The Chinese government is renowned for its ability to keep bad news under wraps, but one secret was bound to come out in the end: Of all the polluted air known to be hanging over China, Beijing’s is the worst.
It’s not the most polluted all of the time, but it is often enough to put Beijing among the top three most polluted cities in China and for it to rank first during some of those memorable days when the entire city seems virtually to vanish in a brownish smog.
Moreover, the air pollution is bad enough to put Beijing at or near the top of the world’s most polluted capitals. China has five of the world’s Top 10 polluted cities, as ranked by the World Bank, and Beijing is seventh.
The ranking also takes into account water pollution, sewage, overcrowding and other factors. “I think it’s already being recognized that in terms of air pollution alone, Beijing is the worst in the world,” at least among capital cities, said Felicity Thomas, a Beijing-based consultant for the firm Environomics.
Beijing residents have observed the fine, white mist that once gave the city a magical hue getting denser and yellower over time. The mountains to the north, once clearly visible from Tiananmen Square, long ago disappeared from sight, and on some particularly bad days, Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s picture, which hangs at one end of the square, can barely be seen from his mausoleum in the middle.
Nonetheless, awareness of the city’s high pollution levels among ordinary Chinese had remained shrouded behind the other kind of fog common to China, the kind that traditionally hides from view any kind of information that might cast China in a bad light.
The story of how that fog has started to lift is as revealing about the changing attitude of China’s leaders to the environment as it is about the levels of pollution in Beijing.
Last year, China’s National Environmental Protection Agency ordered major cities to compile a weekly air-pollution index for publication in national newspapers.
When the list began appearing last fall, the fact that Beijing was not included was hardly noticed. It is general knowledge that Chinese cities are polluted, but it was assumed that the chief culprits were the big manufacturing centers of the interior, not the nation’s capital, the symbol of the nation’s long, proud history, its No. 1 tourist destination and the first port of call for foreign investors.
In fact, the omission of Beijing came after some frantic hand wringing among officials who had intended to include Beijing but were shocked by the high levels of pollution.
“Beijing is the capital, and we had to be prudent. We had to be sure our facts were correct,” said Zhao Yixin, head of Beijing’s Environmental Protection Bureau.
Over the next few months, officials renovated old equipment, bought new equipment, rechecked their figures and redid their math. Yet they kept coming up with the same conclusion: Beijing was right up there with the country’s most notoriously polluting offenders, on many weeks beating out Shenyang, once regarded as the worst culprit.
Finally, Beijing went public in March, joining the other 27 cities in reporting its weekly pollution levels, despite realization that the information risked damaging the city’s image.
The index is almost as cloudy as the pollution levels it purports to reveal. China has devised its own pollution-monitoring system, which does not correspond with international measurements, making global comparisons difficult. It reports only the worst of three pollutants that are measured, which means overall pollution levels are still not known.
Nonetheless, the details that are reported make crystal clear that the air-pollution crisis threatening China’s cities had come home to roost in the heart of the nation’s capital.
“Even by Chinese standards, Beijing is a heavily polluted city,” Zhao acknowledged. What makes Beijing’s pollution problem so serious compared with other Chinese and world cities is that it suffers from consistently high levels of all the major pollutants, Western diplomats say.
Over the last decade, Beijing’s population has doubled and the number of cars has increased threefold.
It has twice as many cars as any other city, and their number–currently put at 1.3 million– is growing by 15 percent a year, increasing the quantities of nitrous oxides emitted into the air.
Because the majority of Chinese cars are not fitted with catalytic converters, each of those cars produces 10 to 30 times the amount of noxious fumes as their American counterparts, experts say.
Beijing relies on coal for 70 percent of its energy needs, including heating, and it burns more coal–28 million tons a year–than any other city in the world. Only 5 percent of that is clean coal, and the concentration of sulfur dioxides in the air on average exceeds the maximum recommended levels by five times.
Winds from the Gobi desert plateau to the north dump an average of 1 million tons of dust on the city each year. That has been alleviated somewhat by a tree-planting program, but the city’s daily average of 5,000 construction sites generate enough dust to make up for the improvements.
A few weeks ago, Beijing scored 358 on the index, which meant the concentration of dust particles in the air was nearly 10 times the World Health Organization’s maximum recommended level and similar to the levels in Southeast Asian cities afflicted by forest fires.
It was just a routine Beijing week.
“We’ve got more people, more growth and more construction, and that means more energy and more dust. Inevitably, we have more pollution,” Zhao said.
There also is more openness about the problem than at any previous time. Despite the vagueness surrounding some of the statistics, there has been no attempt to hide the broader truth that Beijing’s air is seriously polluted.
Much of the information from Beijing and other cities had long been confidential. Most international assessments of pollution levels had been based on figures up to a decade old. Western analysts say it is still too early to assess what the new figures mean.
Since the index was made public, there has been a civic uproar. A citizens hot line run by the Beijing Environmental Protection Agency has been jammed with callers demanding action and asking how they could help. Newspapers have devoted front-page coverage to the problem.
The explosion of public debate is being welcomed by Western observers as evidence of a broader willingness among Chinese leaders to grapple with environmental problems.
“Because of the secrecy in the past and the rapid pace of industrialization, there has been a great ignorance about the environment. Now, it’s gone beyond denial. That in itself is progress,” said John Liu, director of an internationally funded environmental-education project.
President Jiang Zemin is taking a personal interest in the issue and recently was pictured on the front pages of newspapers joining children in a tree-planting project.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was struck during her talks in Beijing last week by the close interest being paid to the problem by Chinese leaders, U.S. officials said. The National Environmental Protection Agency was elevated in March to the rank of ministry, and several initiatives are being planned to alleviate the problem.
It is not always clear that the concern of the top leadership permeates through the layers of Chinese bureaucracy to the local level, where those charged with implementing environmental-protection measures still might put profits before the environment, Zhao said.
Nonetheless, a recent U.S. Embassy report on the subject said, “The greater openness of the Chinese government about China’s environmental problems is building an environmental consciousness.”
That, Zhao said, was the point of the exercise. “Only by telling the citizens what the problem is and how it’s caused can we hope to solve it,” he said. “If we only relied on a few in government, we would never solve it.”
