Living in the Chinese capital, there are days – like today – when you can quite literally taste the air. Not in that pleasant, catch-a-snowflake-on-your tongue way that Canadians know. It’s a sensation closer to licking warm metal.
So when the World Health Organization released its list of the cities with the best and worst air pollution, I was surprised not to see Beijing near the top of the list.
Then I looked a little closer at the methodology. In most countries the WHO relied on its own data. But for all cities in China, the number of reporting stations is listed as “N/A” for not applicable. All data was provided by the China’s own National Bureau of Statistics.
Anyone who lives in Beijing knows that the government here lies to its citizens every day about the quality of the air. (That may sound harsh, but I write as the father of a 19-month-old asthmatic.)
Today, the United States Embassy, which has a monitoring station on its grounds in east Beijing, broadcast via its Twitter account that the air quality was “hazardous” between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. today, with an air quality index of 344 on the scale of 1 to 500. (Or at least 500 – a level 25 times higher than WHO guidelines – used to be considered the top of the scale. The rating in Beijing surged to an unheard-of 562 one coal-tinged morning last November, prompting the embassy staffer who writes @BeijingAir to famously declare the air “crazy bad.”)
But China doesn’t acknowledge these numbers, or indeed the idea that the air quality here could be hazardous for anyone. The state-run Global Times newspaper said air pollution was only “moderate” Tuesday in Beijing. Unlike the U.S. Embassy Twitter account, it gave no measurements of ozone or PM2.5 particulate matter to back its assertion.
The damage being done by Beijing’s refusal to speak honestly to its citizens about the quality of air in this city is hard to measure. It’s a daily struggle to convince those who work in the shared Globe and Mail/CTV office here that we should close the windows, and that it’s smog, not “fog” (as it’s referred to in the state media), that is rendering buildings a few blocks away almost invisible. (Here’s a photo I took of the view out our window one day last fall.)
A 2009 U.S. Embassy cable made public by Wikileaks suggests that the Chinese government – rather than worrying about what the U.S. Embassy air quality monitors were discovering – was instead nervous that the data being made available on @BeijingAir might cause public anger.
Indeed, the information the Embassy’s assertions that the air usually wobbled between “unhealthy,” “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” were being seized upon by anxious Chinese Internet users and even some domestic media outlets as proof that air pollution was far worse than their government was telling them.
The cable says a representative from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained to the embassy that “making this data (which in their view ‘conflicts’ with ‘official’ data posted by the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau) available to the general public through an Embassy-operated Twitter site has caused ‘confusion’ and undesirable ‘social consequences’ among the Chinese public,” the cable reads. The Chinese official asked the embassy to find a way to make @BeijingAir available only to American citizens.
We learn from the cable that the Americans refused. But shortly afterwards Beijing came up with a solution that dealt with not only @BeijingAir, but a lot of other uncomfortable discussion taking place online. It blocked Twitter to all Internet users inside China, but for the relative few who have the means and know-how to get around the so-called Great Firewall.
And so, the air quality in Beijing today was “moderate.” It was a fog outside our window. Open the windows and inhale the fresh autumn air.
My daughter was kept indoors most of the day. But she’s still coughing in her bed tonight.
