A mysterious pestilence has befallen this island’s primeval forests, leaving behind the bleached, skeletal remains of dead trees that now dot the dark green mountainsides. Osamu Nagafuchi, an environmental engineer with a passion for the island and its rugged terrain, believes he knows the culprit: airborne pollutants from smog-belching China, hundreds of miles upwind.

[…] These fears have reached a new level recently as China itself has issued more public warnings about the growing health risks from its cities’ gray, soupy air. While Mr. Nagafuchi and a small number of collaborators say their research is not politically motivated, they admit that they may be finding more receptivity among a public that already resents China for supplanting Japan as Asia’s largest economy, and for what is seen as its haughty attitude in a territorial dispute over islands both countries claim.

[…] Residents who believe the pollution is caused by China described feeling helpless, saying they doubt there is any action their government can take even if it becomes convinced Mr. Nagafuchi is right.

“There is not much we can do about this, except ask the Chinese to spend more money on environmental cleanup,” said Mr. Tetsuka, Mr. Nagafuchi’s research assistant. “I’m afraid it will only get worse and worse.”

Others feel that Japan can achieve more than just appealing to China and selling air purifiers to its wealthier residents. Global Times’ Lin Meilian reports that scholars and officials from the two countries gathered in Beijing last month to discuss environmental cooperation. (Lin also briefly explores the limited effectiveness of unpruned nose hair as a pollution filter.)

Hideaki Koyanagi, director of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES)’s Beijing office, sees the air pollution issue as an opportunity to improve Sino-Japanese relations.

“Pollution knows no borders,” Koyanagi told the Global Times. “What the Japanese people don’t understand is if we help to improve the air quality in China, it will eventually benefit Japan.”

[…] Koyanagi wrote an op-ed piece for the Kyodo News, outlying China’s efforts to control air pollution such as shutting down polluting and unsafe factories and promoting clean energies.

“Blaming China can’t solve the air pollution problem,” Koyanagi said. “It is very important for Japan to use its experience to help China with its policymaking and understand that helping China is helping itself.”

At The New York Times’ Latitude blog in February, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Alexandra Harney described how political self-preservation overcame vested interests and short-term economic imperatives, enabling Japan to address its own pollution problems:

Five decades ago, people were asking similar questions about Japan. Even as the world marveled at the country’s 10 percent annual growth, alarm was growing over air pollution in several cities. Emissions of nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide tripled during the 1960s. Japan became known for pollution-related illnesses: Yokkaichi asthma, Minamata disease (mercury poisoning) — both named after the cities where they first appeared — and cadmium poisoning, known as itai-itai, or “ouch-ouch,” because of the excruciating bone pain it caused.

[…] It was only when citizens’ movements, which grew out of protests against the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and the Vietnam War, got the attention of opposition parties in the 1960s and early 1970s that the government was forced to confront pollution. “I saw the government and L.D.P. as responding just enough, just in time, when the pressure got strong enough that they could defuse the opposition and stay in power,” said Timothy George, a professor at the University of Rhode Island and the author of a book on Minamata disease.

The first result was a blizzard of laws — 14 passed at once — in what became known as the Pollution Diet of 1970. Air pollution fell dramatically in the years that followed.

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The pollutants — nitrous dioxide and particulate matter that is between 2.5 and 10 micrometers in diameter, called PM 10 — appeared to have surged sharply in January, showing levels 47 percent higher than the same month last year, according to the report by Beijing News that was translated into English by The Economic Observer. The report cited as its source Chen Tian, the head of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau.

A third pollutant, sulfur dioxide, decreased slightly over the same three-month period.

Mr. Chen said the main reason for the increase in two pollutants was high levels of emissions. Citing Mr. Chen, the report said “the emissions created by those living and producing in the city far exceed what the environment can take.”

Air pollution in Beijing reached record levels in January as the capital city battled a winter “airpocalypse” that one Chinese public health expert called worse than SARS. Several recent studies have linked pollution to birth defects and premature deaths in China, and the country’s new leaders have declared “ecological progress” a priority even though bureaucratic infighting has threatened to complicate any potential solutions.

Chris Luo of The South China Morning Post has more on Chen’s comments:

He made the remarks on Tuesday on radio after listeners asked why smog had become so bad in Beijing. Public concern about air pollution remains high in the capital after it was frequently shrouded in thick smog earlier this year.

In a document dubbed “Cleaning Air Operation Plan 2013” made public last month, Beijing authorities vowed to lower major air pollutants by 2 per cent this year. To reach this goal, the city announced 52 measures including phasing out about 180,000 vehicles with high emission levels and growing more than 58,000 acres of forest around Beijing.

Chen admitted climate and geological factors had contributed to the “relatively poor air quality”. But he said a major problem was also soaring vehicle emissions and high daily emissions in urban areas.

Phillip Bump of the Atlantic Wire has more on the implications of air pollution in Beijing and beyond:

One of the primary ways in which air pollution kills is the presence of small particles, generally released from burning fossil fuels and other industrial activity. The Lung Association explains how particulate matter kills. The particles are generally measures in two sizes: those smaller than ten microns in diameter and those smaller than 2.5 microns — far, far smaller than the width of a human hair. “Particle pollution,” the Association writes, “can be very dangerous to breathe. Breathing particle pollution may trigger illness, hospitalization and premature death, risks showing up in new studies that validate earlier research.”

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Follow the latest news from the Two Sessions here.

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Because PM 2.5 uses the Latin alphabet, the China National Committee for Terms in Sciences and Technologies is conducting research and gauging opinions from all walks of life to name the term properly, it said.

People nationwide are contributing creative terms, including ‘Beijing grey’, ‘toxic dust’, ‘air pollution index’ and ‘cough trigger’.

In addition to the people who are busy brainstorming, some also suggest that the government should focus more on relieving the dense smog rather than providing a fancy name.

PM2.5 was among 239 English terms and abbreviations whose inclusion in a new edition of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary last year prompted a letter of protest from more than 100 scholars. GDP and NBA were also seen as linguistic pollutants threatening the long-term health of Chinese script, but globalization and pinyin text input make the Roman alphabet’s excision unlikely.

