the Sam Jackson College Experience

The issue of pollution in China is a very great one, and not a matter than can easily be summed up in one blog post, no matter how exhaustive. However, after several rain and then snowstorms over the weekend, the air quality today is so nice, and the scenery so beautiful as a result, that I just had to stop delaying and start writing a little bit about it.

Today the air quality in Beijing, as measured by the US State Department monitoring station at the US Embassy, is at one of its best levels I have ever noticed in my following the reported figures. In fact, at this very moment, the current rating is "Good," the highest possible rating. This is extremely unusual, and really lovely for my lungs today. I noticed how clear the sky was, and how nice the air was to breathe, and this morning I had class on the 5th floor of a classroom building. Here's the view that I have, reminding me of the beautiful scenery that you can ever-so-rarely see just outside the city...

Indeed, 风景很漂亮！ (The scenery,'fengjing,' is 'hen piaoliang,' very beautiful). Apologies for photo quality, it's just a borrowed iPhone shot, as I always forget to bring a camera to track the Monday morning classroom view.

It's extremely difficult to describe what Beijing is like on its bad air days -- which are many, even in the Fall, when the air is light-years better than the Summer air, apparently -- to those who have never experienced it. This is true of a lot of things about China, of course, but in the case of pollution it is especially striking. I went to L.A. this summer for the 4th of July, and that was certainly a striking comparison to the San Francisco air I was used to all the rest of the summer. However, the comparison between San Francisco and L.A. can't even begin to describe the difference between Beijing and say, New York.

Whenever I learn a new "comparison phrase" in Chinese class, my first instinct is to look out the window and talk about pollution (污染, wuran) or the air (空气， kongqi). Something like, "Although Beijing is very pretty, the air is not so good" (一方面北京很漂亮，另一方面北京的空气不太好). Although some say that they start to forget what blue skies look like, I thankfully (or not, depending on how you look at it) haven't come to that stage just yet. Every day a large part of the equation that determines my happiness is determined by the color of the sky and the quality of the air.

Here is a photo, captured at a particularly bad moment, at the Summer Palace. This day was not cloudy, this photo was not retouched, and there was nothing wrong with my camera. On a day like this - which are especially bad, but not especially infrequent - you can stare directly at the sun without any real harm or pain, it seems, because it is so obscured through the smog. The photo was taken at a slightly 'darker' setting so as to bring out more detail, but the lack of contrast is real.

Not so great, right? That's the seventeen-arch bridge at the Summer Palace, Kunming Lake, Beijing. Here's a photo of another part of the lake, reflecting the summer palace, on a notably better day. This photo from someone nice (neverecho) on Flickr.

You can see a big difference, I hope. Now, the air is usually not as bad as in photo #1, though usually not as good as in photo #2, at least as measured by the "how much does it ruin sightseeing" factor. Every day I have Chinese class on the 5th floor of a building that looks out at the mountains in another direction, and my teacher told me two months ago that if I looked out a certain window, I could see the summer palace. I thought I didn't understand her - that I had lost something in the translation - because every day, no matter how hard I looked, I saw no evidence of the place... until today, when I saw the top of the Buddhist Incense Tower (the same tower pictured above) beautifully framed by the mountains behind it, from about 2.5 miles away. (Sorry, forgot to take the camera after remembering how I should have brought it to my first class... am sick today!)

Here's a photo (again) of me at the Forbidden City, on what was a really uniquely great air-quality day. They're not impossible, just relatively rare. Blue skies, hooray! We hear that things have been especially good recently, which is at once comforting and scary. Comforting to know that things are improving, scary to know that they used to be worse, given what they're like today.

I think that this demonstrates some of the variety that you see here in Beijing alone. In the first week we were here, the air was more like in the unfortunate Summer Palace #1 example, and you literally couldn't very well see more than a few hundred feet down the street very clearly. It was some time before I even knew that the mountains in the first photo existed, since you certainly couldn't see them rising out of the North China Plains just on the horizon. I want to go revisit places that I went in early September just so that I can now actually see them, since as time has gone on things have generally improved with the seasons.

