The good doctor in Beijing recently conducted a new air pollution survey around the city, comparing indoor and outdoor pollution, and the effects of things like air purifiers.
Last night, 7:23, according to the monitoring equipment installed in the U.S. embassy in Beijing:
What “500″ means:
150+ = “Unhealthy”, 200+ = “Very Unhealthy”, 300+ = “Hazardous”. So what are we supposed to call it when it maxes out the scale?
Of course, you might be wondering what the Ministry of Environmental Protection was reporting at the same time:
The Chinese version site had the same:
As we couldn’t see down the street today, I don’t wonder who’s numbers are more accurate. However, three things you need to know about comparing pollution numbers:
Part of the reason for the discrepancy is that China doesn’t monitor the smaller, more harmful forms of air pollution.
To best appreciate the awesome-but-sadly-apparently-temporary powers of China’s weather gods, you must play this mp3 while reading:
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All these photos are from out our kitchen yángtái windows. The blue sky photos are from Oct. 1st; the less-blue ones are from this morning.
When we flew in to Beijing on Sept. 30 we could barely see the terminal from the airplane on account of all the kōngqì wūrǎn (空气污染). But not to worry, in China the They can change the weather. When there’s an important made-for-TV event, They make it rain the night before and… voila!:
That was Oct 1st, the even-more-important-than-the-Olympics 60th anniversary national day military parade. And this next photo was from this morning — apparently They didn’t have any photo-ops scheduled today:
Pollution is measured here in term of “blue sky days” (蓝天). True to form, since reality in China is whatever They say reality is (you really ought to read 1984), “blue sky day” doesn’t actually mean that the sky is blue or clear; it means the official pollution readings are below a certain level, which often is still thick with haze. And never mind that the cut off line for blue sky days is still considered hazardous by the rest of the world’s pollution monitoring scales, or that They don’t even bother measuring the most harmful forms of air pollution particles. In this last photo, you can see the colour starting to change in the top left corner; there were no clouds today, and if you looked straight up, you could actually see some faint blue.
P.S. – I think I’m just about done whining about the pollution, at least for now. Posts on karaoke survival, creative ways to stay connect with family back home, Tianjin’s suspiciously curvacious public statues, free One Child Policy baby accessories, and a racial Disney moment at the English school are all in the works.
Finally! I just discovered a great site by a family doctor in Beijing (close enough!) with all the info you need — like what to do — about the appallinginfuriatinghorrifyingconfoundingoppressivechewableinexcusabledamnablelethalghastlyhideousdepressingatrociousilliberalobscenefoulnose-burningabominableface-coatingheinouslì haimonstrousodiousexecrableunholy [they-don't-make-strong-enough-negative-descriptors] air pollution. For example:
Call me a pampered whiny rich foreigner if you want, I don’t care; I want to liiiiiive!
And please, by all means, you’re welcome to add adjectives to my list (but keep it PG!). Sometimes it just feels good to vent to get it off your chest, especially since you can’t vent to get it out of your chest.
I’ll add a photo later if I can bring myself to take one (through tears, no doubt).
What a half-hour’s bike ride during Friday morning rush hour can get you in Tianjin:
People who stared at me: 4
People who took no notice of me: hundreds
Red lights: 8/11 (meaning I had to stop for 3)
Buses I wanted to curse at: all of them, but 4 especially noxious ones in particular
Groups of migrant construction workers protesting their late wages: 1
Cars on fire: 1
Buildings I should be able to see but can’t because of the air pollution: dozens? scores? hundreds?
Years shaved off my life due to the air pollution: incalculable
Five days a week I bike half an hour one way to work; so 13.2 kilometers total there and back according to google maps. The numbers above are only for the morning commute to work. There really was a car on fire this morning.
Photos from this week. You can click some to see them bigger.
These guys are often gliding up and down the canal that runs by our apartment and the school:
Public dancing in parks is really popular, especially with the middle-aged and older crowd. These people can really dance, too:
It was polluted beyond belief this week. I took this photo on my way to school around 8am on a cloudless day:
Soon-to-be-married couples often get stylish photos taken all over town, especially in the former foreign concession areas. There were a lot of couples out the day I took this; one intersection had four different couples and camera crews. The writing is some sidewalk poetry in a former British park:
A chess game gets intense at a popular playground:
Odd contrast: a hand-pulled coal cart parked by a… I don’t know what to call a store that sells clothing/accessories like this. Many people still heat their homes with this kind of coal, and many restaurants still cook on it. That combined with all the smoking apparently makes China’s indoor air pollution up to 10 times worse than outside:
Me and Liu Wei at a rather eccentric local museum. It doubles as a restaurant and its business card says “eatable museum.” A lot of the stuff on display was damaged during the Cultural Revolution, that means there are lots of headless statues and statue-less heads. The walls are covered in shattered pottery:
I took the photo on the left today around 10:30am. The TV Tower — which you can only barely see on the left despite the fact that it’s a sunny, cloudless day — is less than two blocks away.
If you look straight up on days like these, you can see a faint hole of faded blue, but in any other direction all you get is this bright gray washed out haze that just gets thicker nearer the horizon.