Some netizens took the issue less seriously. From a selection by Southern Metropolis Daily, via CDT Chinese:

@_vivo：建议叫国民体质辅助进化颗粒2.5(超微无害型)。

@_vivo: Let’s call them national fitness supplement particles 2.5 (of the extremely small and non-harmful variety).

@魏世江：砖家不把心思放在污染治理上，净干些没用的事。有本事把所有数学教科书上的符号全改成中文，把所有化学反应方程式也用中文，再牛逼点，你把所有计算机教科书上的程序代码都改成中文啊?

@weishijiang: These bricksperts aren’t thinking about pollution control, they’re just wasting their time. Why not change all the symbols into math textbooks into Chinese characters, or all the formulae for chemical reactions … even better, why not change all the programming code in computer textbooks into Chinese script?

@萍心而论：看评论笑死我了，北京致咳物、毒尘、下午两点半、北京灰、小250……我觉得吧，砖家可能是想把PM2.5当宠物养了。不明白一个已被大家理解并接受的词汇，再改成别的名又有何意义。

@pingxinerlun: I’m laughing my head off at this discussion: Beijing cough particles, toxic dust, 2:30 p.m., Beijing gray, Little 250 … I think these bricksperts might be planning to raise the PM2.5 particles as pets. I don’t see the point in changing a term that everyone already understands and accepts.

@我系J臣：按照央视的习惯，应该译成“皮阿姆贰点伍”吧。

@woxiJchen: According to CCTV custom, it should be called “pi emu er dian wu” ["PM2.5" phonetically transcribed into Chinese].

@邵明波：别折腾了。建议官方将其定名为“幸福颗粒”吧。

@shaomingbo: Don’t fret. I suggest that officials call them “Happiness Particles.”

Alia at Offbeat China rounded up some of the more colorful suggestions contributed by netizens, but conceded that the rather drab Xi keli wu 细颗粒物 (“fine particles”) appeared to be the frontrunner.

• “Shitizen 250” – PM is the initials of Pi Min (屁民) which, in Chinese, means citizens who have been treated by their government like shit [CDT translates this term as "rabble"]; and 250 is a slang in Chinese for the dumb and stupid.
• “Happy Particles with Chinese Characteristics”
• “National Secret” – Background: last week, China Environmental Bureau refused to dislocate soil pollution data in the country, saying the information is state secret.
• “GDP Chain Index”
• “Harmony Particle”

See more suggestions at Offbeat China and more on PM2.5 and air pollution via CDT.

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“I haven’t seen the smog stay so long like this for years,” a 40-year-old woman who only gave her last name, Zhou, said after buying two air purifiers for more than 13,000 yuan($2,000) each in downtown Beijing. “This seems to be the only solution for us. You used to just open the windows to get fresh air at home, but now you can’t do that since it’s even dirtier outside.”

[...] Official measurements of PM2.5 rose to 993 in Beijing on Jan. 12. The city has proposed rules to scrap old vehicles, ban new cement and steel factories, and impose fines for roadside vendors barbecuing food on smoggy days.

Further measures to clean up the capital may be difficult because much of Beijing’s smog comes from surrounding regions, Ma Jun, a Beijing-based environmentalist and founder of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said in a phone interview.

“China is the world’s biggest steel producer, and half of China’s steel is produced in areas around Beijing such as Hebei and Tianjin, mostly by burning coal,” Ma said. “How can the region stand this?”

People with an entrepreneurial spirit have started to make money by selling fresh air in cans. From John Garnaut at The Sydney Morning Herald:

Chen Guangbiao, whose wealth is valued at $740 million according to the Hurun Report, sells his cans of air for five yuan each.

It comes with atmospheric flavours including pristine Tibet, post-industrial Taiwan and revolutionary Yan’an, the Communist Party’s early base area.

Mr Chen told Fairfax Media he wanted to make a point that China’s air was turning so bad that the idea of bottled fresh air is no longer fanciful.

“If we don’t start caring for the environment then after 20 or 30 years our children and grandchildren might be wearing gas masks and carry oxygen tanks,” said Mr Chen.

James Fallows at The Atlantic notices a less humorous related phenomena: birth defects and cognitive disorders related to the heavy pollution:

Some related notes that have come in, about a problem increasingly recognized inside China as a national emergency. From a reader in the United States:

“[...A]long with the disappearance of children with no identified medical needs, we have seen a huge increase in the number of children with identified medical needs.  Every month, I place children (from 9 months to 14 years) who have cleft lip and/or cleft palate; missing fingers, hands, toes, parts of arms or legs; malformed internal organs; genetic disorders; etc. ”

[...] From another reader, this link to an article on the possible relationship between certain forms of pollution and autism. And from a technically trained reader who has been living and working in China:

“It is not hard to believe, if the vegetables they ate spent the entire season grown in soil and air laden with heavy metals, the water they drank is contaminated with metals and VOCs [Volatile Organic Compounds], and the air the breath is full of PM2.5 dust which can pass through the alveoli sacs into the blood stream, and through the blood/brain barrier, directly into their growing brains.  Certainly, we are aware of how heavy metals retard brain development…”

See more on air pollution via CDT.

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Post tags: air pollution, air quality, Beijing, Beijing environment, Chen Guangbiao, coal power, environmental activism, greenhouse gas emissions, PM2.5, sustainable development
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The capital will take 180,000 old vehicles off the road and promote clean energy autos among government departments, the public and the urban cleaning sector, which includes street cleaners and trash collectors, Wang Anshun said at the opening of a session of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, the municipal legislature.

The heating systems of 44,000 old, single-story homes and coal-burning boilers downtown are to be replaced with clean energy, Wang said as he delivered a government work report.

The city will also speed up the promotion of clean energy in rural areas and strictly control dust in construction projects, said Wang.

He vowed to strengthen air quality monitoring and analysis, as well as the release of such information.

The promise of increased transparency, itself coming on the heels of a wave of unusually frank coverage in state media, was accompanied by a call for public comment on the new regulations. From Dexter Roberts at Bloomberg Businessweek:

In another sign that Beijing officials are, for now, leaning toward openness, officials will allow the city’s 20 million residents to weigh in on draft regulations aimed at curbing the Chinese capital’s horrendous air pollution, according to a notice posted Jan. 20 on the Beijing municipal government website. The public can comment on the proposed new measures until Feb. 8, the day before China shuts down for the annual Chinese New Year festival, said the statement issued by the city’s legal affairs office.

