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:

1. Part of the reason for the discrepancy is that China doesn’t monitor the smaller, more harmful forms of air pollution.
2. It also helps that they shifted the location of their monitoring equipment to get better averages and record more “blue sky days”.
3. Measurement scales vary from country to country. You can see how China’s pollution scale compares to those of Honk Kong and the U.S. here: API and PM10 – health and here: Using the Beijing Air Quality Index (AQI) – Part I. These are also helpful (Wikipedia): Air Quality Index and Air Pollution Index. This site has a convenient widget that lets you compare China’s interpretation of its current pollution levels with that of other countries.

On days like this you can smell it as soon as you open the front door and see it just by looking across the street.

We first found these sites via MyHealth Beijing. Click the screen shots to view the source pages. See the links below for some pollution photos.

Related:

• Behold the power of China’s weather gods!
• Everything you wish you didn’t know about air pollution in China

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

[Visit the blog to listen to audio]

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.

Other pollution posts:

• Everything you wish you didn’t know about air pollution in China
• This week in Tianjin (photos)
• Chewing Tianjin’s Air
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

• How Bad Is It, Really?
• Why you should Close Your Windows at Night
• About air purifiers
• Pollution slideshow
• Using the Beijing Air Quality Index (AQI) (why “200″ is 4x worse than “100″)

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).

Other posts about Tianjin’s indecent pollution:

• Behold the power of China’s weather gods!
• This week in Tianjin (photos)
• Chewing Tianjin’s Air
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

• 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.

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

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:

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

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):

No clouds, no sandstorm, just wū rǎn (污染).

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.