Bad Breath
Bad air is a problem that affects most megacities, particularly those in the developing world. But many governments are keen to play down its effects on the population. Robert Foyle-Hunwick finds out why…
Words Robert Foyle-Hunwick
There are still days when the sky is dense above the former home of Shougang, once the largest steel mill in China but now 8.5 square kilometres of rust in the western suburbs of Beijing. Back when plumes of smoke on the skyline were a source of civic pride, there were 3,700 factories in the capital. But after Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics, foul air was no longer an acceptable metric of progress. The factories were closed; Shougang was relocated to a reclaimed island 200 miles away. But once the patriotic fervour died down, the infamous Beijing haze crept back uninvited. People now joke about an ‘APEC Blue,’ a temporary clarity of air that was only brought about by top-level summits.
Events like Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Olympics are irresistible opportunities for the authoritarian nations of China and Russia to lend global legitimacy to their regime. Like Beijing’s polluting plants, critics can simply be moved along. During Sochi’s ‘Zero Waste’ Olympics in 2014, for example, authorities countered scathing foreign coverage by offering support to protest groups like Environmental Watch — then, months afterward, arresting its leading activists. But the national glory of a World Cup can also prove tempting to governments of relatively open democratic systems like Brazil and India.
These countries, particularly in the Pacific Basin, tend to suffer disproportionately bad air, leading to excess mortalities. The air in Beijing, Moscow, São Paulo, Jakarta and Mexico City frequently exceeds World Health Organization guidelines, especially compared to Tokyo or London. When a University of São Paulo study showed that the city’s air claimed more lives nationally than traffic accidents, breast cancer and AIDS combined, a public outcry ensued; to prevent an embarrassing repeat, Rio de Janeiro has invested $14 million in air-monitoring stations around the 2016 Summer Games locations.
Latin American elites often evoke the spectre of foreign ‘meddling’ to shield their predatory policies from oversight by environmental NGOs. India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has tried the same, intimidating the likes of Greenpeace by cancelling their licenses, freezing bank accounts and dubbing them “anti-national.” Among the many who fear unspecified forces are plotting to thwart India’s rise, these tactics are a vote-winner. For the 300 million urban Indians who must endure dangerously toxic air every day, however, national pride is self-defeating when confused with confrontational pollution denial.
India’s environmentalists have one major ally in the form of Delhi’s High Court. This institution has remained above the fray, pushing back against the government’s attacks on Greenpeace by ruling that “criticism cannot be muzzled.” For the authoritarians in Beijing or Moscow, however, who frequently evoke fears of ‘western containment’ to tap wells of nationalist support, there are no such checks or balances.
Russia, in particular, embraces the idea of national ‘exceptionalism’, framing environmental protection as a luxury only the West can truly afford. Air pollution is ten times the accepted safety standard in 84 of Russia’s major cities, while the Center for Russian Environmental Policy has warned that the Kremlin’s “dirty economic growth” claims 300,000–350,000 lives a year. Environmentalists, meanwhile, are accused of being everything from luddites to traitors.
These distortions belie a long history of patriotic environmentalism in Russia, from Gorbachev-era literary figures who campaigned to protect the symbolic Lake Baikal region, whose air quality had been devastated by the Ulan-Ude industrial complex in the Selenga basin, to the eco- nationalist movements of the USSR.
Ethnic minorities, angered at the Soviet government’s exploitation of their natural resources and disregard for consequences, frequently protested at the threat to their “biological viability.” Indeed, a better environment was one of the main aims of the democracy movement that broke up the USSR — a good reason, then, for Beijing to fear any autonomous civil movement collecting around an environmental banner.
Chinese authorities are already jittery about pollution becoming a potent rallying call for revolution. Even as China’s president, Xi Jinping, announced that environmental criminals would be punished “with an iron hand… no exceptions,” his censors were methodically purging the web of Under the Dome, a documentary about noxious air that accumulated millions of views within days of its release. Its director, Chai Jing, has a chronic respiratory infection, while her daughter was born with a smog-induced tumour — and Under the Dome was initially promoted widely within the state media. The People’s Daily quoted China’s Environment Minister as saying that the film was “important.”
But Under the Dome’s grassroots popularity took censors aback; on one website it was viewed 300 million times over just a week. Having first tried to co-opt the lm’s message, the authorities responded to the surge of populist support by purging the web of all evidence of the title. This reversion to the most reflexive of authoritarian responses — to hide and obfuscate — was particularly disappointing to those who believed the lm signalled a shifting of attitudes toward a tolerance of eco-nationalism.
For years, Chinese media has stubbornly described urban haze as “fog,” ignored the medical science on mortality rates and formally protested embassies in Beijing who ran their own air-quality readings. Many hailed the 2014 accords on climate change between the US and China as a rejection of some of this jingoistic ‘East versus West’ talk, which had previously derailed talks in Copenhagen. But while Beijing belatedly recognises the urgency of its pollution problem, its Leninist system has long existed to stifle contrary voices, and is not readily capable of adapting to populist concerns, even if they align with the leadership.
Authoritarian systems tend to be disconnected from popular reality, and consequently fear the people less than they understand them. Who knows where sentiments might suddenly turn, goes the thinking. The Chinese pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 began as dissent against inflation and corruption, after all — and who to blame for the bad air but the government? The self-congratulatory spin of the 2008 Olympics, with its ‘Blue Sky Day’ targets, has not left a cleaner capital in its wake. Instead, there is more traffic and frequent talk of a Beijing ‘Airpocalypse.’
For authoritarian governments, bad air is no easier to switch off than nationalism — and possibly just as dangerous to the population’s health.
This is article is from Weapons of Reason’s second issue: Megacities.
Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
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