“This is important. Now public scrutiny should play a key role in promoting pollution control and enforcement of this rule,” says Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Ma’s environmental advocacy group plans to comment through the online platform that the municipal government has created for this purpose.

Edward Wong argued at The New York Times on Sunday that Beijing’s “extraordinary surge” in air pollution was one of several drivers of growing demands for political input. But Reuters reported a generally unfavorable response to the plans on Sina Weibo:

“These plans are just dreams,” wrote one user.

Others said the phasing out of old cars would make little difference in a city where about 250,000 new cars hit the road every year, albeit with supposedly higher emissions standards.

“These ‘old cars’ are what the ordinary people drive. You people can only dare talk about this subject when you start phasing out all the cars officials drive,” wrote another user.

Other doubts remain about the likely effectiveness of public consultation, enforcement, and of rules targeted only at the city itself. From Yin Yeping at Global Times:

Zhang Yuanxun, a professor of resources and environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that a lack of law enforcement will be a problem.

“The punishments enshrined in the regulations are too strict and broad. It will require many more law enforcement officers to ensure its effective implementation,” he said.

“The old laws were not enforced, not to mention this new one,” he said.

[…] “Also, just restricting the local atmospheric pollution would have little contribution to its improvement if there are no changes in the pollution conditions in the surrounding areas [of Beijing],” [Zhou Rong, climate and energy director of Greenpeace] said.

Wang Yan, a resident working in international trade, said she thinks the new laws should have been launched already.

“I don’t think I’ll offer comments on the new regulation since I doubt if my voice will be heard,” she said, adding targeting street barbecues is ridiculous.

At chinadialogue, Gavin Lohry suggested an additional measure that might help address a range of environmental concerns, from air quality and energy consumption to drainage:

Green roofs – roofs covered with plant vegetation – first gained popularity in Germany and have since been spreading around the world. They help cities reduce storm water runoff, cool the urban environment, absorb air pollution, insulate buildings and increase biodiversity. With enough green roof adoption, Beijing could realise positive impacts on the environment and improved quality of life.

My research on the topic found that in Beijing there is around 93 million square metres of roof space suitable for cost effective green roof adoption. If the cheapest and most basic forms of green roofs covered the suitable roof space, the urban environment would be substantially improved.

Under this scenario air particle pollution could be reduced by as much as 880,000 kilograms every year, equivalent to taking 730,000 cars off the road. The roofs could reduce storm water by 3.5 million cubic metres during large rain events, equivalent to filling the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square with two metres of water or 1,400 Olympic swimming pools.

Any boost to Beijing’s drainage infrastructure would be valuable in the event of more storms like last summer’s, which killed 77 people. But there are no easy solutions: the problems are tangled, often beyond the scope of local government policies, or out of human control entirely. From Jonathan Kaiman at The Guardian:

Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China’s environment at the University of California, San Diego, said that there is no silver bullet for the country’s air pollution. The underlying causes are dynamic and diverse: power plants, small factories, automobile emissions, rampant construction, farmers burning coal for heat. “One of the things about the air quality in Beijing is that it varies a lot more than it used to,” she said.

Beijing’s air quality fluctuates with the weather – a strong wind from the north can blow the smog to sea, she said, while south-eastern winds trap the air against a nearby mountain range, drowning the city in a pea-soup haze.

[…] Beijing has taken significant steps to combat pollution – it invested an estimated $10bn before the 2008 Olympics to raise emissions standards, replace residents’ coal stoves with natural gas heaters, and relocate a ring of steel plants on the city’s outskirts. Yet Beijing still shares its airspace with six surrounding provinces which may not adhere to comparable environmental standards.

“One of the fundamental problems is that the environmental regulators don’t have sufficient authority and resources to overcome the forces that are creating the pollution,” said Alex Wang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on China’s environmental law.

The problem is indeed hardly limited to Beijing, as Peking University professor Pan Xiaochuan angrily pointed out while blasting the term “Beijing Cough” as an “extreme insult” to the city. Other cities have been even more severely affected, and Shanghai has not escaped. From Reuters:

Shanghai, too, is improving public communication of air pollution data, as Angel Hsu describes on her blog:

[… B]y far my favorite innovation Shanghai’s EPB has made so far is in the use of this little air quality mascot to communicate what the various levels of pollution on the normalized AQI index mean. For the most part, things take a sour turn for AQI girl (let’s just call her that, I’m not sure if she has an official name) after the Good (51-100) part of the range. I like how they coordinated her hair color with the official color codes of different pollutant thresholds – it’s a great way for people to automatically remember and understand what the different colors mean. AQI girl also provides a much more people and user-friendly means to calculate air quality, as opposed to other cartoon characters or anime figures that they could gone with.

[…] I can only imagine next will come a video game for AQI girl, that will feature her navigating Shanghai’s polluted streets, having to dodge roadside exhaust coming from tailpipes, all the while remembering to wear her face mask when she sees AQI readings above 150.

The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Spegele and Wayne Ma described the obstacles to implementing deeper and broader solutions. Proposed changes inevitably raise questions of who will pay for them.

Over the long term, drawing down emissions will require costly upgrades to industrial facilities and oil refineries, measures resisted by state-owned companies unable to pass costs on to consumers and local governments that depend on industrial output for revenue.

[…] Though attention over the years has focused on power plants and passenger-car emissions, China’s pollution problems are complex and spread broadly across the economy. Mr. Zhao, of Nanjing University, and a research team studied the effectiveness of Chinese government policies in curbing emissions between 2005 and 2010 and estimated PM2.5 from coal-fired power generation fell roughly 21% as cleaner technologies took hold. Meanwhile, PM2.5 emissions from iron and steel production rose roughly 39% to 2.2 million metric tons, according to the estimates, as output increased.

China is particularly struggling to curb what are known as secondary pollutants, formed when primary pollutants—such as emitted sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, from coal burning and other sources—undergo reactions in the atmosphere. The government has had some success targeting primary pollutants, but analysts say it is just beginning to target secondary pollutant problems, including particulate matter that is harmful to human health.

