commented that he liked Taiwan better than Hong Kong because it was cleaner. I was stunned by that comment because the last time I visited Hong Kong (before retrocession to China), no one would have said so. Hong Kong is downwind of China, and maybe is not as cleaned up anymore now that it is under Chinese rule. Taiwan under democratization has become very clean indeed (although it too is downwind of China). Politicial pluralization through a free press and free elections (an advantage India already has) and effective rule by law (an advantage India is developing) seem all over the world to help countries prosper in a more environmentally sustainable manner. I wish China well in developing democracy and rule by law, and in any event to enjoy clean air sooner rather than later.