Maybe I complain about the pollution too much, but it’s incredible, and we bike in it all the time. We don’t mention it much with our friends (Chinese or foreign) because there just isn’t much to say.
The second photo (above right) is from the June 2007 around 10am.
[2008 Oct 14]
These photos are from today around 9am. The first is (not) of the tower again, and the second is the opposite direction (south-east):
My teacher said this isn’t an actual sandstorm (沙尘暴 – shā chén bào); it’s just “scattering sand” (扬沙 – yáng shā). But it’s still nasty being outside in the wind.
May’s propaganda
There is no shortage of “Welcome the Olympics, be more civilized, establish a new atmosphere” banners. They’re even on taxis and buses. Neighbourhood committees are putting up posters listing the names of residents and how much they each donated to the earthquake relief effort. Roads are getting paved, unfinished buildings are getting the outsides slapped on, other buildings are getting facelifts, our fake roof is finished, you can buy 10元 (<$1.50) t-shirts on the university campuses the say "I [heart] China! Go China! Go Chinese!" and "Go China!" with politically correct maps that conspicuously include all the disputed South China Sea Islands. The “be more civilized” cartoons are posted all over, and near the school people’ve painted a giant mural of them, right next to another big slogan:
The slogan on the right says:
“Liberate thought, do work & create industry, scientific development.”
解放思想,干事创业,科学发展
Along the top of the left photo is yet another “Welcome the Olympics, be more civilized, establish a new atmosphere.”
Also, these three articles have been waiting in line since the end of February:
Confessions Of A Propagandist A guy who worked two years as a “language polisher” for China’s official news agency’s English service introduces us to the world of China’s official media and the difficulties of translating official newspeak into readable English.
“The Connection Has Been Reset” Explains how they control internet content and monitor user activity, how easy it is for users to get around the restrictions, and why, despite the ease with which people can get around said restrictions, the system’s quite effective anyway.
Beijing’s Sky Blues & More ‘Blue Skies’ in Beijing You may have heard that Beijing has increased its air quality and met ‘blue sky’ targets ahead of the Olympics. A D.C.-based ‘independent environmental consultant,’ who was a 2006 Princeton in Asia fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Beijing, explains how they manipulated their data collection procedure to report more ‘blue sky days.’ Beijing’s environmental officials respond with, “This phenomenon does not exist,” though I’m not sure if they’re referring to statistics tampering, or blue sky days.
Jessica has a hilarious post in the works about the treatment her and her workout buddy get at the gym from the middle aged ladies. Stay tuned…
In case you’re wondering, we’re back in regular classes starting Monday morning at 8am. This week new associates for the NGO arrived, so Jessica helped get their apartments ready, and on Thursday I’m doing the traffic/bike riding orientation and the trip to the bike market (for those brave enough to purchase a bike after their official introduction to Tianjin’s traffic scene!). Newly arrived folks really don’t seem to like it when we tell them you’re supposed to stay laying in the road if you get hit by a car and wait for the police. Hey, we don’t make the rules!
By the way, if you haven’t noticed yet, please check out the new-and-improved photo galleries! You can scroll through now, like a slideshow. (It “should” work on whatever browser, but if you’re having problems, try using Firefox, or just click here.)
And here’s your February dose of propaganda…
Public service commercials in any nation are perfect joke fodder, and this public service commercial from Shanghai is currently attracting scorn from the foreigner blogosphere, as can be seen in the comments on Sinosplice. It’s 6 minutes of Mainlanders not being unapologetically inconsiderate to one another in public (which we’re all in support of, by the way):
The little girl at the end says: “和谐城市心灵乐章” (hé xié chéng shì xīn líng yuè zhāng), which means something like, “Harmonious city, spiritual symphony” (?). “Harmonious” is a current official theme word/excuse/legitimizing concept for China’s ongoing social control measures.
Right at the beginning, when the foreigner couple poses for a photo, you can get a taste of the pollution haze in the background behind them.
A guy decides to research and drink every single kind of tea in China, one per week, and blog about it. If you like Chinese teas and want to know more about them, this is a great project to check out: The Taobao Tea Trail
A journalist with over seven years experience in China is taking a six-month journey through rural China to document the lives of China's "other billion" -- the Chinese who aren't born, raised and educated in relatively developed coastal cities: "I have embarked on what I hope will be a six month journey through the Chinese countryside — listening, watching and telling stories from farmers’ lives. ... China, it is often said, has more than 400 million Internet users and hundreds of millions of new urban residents who are changing the face of the country. It is less often noted that China also has another billion people who have not yet been fully included in these new economic and social changes. The following, if you will, are some fragments from the story of the other billion."
The China Beat provides a helpful summary of a dystopian novel critical of the way things are in China: "The novel can be read ... as a realistic presentation of the shocking darkness behind the dazzling economic miracle created by the Chinese model. It also proposes that China’s younger generations suffer from the consequences of collective amnesia and historical half-truths... The book can also be read ... as an allegory of the modern nation-state. Taking China as a case study, by questioning the morality and political legitimacy of the Chinese model of development, the novel is intended to lead us to the potential catastrophes that a modern nation-state may bring about if it is out of its people’s control."
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