Spegele also discussed a range of air pollution issues with the Journal’s Deborah Kan:

Officials have been careful to manage expectations, stressing that real change will take years, just as the current situation was years in the making. South China Morning Post’s Li Jing spoke to Qu Geping, whose career in shaping China’s environmental policy included a stint as the country’s first environmental protection administrator from 1987 to 1993. Qu lamented that the present of emergency was foreseen thirty years ago, when China nearly chose a different development path to avoid it. He blames the lost opportunity on government according to “the rule of men”, rather than rule of law.

“I would not call the past 40 years’ efforts of environmental protection a total failure,” he said. “But I have to admit that governments have done far from enough to rein in the wild pursuit of economic growth … and failed to avoid some of the worst pollution scenarios we, as policymakers, had predicted.”

[…] But, Qu said, if the central government had respected a policy that it released in 1983, China could be in a much better place now.

“The State Council published a document that year, stipulating that economic and urban construction should synchronise with environmental protection, so that the three legs of social development could reach a co-ordinated benefit,” he said. “It was a pragmatic and feasible strategy, even more approachable than the notion of ‘sustainable development’ enshrined by the United Nations years later.”

[…] “Why was the strategy never properly implemented?” he said. “I think it is because there was no supervision of governments. It is because the power is still above the law.”

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The across-the-board coverage of Beijing’s brown, soupy air, which has been consistently rated “hazardous” or even worse by foreign and local monitors since last week, was the most open in recent memory. Since 2008, when Beijing made efforts to clean up the city before the Summer Olympics, the air has appeared to degrade in the view of many residents, though the official news media have often avoided addressing the problem.

The wide coverage on Monday appears to be in part a reaction to the conversation that has been unfolding on Chinese microblogs, where residents of northern China have been discussing the pollution nonstop in recent days.

The problem is so serious — the worst air quality since the United States Embassy began recording levels in 2008 — that hospitals reported on Monday a surge in patient admissions for respiratory problems. Beijing officials ordered government cars off the road to try to curb the pollution, which some people say has been exacerbated by a weather phenomenon, called an inversion, that is trapping dirty particles.

“I’ve never seen such broad Chinese media coverage of air pollution,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, a business consultant in Beijing who tracks the Chinese news media. “From People’s Daily to China Central Television, the story is being covered thoroughly, without trying to put a positive spin on it.”

One notable media report was an editorial in the Global Times, translated for their English edition, which called for transparency and public involvement in finding solutions to pollution:

On this issue, the government cannot afford to make decisions for the society. Previously, governments used to deal with the pollution information in a low-key way and made the choice between development and environmental protection for public. However, when public opinion didn’t go for this way of thinking, it led to some conflicts.

In future, the government should publish truthful environmental data to the public. Let society participate in the process of solving the problem.

The public should understand the importance of development as well as the critical need to safeguard the bottom line of the environmental pollution. The choice between development and environment protection should be made by genuinely democratic methods.

Currently, Chinese public opinion prefers sensational news. Against such condition, the governments cannot always think about how to intervene to “guide public opinion.” It should publish the facts and interests involved, and let the public itself produce a balance based on the foundation of diversification.

The government is not the only responsible party for environmental pollution. As long as the government changes its previous method of covering up the problems and instead publishes the facts, society will know who should be blamed.

The Wall Street Journal has more examples of reporting in the Chinese media:

State broadcaster China Central Television made poisonous air the lead item in its prime-time news broadcast Sunday evening, and again on its midday news program on Monday. The 30-minute Sunday night news broadcast featured nearly eight minutes of air pollution coverage, including a special “from the editor” on-air commentary.

“Everyone is the victim of polluted air, and everyone is capable of reducing the smoggy air,” said CCTV in the commentary. “Environment protection policies should be strengthened. Governmental departments should take the lead and drive official cars less frequently.”

Government officials were ordered to reduce vehicle use over the weekend, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency, which also covered the pollution story extensively.

For more links to Chinese media reports, see Bill Bishop’s Sinocism newsletter.

On his blog, the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos writes about the shifting public consciousness on the issue:

The smog this weekend passed another threshold I hadn’t seen before: a test we might call “the local tolerance.” For years, Chinese people called their smog “fog,” a subtle way of saying, in effect, Western countries were polluted on their way up, too, so give us a break. Not anymore. The Chinese press was full of stories about smog this weekend, including a reminder of the hideous fact that high levels of particulate matter caused a combined eight thousand five hundred and seventy-two premature deaths in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xi’an last year, according to estimates in a study by Greenpeace and Peking University’s School of Public Health.

Someday, I’ll write about the political effects of environmental pollution, about how, when the middle class in places like Hungary and Taiwan eventually got fed up with their ruling parties, one of the first issues around which they organized was the environment, because it was visceral and seemingly apolitical.

But not today. Today, I’m lying low and taking shallow breaths.

Despite recent efforts to alleviate the current cloud of pollution, Didi Kirsten Tatlow writes in the International Herald Tribune that the scale of China’s economic growth (which may be slowing down but is still formidable) means environmental problems are likely to persist:

The scale of the problem is, quite frankly, overwhelming. A very revealing chart by Edgar, the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, from the European Commission, estimates that in 2011 China produced 9.7 million kilotons of carbon dioxide, nearly double United States’ 5.42 million kilotons.

Indeed, were the Chinese cement industry a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, producing 820,000 kilotons in 2011, slightly ahead of Germany’s total carbon dioxide emissions that year of 810,000 kilotons, according to Edgar. Germany was the sixth most polluting nation in the world, with the United States the second and China the first, according to the chart.

But something else stands out here: China’s population of more than 1.3 billion is about 4.5 times that of the United States’ approximately 300 million. So though it leads the world in carbon dioxide emissions, it is still, per capita, far less polluting than the United States.

Unfortunately, that may change. China’s economy may overtake the U.S. economy sometime within the next decade or two, meaning that we may be facing a truly astonishing problem. As Ma Jun, the director of the Chinese Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post: “It is no secret that our way of development is not sustainable and the total pollution emissions in the region have far exceeded the maximum ecological capacity.”

Meanwhile, the economic and health impact from this week’s toxic cloud is already being felt. Airports have canceled flights, factories have been asked to slow production, and schools have reduced activities. A cardiologist at Peking University People’s Hospital told Bloomberg that the number of heart attacks seen at the hospital had doubled since Friday, when the pollution began to spike. Respiratory wards were overflowing over the weekend, according to the Financial Times.

