Beijing Isn't Actually That Polluted (...?)

The first time I went for a run in China, I lasted only fifteen minutes before collapsing on the ground, spluttering grey phlegm like a deranged concrete mixer.

This was only a few weeks into my arrival, not a massive amount of time since I had been regularly doing 10ks around the quaint Caversham countryside. But the air is different in Chengdu.

A southwestern second-tier city, Chengdu was the first place I properly lived in in China. A recent analysis has shown that this year, Chengdu's air pollution surpassed that of the capital, Beijing. When you think of Beijing, you picture Tiananmen Square enrobed in a thick grey smog, with mask-wearing passers-by barely visible and Mao's face ominously peeping through the soot. It's the world's poster child for ultimate air-quality mismanagement; the home of the 'airpocalypse'.

Such a classic shot.

Now, Chengdu is even worse.

But what happened? Moving to 'Greyjing' nine months later, I was surprised to find that the summer days were unexpectedly bright and blue. The most fallaciously pretty afternoon was during the National Day celebrations of October 2015 - the previous day had pissed it down, but now it was as if APEC had come round again.

'APEC Blue' was the name given to the highly unusual (and suspiciously) blue skies during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Beijing the previous year (when I was still choking on PM2.5 in Chengdu). Then it became a term used to describe anything beautiful but fleeting - but conversely, it seemed such 'blue heavens' became more and more frequent during my two years in the big BJ.

That very same year, the documentary 'Under the Dome' by the spectacular Chai Jing went viral. The monumental wake-up call it created was like an oriental Silent Spring, and of course, within a week the film was censored - but not before hitting 300 million views. It outlined Jing's daughter's in utero tumour caused by shitty air and laid into China's biggest polluters. At the end, she encouraged viewers to say 'No, I'm not satisfied, I don't want to wait. I want to stand up and do a little something.' No wonder the CCP got scared.

And people did a little something. No 1989-style revolution, obviously, but some type of online grumbling that got noticed. Beijing had for years already been moving the factories out of the city centre, riling up the older generation who'd lost their jobs as a result. This had, in a huge way, transferred the grey problem to surrounding provinces like Hebei (which Chinese people now stereotype as polluted), but Beijing's turf still had a winter-smog elephant to deal with.

Every November, around the 15th, Beijing flips on the central heating. This kept people in the little hutong courtyard houses like mine cosy during the tundra-like climes (and in my conspiracy-paranoid mind, shut up - in more senses than one). But there is a big cost to this. The energy it takes to heat a city of 22 million via a system of underground pipes means an unbelievable amount of coal being burned, and consequently a fat shroud of smog over the capital. Sometimes the Gobi Desert also likes to troll the capital, dumping yellow clouds of sand whenever it gets a bit windy (which, in winter, is sometimes).

Last year in 2017 they tried to ban coal for heating and replace it with natural gas, which it turned out they didn't have enough of, leaving a ton of people in Hebei out in the cold. Naturally, Hebei-ers were frosty about this and the 'government' had to revert to the black stuff. But like Chai Jing, many more city-dwellers are complaining about the long-term effects pollution has on general health and well-being - especially that of their children. These people, mostly the rising middle-class, live in Beijing and Shanghai and can afford to consider the luxuries of clean air, occasionally disappearing to Taiwan, Japan or New Zealand to detox their lungs. To placate these high-PPP people, whose mass dissatisfaction could threaten the very stability of the regime, the biggest cities are mobilising in a big way to clean up the skies.

And it seems to be working, if you take the word of China's Ministry of Environmental Protection, which for your own sanity you shouldn't. The US embassy, which unofficially (but more reliably) monitors the city's air, had readings which suggested PM2.5 concentrations in winter 2017 were more than 50% lower than in 2016 - in agreement with the official stats.

It's like Beijing has reached post-development, where inhabitants have the economic clout to call out the damage from the industrialisation that made them rich. Meanwhile, in second- and third-tier cities like Chengdu, it's still development at all costs. It may take several years before they get to the comfortable-enough point to 'do a little something'.

Of course, Beijing still has its bad days, and compared with European cities it's a gas chamber. But it's nothing that can't be dealt with temporarily by a magic weather machine or cloud-dispersing rockets to maintain a sunny façade, as is what probably happened for my nostalgic National Day parade in 2015. Back then, most days people used to say that smoking was a way of filtering out the pollution. When I went back just last year, there were fewer masks, and fewer smokers. Maybe, just maybe, there's less to filter.

EDIT: Literally a few hours after I wrote this, I looked on a WeChat group of the Beijing Energy Network that I'm part of. Someone had posted this update that BJ's pollution in the first two months of winter 2018 was actually WORSE than in 2017. So it probably isn't a trend and may well invalidate all of the above... hence the ellipsis and question mark in the title. And this awkward photo as recompense.

The face of a smog mask expert.