“China’s massive pollution problem”

Imagine living in a world where whenever someone wanted to go outside, he or she always had to wear a facemask to prevent inhaling unhealthy amounts of air pollution. While this is not the reality in America, it is most certainly a reality in China’s biggest cities, especially Beijing. Keith Wagstaff’s article in The Week titled “China’s Massive Pollution Problem” explains how bad China’s smog is, why China’s air is so polluted, and how dangerous the air is on the Chinese. China’s air pollution is so serious that many of its cities have been deemed “barely suitable for living” and is making the Chinese population both angry and sick. The article’s thesis is not stated, but the concluding sentences of the article powerfully show the inequality for the millions of poor Chinese in this situation: “Wealthy businessmen and government officials are also shelling out for indoor air purifiers, which sometimes sell in upscale showrooms for as much as $3,000. In the first half of 2013, IQAir, a Swiss company, saw sales of its luxury air purifiers triple in China. The trend, however, has bred some resentment from average Chinese families. Their annual income? About $2,100 a year.”

Wagstaff’s first paragraph describes how bad China’s smog has gotten, showing how bad the air that millions of Chinese people have to breath. Of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, sixteen of them are in China. Wagstaff states that government officials of the city Harbin recently had to shut down roads, schools, and the airport because the air pollution levels were 40 times the safe limit set by the World Health Organization. He writes: “During the ‘airpocalypse’ in Beijing earlier this year, the density of small, lung-penetrating particles reached 993 micrograms per cubic meter—a concentration normally not seen outside of forest fires. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers anything above 300 dangerous, and maxes out its scale at 500.” Wagstaff claims that China’s smog is dense enough that a factory burned for three hours in Beijing before anyone noticed it was in flames.

How did China’s air get so polluted? Wagstaff states that two decades of runaway economic development unrestrained by air pollution laws, a huge increase in car ownership, and China’s reliance on coal have all helped create China’s smog problem. Even though the 1990s were a time where bicycles filled China’s cities, today the Chinese own more than 120 million cars due to the explosive growth of the middle class. Instead of auto emissions, he points out that most of the blame rests on coal. China depends on coal to make about 70 percent of its power. Wagstaff writes that the air gets especially worse when cities turn on their coal-fired collective heating systems during the winter “heating season.”

The article describes how the health effects of smog are widespread and severe. According to a study that Wagstaff refers to for the year 2010, air pollution contributed to about 1.2 million premature deaths in China. He adds that lung cancer rates in China have skyrocketed by 465 percent over the last three decades. After air pollution spiked in Harbin, hospitals reported a 30 percent increase of respiratory problems in patients. Wagstaff writes: “Scientists say the pollution in northern cities is so severe that 500 million people’s lives will be shortened by an average of 5.5 years.”

Wagstaff writes that the smog is not just hurting the Chinese medically, but it is also damaging the nation’s economy. According to a study by Greenpeace and Peking University’s School of Public Health that he refers to, smog-related economic losses in four major Chinese cities climbed to $1.08 billion in 2012. Wagstaff adds that Beijing’s economy has been severely impacted by a 50 percent decrease in tourism. The pollution makes it hard for Beijing-based businesses to recruit the best foreign talent because more and more potential employees demand hardship pay if they are going to live in the city’s awful air quality. Wagstaff says: “With studies connecting prenatal exposure to air pollutants with autism, depression, and long-term lung damage, many foreign and local parents are ‘second-guessing’ their living in Beijing.’ said family physician Richard Saint Cyr, who is based there.”