The recent surge of polluted air is likely partially due to a recent cold snap, when residents burned more coal than usual to keep warm. Weather reports indicate that the extreme pollution may ease mid-week, as another cold front is expected to blow it away. By early Tuesday, the air already seemed clearer:

Hooray. Beijing air looking much better this am. twitter.com/niubi/status/2…

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) January 14, 2013

c

A photo from NASA shows the cloud of pollution over Beijing (which is within the blue circle):

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Post tags: air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, industrial pollution, PM2.5, sustainable development
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“This is a historic record for Beijing,” Zhao Jing, a prominent Internet commentator who uses the pen name Michael Anti, wrote on Twitter. “I’ve closed the doors and windows; the air purifiers are all running automatically at full power.”

Other Beijing residents online described the air as “postapocalyptic,” “terrifying” and “beyond belief.”

The municipal government reported levels as high as 500 on Saturday evening from some monitoring stations. The Chinese system does not report numbers beyond 500. Nevertheless, readings in central Beijing throughout the day were at the extreme end of what is considered hazardous according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency standards. (By comparison, the air quality index in New York City, using the same standard, was 19 at 6 a.m. on Saturday.)

Pollution levels in Beijing had been creeping up for days, and readings were regularly surging above 300 by midweek. The interior of the gleaming Terminal 3 of the Beijing Capital International Airport was filled with a thick haze on Thursday. The next day, people working in office towers in downtown Beijing found it impossible to make out skyscrapers just a few blocks away. Some city residents scoured stores in search of masks and air filters.

Live from Beijing blog posted a useful breakdown of the readings and possible reasons for the pollution.

Beijing residents on Twitter posted photos and impressions of the city under the toxic cloud, even creating a dedicated hashtag for the “airpocalypse”:

Pollution in Beijing is, literally, about to go off the charts. 481 out of maximum 500 on the US embassy’s meter.

— Mike Forsythe傅才德 (@PekingMike) January 12, 2013

This can’t be right, can it? Can someone at embassy explain? RT @beijingair: 01-12-2013 15:00; PM2.5; 802.0; 699; Beyond Index

— Edward Wong (@comradewong) January 12, 2013

Respiratory cases hit 5-year high at Beijing Children’s Hospital scmp.com/news/china/art… China on health alert as smog worsens @scmp_news

— Brendan Scott (@BrendanScott) January 13, 2013

is this a new high? Rt“@beijingair: 01-12-2013 20:00; PM2.5; 886.0; 755; Beyond Index

— Louisa Lim (@limlouisa) January 12, 2013

“@tualatrix: 全国空气污染概略图，华北几乎都沦陷了…… twitter.com/tualatrix/stat…” map of pollution disaster in much of eastern china, not just beijing..airpocalypse

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) January 12, 2013

Weibo’er #1: If Beijingers stopped driving, skies’d turn blue. Weibo’er #2: If they took to the streets, skies’d turn blue, too. @wenyunchao

— Joshua Rosenzweig (@siweiluozi) January 13, 2013

MT @allroads For those who think China’s air pollution will get better.Think again. 2x GDP requires 3.5x energy. 78% of which will be coal

— Ray Kwong (@raykwong) January 13, 2013

While the English version of Xinhua reported that a heavy “fog” had descended over Beijing, Chinese media did report surprisingly openly on the pollution, with CCTV even publishing a webpage dedicated to PM2.5:

Fog? MT @xhnews: China’s meteorological authority issued yellow alert on fog shrouding the country’s central and eastern regions on Sunday.

— Edward Wong (@comradewong) January 13, 2013

Chinese media clear this is not just fog-北京城区多处PM2.5指数突破900 最高接近1000 news.163.com/13/0113/00/8L2…

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) January 12, 2013

【新闻背景】PM2.5的危害_央视网 bit.ly/Ss9bsN number 2 story on last night’s CCTV Evening News, watched by 100s of millions, on dangers of PM2.5

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) January 13, 2013

The #airpocalypse shows that we reporters should ramp up coverage of environmental issues in and outside of China.

— Edward Wong (@comradewong) January 13, 2013

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing tweets readings of its pollution index, despite the Chinese government calling the effort “illegal” last year. Earlier this month, the government announced a new website that would list daily PM2.5 readings in 74 Chinese cities. At the time of posting, the U.S. Embassy readings had dipped down to 286, a reassuring “very unhealthy” reading, and then simply posted:

01-13-2013 14:00; PM2.5; No Reading;

— BeijingAir (@BeijingAir) January 13, 2013

For those not in Beijing, this video posted on Beijing Cream shows just how bad it was:

Read more about air pollution and PM2.5 via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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[...T]he Chinese state media said on Sunday that 496 monitoring stations would release data in real time on six types of pollutants, including sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and on PM2.5, particles that are so small they can only be detected by an electron microscope, but which can cause respiratory and heart disease.

[...] The pollution data will be available on the internet and through smartphone apps, said the Ministry of Environmental Pollution. There will also be daily readings on television and radio bulletins.

[...] The release of the official data will leave local governments less room to manipulate their statistics and hide the country’s worsening pollution problem.

It will also hamper other local governments from exaggerating how bad their air is in order to win pollution treatment funding from Beijing.

The New York Times, on the other hand, compares pollution in Beijing with London’s in the past. From Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore:

For London, the disaster was the Great Smog of 1952, which hit the city just this month 60 years ago. Near-freezing temperatures led to excessive coal burning in homes, which, combined with low winds, produced a thick yellow fog. Visibility was reduced to just a few feet. Public transport, cinemas, theaters and sporting venues closed down. An estimated 4,000 people died, mostly among the young, the elderly and sufferers of respiratory illnesses.

[...] China, as Peter Thorsheim, author of “Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800,” points out, would do well to learn from Britain’s mistakes for both its sake and its neighbors’. The Great Smog was a catastrophe, but it was also a “moment of opportunity amid the tragedy,” Thorsheim told me this week. The British government turned criticism from the opposition and the public into concrete improvements, including the 1956 Clean Air Act.

Has China reached its Great Smog moment? By the 1950s, although war-torn, Britain was already one of the world’s most technologically advanced and wealthiest nations; that surely helped its decision. China, despite its overall economic might, has not yet reached that stage in per capita terms, and development remains the Chinese Communist Party’s primary concern.