The New York Times reported about two weeks ago on air quality in Beijing and China. From that article, I see that there were apparently 221 "blue-sky days” for 2009 through September, according to Beijing city officials, a city record since their blue-sky index began in 1998. While this sounds great, not all 221 of those blue-sky days were as blue as the one you see above, and they most certainly did not register as "healthy" or even "moderate" on the air quality indicator metrics that would be used in the United States or Europe. As the article explains, the Chinese official air-quality indicators are quite misleading and skew data in a way which looks more favorable for China; the US Embassy monitor is more thorough and realistic in terms of what it measures and how it does so, even if it is not located in as many monitoring sites.

The positive notes in the article include massive reductions in per-car emissions, huge shifts to newer pollution control regimes in Beijing factories, better boilers and furnaces in power plants and homes, cash-for-clunkers programs to eliminate old cars from the roads, etc, etc, etc. Interesting to note is the ease with which Chinese administrators and authorities can act - if they choose to do so - given the generally feeble powers of businesses or other private groups to oppose the government -- when this works well, it works!

Last weekend I took a walk around some hutongs around 20 minutes from Tiananmen, and you can still see people there burning the coal briquettes described in the article as being so terribly harmful to the environment. With the cold winter ahead, I can only imagine how many people would go through. The photo below shows them highlighted through the doorway into someone's home. (Note that some parts of these hutongs were nicer, and some were worse; some had more rubble, while some looked like nice neighborhoods, and most of them were at least a little bit paved, unlike the one here)

Beijing, however, isn't all of China, though the same characteristics that manifest here in Beijing are present elsewhere to varying degrees. Nearby Shanxi province is reputedly the most polluted in all of China, in both air and water, with little of the political will to clean up and much less international face to lose for not doing so.  On a positive note, when we left Beijing after that first, polluted week, we were amazed and happy to arrive in Yunnan Province to a pure-seeming environment with perfect blue skies every day.

Yunnan lives up to its name: "south of the clouds," with lots of big sky.

Meanwhile, on our visit to Shanghai, we were blessed with very good weather and air, and most of the days were substantially better than Beijing; the worst may have been worse than what you would find in the U.S., but there was perhaps just one day out of our visit that had distractingly bad air quality, a much better ratio than what we normally experience in Beijing. Indeed, just as the Olympics helped to shape Beijing, so this upcoming 2010 World Expo is leading Shanghai to create a huge push for its own increase in blue-sky days (above and beyond what Beijing hopes to accomplish) among other big changes. Below is a photo of Shanghai's Pudong skyline on a typical day when we were there, more or less, with this one erring on the side of "less" - obviously not perfectly haze-free, but better than what we were used to back in Beijing.

Air quality is what is most noticeable about the environment (环境) here, but obviously other things are important. Arguably, while air quality is currently estimated to be responsible for upwards of 700,000 deaths in China, water is an even more important factor in the human-environmental equation. In fact, water quality and water security in the US are too-little talked about as well. This past weekend, we had a lot of rain and snow - I mentioned this at the start as the cause of today's wonderfully clear day. What I didn't mention is that the reason we had so much snow here in Beijing is because authorities fired huge amounts of silver iodide into the clouds in order to seed them and cause more precipitation, in order to try to alleviate more drought here in Beijing.

Weather modification like this seems to escape the notice of many of our Chinese roommates: for example, on the 60th anniversary, several people I spoke with were just "amazed!" that the weather coincidentally happened to be so great on that auspicious occasion... not quite suspecting that it could have been artificially concocted. In any event, these frequent efforts at weather control from the central government only underscore the importance of water here in China. I don't know very much about the water available - what's wrong with it, how unsafe it might be, or exactly how prevalent counterfeit bottled water is in places that I go. I do know that I love street food, and that I love bubble tea smoothies made with ice of dubious origins...

I'm only here for a single semester, and I don't think I can accumulate too much long term trouble, be it from air or water, no matter how hard I try to taste all that Beijing has to offer. My immune and digestive systems are strong, and despite a few slips here and there, I've been fine. I'm mostly just worried about the 1.3 billion people who live here full time.

Then, of course, there's the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere, and the other pollutants that make their way across the ocean only to come back to visit me in the United States. But I try not to think too much about all that.