See more on air pollution via CDT.

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In the letter, experts point out that including such terms breaches the Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language and the Regulation on the Administration of Publication.

The collection of terms using Latin or Greek letters in the dictionary violates the law, which stipulates that publications in Chinese should conform to generally-followed criteria and standards of the language.

“Listing those terms and replacing Chinese characters with letters in such a dictionary, which is supposed to be an exemplary linguistic standard, deals the most severe damage to the Chinese language in a century,” Li Minsheng, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Monday.

‘NBA’ was also among the English abbreviations proscribed by a 2010 directive from “a relevant Chinese government department” to national and local broadcasters. The ban apparently did not apply to the logo of state broadcaster CCTV.

Xinhua’s report on the petition points out that Chinese has already adopted many terms from Japanese, including ‘dang’ (political party), ‘jieji’ (social class) and ‘douzheng’ (struggle). But the scholars’ complaint is less about foreign loans than the preservation of Chinese script, the defining expression of the Chinese culture. From Xinhua:

Fu Zhenguo, a senior journalist with the state-run People’s Daily and one of the organizers of the petition, said that if the Chinese people ignore the inclusion of words like “NBA” and “GDP” in their language and do nothing to exclude them from the dictionary, the language they use will end up as a bizarre mixture of Chinese and English.

[…] “If they keep growing, we could have over 10,000 English entries in 100 years,” said Fu, who has instead proposed translating English words into their Chinese equivalents before including them in the dictionary.

“When the English language absorbed the Chinese vocabulary, it used pinyin, the phonetic system that romanizes Chinese characters, instead of the Chinese characters themselves,” he said.

“So why do we take in these English acronyms and words without translating them into Chinese characters?” he asked.

The protesters’ vehemence echoes 20th century discussions of writing reform, in which a comprehensive shift to alphabetic script was proposed on grounds of efficiency and modernity. That argument is long dead, but those fighting to keep the Roman alphabet out of Chinese face an uphill battle. One major beachhead is technology and the Internet, where alien letters spill over from URLs and pinyin character entry into online slang and culture (from Ministry of Tofu, via Eveline Chao). From Didi Kirsten Tatlow at The New York Times:

William C. Hannas, a linguist and author who speaks or writes 10 languages including Chinese, says the debate on going to an alphabetized writing system, which flourished into the 1950s, is over.

“There is no debate in China — or anywhere today — on writing reform,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We resent being asked to give up a tradition, or hearing from an outsider especially, that a piece of our identity is flawed.”

Nevertheless, something along those lines is happening unofficially, he says.

Especially online, Chinese are experimenting with the Roman alphabet: government, “zhengfu” in pinyin, is often shortened to “ZF.” An interpersonal competition is a “PK” (taken from video game terminology). To digitally alter images with a program like Photoshop is to “PS.” To make love is to “ML.”

“Digraphia — the coexistence of character and alphabetic writing — is happening in China not by policy from the top down, but by default from the bottom up,” Mr. Hannas wrote.

See more on changing language and the eternal treadmill of dictionary updates via CDT, as well as our Grass Mud Horse Lexicon and Word of the Week series.

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Post tags: Chinese characters, Chinese language, English, GDP, Internet culture, NBA, PM2.5
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Environmental authorities above the county-level are required to publish relevant information with the approval of the central agency. The regulations also state that local governments should not release information that is not consistent with different departments.

[…] Many foreign countries with developed legal systems view environmental monitoring information as the common property of all human beings. This means that no one, not even the government, has the right to stop others from releasing information so closely related to public health.

[…] Everyone has an obligation to protect the environment. It is not the government’s job to take full responsibility. The voluntary participation of NGOs relieves government agencies, both understaffed and underfunded, of pressures to keep up with environmental information.

For more on government regulation on environmental monitoring, see New Regulations Require Monitoring of Air Pollutants, via CDT.

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Two theories on the deadly smog soon emerged. The most popular, and the least serious, was that Wuhan’s high school students were burning their books in the wake of graduation and the much-hated college entrance examination. The more serious was that a large-scale industrial accident had taken place. Boiled Universe, the handle of a Wuhan-based Sina Weibo user of no great importance, was one of hundreds of microbloggers who offered a variation: “It’s said that a boiler explosion at Wuhan Iron & Steel caused large volumes of toxic dust and smoke to spread, enveloping the whole of Wuhan, and the death of two people.” Others not only promoted the rumor, they did so by re-tweeting what they claimed was a photo of a chlorine gas leak at Wuhan Iron & Steel. (Another microblogger later offered definitive proof that the photo was six months old).

Someone from Wuhan Iron & Steel Co. Ltd, clearly incensed by the rumor-mongering, logged into the company’s Sina Weibo account (the company has 900 followers, billions in revenue) to deny responsibility for the haze . But that was destined to go nowhere: Few in China are going to take the word of a giant state-owned steel company, especially when it comes to rumors about large industrial accidents. By mid-afternoon, fears of a chlorine gas leak had become so prevalent (online, at least), that the Wuhan Fire Department felt compelled to tweet on Sina Weibo to inform its 95,000 followers that over the course of Monday, it had removed two hornet’s nests, caught a snake and put out five small fires, but it had not, under any circumstance, responded to a major alarm, much less a “so-called chemical leak and explosion.”

Local authorities then went further. From Bloomberg, the following day:

Police in the Chinese city of Wuhan detained two people for spreading rumors that heavy pollution in the capital of Hubei province was caused by an industrial accident, a newspaper controlled by the local Communist Party reported.

The Changjiang Daily, supervised by Wuhan’s party committee, said government departments denied rumors the smog that covered the city June 11 was related to an industrial accident or the leaking of toxic gases. The newspaper didn’t give more information about the people detained or the rumors.

After some investigation, Wuhan’s Environmental Protection Bureau blamed burning of straw by farmers for the pollution, in a statement translated and circulated by the US embassy in Beijing:

An analysis of the air indicates the pollution is caused from burning of plant material northeast of Wuhan.

[…] According to our investigation, the abnormal air quality in our city is mainly caused by the burning of the crops northeast of Wuhan towards Hubei province. Similar air quality is occurring in Jiangsu, Henan and Anhui provinces, as well as in Xiaogan, Jingzhou, Jingmen and Xiantao, cities nearby Wuhan.

The straw burning explanation was, as Minter described, greeted with some incredulity. Farmers had long burned straw as fuel, but Monday’s pollution was exceptional, and its intensity seemed to point to an industrial source. But according to Cornell University air quality expert Dane Westerdahl, America’s only source of “beyond index” pollution scores is not industrial activity, but forest fire. Using straw as fuel spread the burning out over many months. With coal and natural gas replacing it in this role, and other traditional uses also disappearing, straw is now incinerated in vast quantities simply for disposal, producing greater, more concentrated amounts of smoke than in the past. Jiang Gaoming described this shift in a 2007 article at chinadialogue, pointing out that with some organisation and investment, the straw could instead be used to produce beef, fertilising manure or carbon-neutral energy.

In northern China it is now the middle of the autumn planting season, and once again the farmers are burning off the crop stubble left after the harvest. The highways that run through the fields are covered in smoke, which seeps in through closed windows and can reduce visibility to half a kilometre. It gets worse at night; crop fires are illegal, so the farmers wait till it gets dark to avoid getting caught. However, you were unlikely to see this a decade ago ….

So why are the farmers so determined to burn off their leftover straw? Because there is nothing else to do with it. In the past the straw was used as fuel, but now farmers are more affluent and burn coal or natural gas. At one time it could also have been used to feed draught animals, but now they have been replaced with tractors. The government has promoted the use of straw in methane production, but to date only 0.5% of China’s total 600 to 700 [million?] tonnes of straw produced annually is used to make the gas. Ideally it could feed livestock, but the cost of storing straw and the livestock itself makes this unfeasible. Even if you fed the entire nation’s herds with straw, there would still be a lot left over. One could increase the number of ruminants, but China’s straw is scattered around the country and the cost of collecting and transporting it is high. If farmers cannot make a decent profit from it (and they no longer care about earning a few yuan here and there) it will be burnt off to prevent it getting in the way of other work.

The immediate grab for explanations involving hushed-up accidents, and the widespread rejection of the one offered by the local government, show the depths to which trust on public safety issues has sunk. New rules requiring publication of PM2.5 data for cities around China, overdue or not, were a sign of progress on this front. More recent developments such as the arrests of the alleged rumour-mongers in Wuhan and demands for the US embassy to stop tweeting its own air quality measurements seem to indicate a backward step. At chinadialogue, Greenpeace’s Zhou Rong argued that, while the American @BeijingAir monitor does indeed accentuate negative readings, silencing it is not a solution. Instead, the government’s best means of overcoming public scepticism is greater transparency.

First, the government should face up to the severity of the air-pollution problem. China has long looked to traditional pollutant indicators like PM10 (coarse particulates) to evaluate air quality, but not PM2.5 levels. The result is a picture of air pollution that is, at times, too rosy – and out of step with public perceptions.

[…] Second, although most Chinese cities have now started to publish PM2.5 figures – a major step forward – they remain evasive about the health implications of that data. The public don’t understand what a daily average PM2.5 figure of 35ug/m3 or 75ug/m3 means for their health. They just want to know if their elderly parents can go out for a stroll or their kids can go out to play, but the raw statistics they are given don’t tell them that. In the absence of more “human” data, it is hardly surprising that so many citizens, concerned about their families, turned to the US embassy’s feed and its depressing litany of warnings – exaggerations that have worsened the fear and mistrust of the government.

It isn’t complicated stuff. But escalating it to a political – even a diplomatic – issue may just make it so. To regain public trust, all that the Chinese government needs to do is push its existing systems of data disclosure further, and provide accurate information in a format the public can digest and use. Breathing air under the same piece of sky every day, ordinary Chinese people make their own judgements about the state of their environment. And when it comes to statistics, urban residents will judge their veracity by their own experience.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, air pollution, air quality, chemical leak, farming, greenpeace, industrial accident, PM2.5, public opinion, public safety, rumors, United States, wuhan
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…To come out swinging against the United States for tweeting (here and here) air pollution readings deviates from this pattern. It’s one thing to posture against what Party officials often call “hostile foreign forces,” when the matter under discussion is remote from the everyday concerns of Chinese citizens. But when the issue is the thick haze that hangs over China’s growing cities, harming the health of their residents, condemning U.S. diplomats for providing air pollution information is only going to further alienate the public.

Another thing that makes the criticism of the U.S. Embassy so odd is that the U.S. Embassy has been reporting such information in Beijing since 2008. It started monitoring and posting air quality to advise its staff and other American expats about when it was unsafe to jog, bike, and engage in other out-door activities. Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveal that Chinese officials privately lodged protests with the U.S. Embassy over the practice as early as 2009.

Then in early January 2012, when disparities between the information reported by the U.S. Embassy and by the Beijing municipal government during a number of weeks of particularly bad air quality aroused public outcry, the government responded agilely. After Premier Wen Jiabao said that air quality reporting should reflect public perceptions, authorities adopted more stringent air quality standards and began monitoring harmful particulates like PM 2.5 (particulate matter measuring less than or equal to 2.5 micrometers in diameter).

But realizing concrete improvements in urban air quality will take time. Announcing new standards was only a temporary solution to the leadership’s public opinion problem. At present two-thirds of Chinese cities cannot meet China’s own PM 2.5 standard. China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection has installed monitoring stations in 113 key cities that send data automatically to the national headquarters in Beijing and plans to install more. Nevertheless, the public still suspects that the air reports in local newspapers and TV broadcasts are manipulated by local authorities. Residents of major cities need only look out the window, take a deep breath, and wonder how these reports can claim that the air is only “lightly polluted.” Poor air quality days similar to those that stirred up the public last January will almost certainly occur again.

Read more about air pollution and PM 2.5 in China via CDT. See all of our coverage of the environment.

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Now China says all air quality readings conducted by foreign missions are illegal. Vice Minister of Environmental Protection Wu Xiaoqing said on June 6 that the consulate’s actions constitute a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and interference in China’s internal affairs.

A diplomat in the Shenyang consulate, “Luo Jie” (罗杰), responded to the latter accusation via Weibo:

LuoJie_USConsulateShenyang: It is our job to monitor our work environment; the consulate issues this information because it is responsible for the health of officials and their families. If the health of our diplomats counts as part of China’s “internal affairs,” things get more complicated.

罗杰_沈阳美领事 ：监测我们工作环境是我们任务；使馆负责官员和家人的健康， 所以发布信息。如果我们外交官的健康是算中国“内政”一部分，那就更复杂了。

Global Times Chief Editor Hu Xijin came to China’s defense on Weibo, following the publication of an editorial in his paper titled “The U.S. Embassy Must Actively Respond to the Environmental Protection Ministry”:

HuXijin: Objectively, the U.S. embassy’s PM2.5 data have pushed China to improve its own air quality monitoring. But it is also objective fact that this data is incomplete. It has recently given vent to the emotions of some Chinese. The embassy must promptly stop [its readings] and not cause any more trouble. It is necessary for diplomatic missions to make these adjustments. The Environmental Protection Ministry’s announcement is objectively seeking realistic results, and its request that the U.S. embassy cease to issue data is reasoned.

胡锡进：美国驻华使馆发布PM2.5数据对中国提高空气质量监测精度、加快大气治理起了客观刺激和推动作用。但该数据的不全面也是客观事实，它成了目前中 国一些人的一个情绪发泄点也是事实。美使馆应及时撤出，不再掺和，这确是外交机构应做的调整。环保部的声明是客观求实的，它要求美使馆停止发布数据有其道 理。

As usual, netizens were ready with witty ripostes for Hu:

LaimangHupan: Why does reading the domestic news feel like reading a bunch of jokes? Before it was ridiculing Gary Locke for being honest and humble, now it’s the differences in PM2.5 readings? It turns out the safest place to be is the enemy camp. Our great nation should go tit-for-tat with and issue PM2.5 readings from our own embassies, make our embassies the safest place for the Occupy Wall Street people, and make our country proud.

莱芒湖畔：为什么现在看国内新闻总有看笑话的感觉？前一阵是讥讽骆家辉清廉低调，现在又是PM2.5数值差异？敌营阵地居然是最安全的地方。我们泱泱大国的 对外使领馆也应该以牙还牙，公布当地的PM2.5数值，让我们的使领馆成为占领华尔街的人们的最安全的地方，方能扬眉吐气。

Silent59412: I never understand the Environmental Protection Ministry, especially this sentence: “They use their own country’s air quality standards to evaluate ours, which is clearly unreasonable.” Does this mean Americans are higher human beings or lower human beings than Chinese?

默59412：我一直没看懂环保部意思，尤其是这一句“他们用本国的空气质量标准来评价我国的空气质量，这是明显不合理的”。是说美国人比中国人高等一些还是低等一些？

Houhuoma: Do you think people are blind? How many days the Beijing skies have been blue? You think ordinary people will only believe your own statements?

猴活妈：老百姓都是瞎子呀，就北京这天有几天是蓝天，你以为只有自己公布就让老百姓信了

SeeStarsHearWaves: The price of oil should respond positively to the requests of the National Development and Reform Commission. Taiwan should take the initiative to return to the motherland.

观星听涛：石油价格应积极回应发改委要求。台湾应主动回归祖国。

LawyerYuanYulai: Is the Global Times fighting with the U.S. to win minds, or to win hearts?

袁裕来律师: 环球时报是在跟美国斗智慧，还是斗胸脯？

keyurain: Can’t we do this the old fashioned way? The U.S. publishes China’s human rights white papers, and we publish theirs. America issues PM2.5 readings in Beijing and Shanghai, we issue readings in Washington and New York.

keyurain：可否依照老模式？美国发表中国人权白皮书，我们发表他们的白皮书。美国在北京上海报PM2.5，我国也在华盛顿和纽约的使馆测量发布。

Vine_Leon: I demand that CCAV stop broadcasting the weather reports from New York and Los Angeles!

藤_Leon：强烈要求CCAV停止播发纽约洛杉矶的天气预报！

For more on the air quality debate in China, read CDT’s PM2.5 posts.

“Netizen Voices” is an original CDT series. If you would like to reuse this content, please follow the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 agreement.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: air pollution, air quality, environmental data, environmental regulation, netizens' voices, PM2.5, pollution, sina weibo, transparency, United States, weibo
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During a June 1 press conference, the Shanghai Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau announced that installation of the city’s PM2.5 (fine particle) air quality measuring equipment was completed in late May. The equipment will now undergo testing and calibration in June. An exact date for when the machine’s readings will start being made available to the public is yet to be announced.

According to the “Plan for the Testing and Implementation of the First-phase of New Air Quality Standards” published by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, Shanghai is among the first batch of Chinese municipalities granted permission to publish PM2.5 air quality data. Earlier media reports also indicated that Shanghai would officially begin publishing PM2.5 data this June.

Shanghai Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau director Zhang Quan stated that official publication of PM2.5 readings would signify at least three achievements: that the installation of national air quality control centers has reached completion, that the 10 indexes by which new environmental standards will be calculated will have been made public and that new standardized equipment has passed the testing phase.

After the installation of Shanghai’s national air quality control center, the equipment must still pass temperature and humidity testing before it can meet scientific requirements, Mr. Zhang said. Only then would results be made available to the public.

In May, the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai began issuing its own PM2.5 air quality data on the consulate’s official website. Mr. Zhang stated that the consulate’s publication of PM2.5 data is illegal.

PM2.5 readings recorded by the consulate tend to differ from the readings of the Shanghai Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. Regarding this, Mr. Zhang again responded, “The PM2.5 density readings taken by the U.S. Consulate and some other research organizations are actually very similar to the Environmental Protection Bureau’s. The disparity arises from differences in evaluation criteria.”

Mr. Zhang indicated that China employs the World Health Organization’s (WHO) relatively low Level 1 standards for PM2.5 readings. Some developed nations, on the other hand, use the higher Level 2 or Level 3 standards.

PM2.5 refers to particulate matter suspended in air measuring less than or equal to 2.5 microns in diameter—a size so small that the particles can enter into a person’s lungs. Because these particles are highly toxic and stay suspended in the air for a very long time, potentially traveling vast distances, they are considered to be very damaging to human health and the environment. In February 2012, China’s State Council issued new air quality standards, which, for the first time, included standards regarding PM2.5 density.

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