JANUARY 16, 2014, 4:52 AM
Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Thursday, some residents of Beijing woke up with splitting headaches. A curtain of haze had fallen across the city of more than 20 million. It was the first “airpocalypse” of the year in the Chinese capital and nearby provinces, and it had come appropriately enough one year after a similar event had led to widespread anxiety.
“How does the smog differ from the apocalypse?” Joe Wong, a comedian from northeast China, wrote on his microblog on Wednesday night, when the pollution levels had begun surging. “After the apocalypse, you no longer worry about the smog.”
On Wednesday night, the United States Embassy in Beijing began sending out online warnings that the air quality level had gone above 500, the upper limit of the measurement scale, and was now “beyond index” (or “crazy bad,” as one embassy employee had written on an official embassy Twitter account several years ago.) It stayed at that level until Thursday, when it dipped to “hazardous” from “beyond index.” Hazardous means an air quality index above 300, at which point the concentration of fine particulate matter in the air is many times the exposure limit recommended by the World Health Organization. American health officials say a hazardous rating means people should avoid venturing outdoors.
Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that Chinese officials had ordered the closing of some highways, and visibility in some parts of Beijing was expected to drop to 500 meters. The municipal government issued a yellow smog alert at 7 a.m. “The smog is forecast to last until Friday morning,” Xinhua reported.
The four major highways closed were those from Beijing to Shanghai, Daqing to Guangzhou, Beijing to Harbin and Beijing to Pinggu.
The relentless pollution in Chinese cities has had other economic effects. China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, reported on Monday that there was a severe drop in tourism in Beijing last year, in part because of pollution. From January to November in 2013, the city had 4.2 million visitors, down 10.3 percent from the same period in 2012, China Daily reported, citing statistics from the Beijing Tourism Development Commission.
The report said the commission blamed the pollution, the weak global economy and a strong renminbi.
Some researchers have concluded that air pollution shortens lifespans considerably. One recent study said outdoor air pollution in China contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010. Another study showed that residents in one part of northern China had lived five years less on the average than residents in southern China because of pollutants from extensive coal burning for winter central heating in the north.
Some well-known online commentators posted photographs on Thursday of the invisible Beijing skyline.
“This is what it looks like outside of my window, severe smog,” wrote Ren Zhiqiang, a prominent real estate tycoon, while posting two photos that were little more than snapshots of gray.
One American graduate architecture student, Benjamin Golze, braved the smog to travel to the Beijing airport to catch a flight, though flights in northern China are often delayed because of smog. Mr. Golze had just spent two-and-a-half weeks in Beijing to study how to design an embassy building that can look beautiful while keeping out polluted air. The concept is for his master’s thesis project at the University of California, Berkeley.
“People spend something like 80 percent of their lives indoors,” he said in an interview. “At that level, you have to start thinking about the long-term effects of the chronic condition.”
He added that in environments like those of Chinese cities, architects and mechanical engineers need to veer away from a traditional idea, especially popular among Western engineers, that indoor air is bad and outdoor air is good. Because of that notion, he said, many engineers spend time trying to figure out how to alleviate air pollution from indoor sources rather than deal with penetration of a building by outdoor pollutants.
“The idea is a result of the long tradition of glass buildings being totally sealed from the outside and toxic materials being used inside and the building not being vented properly,” Mr. Golze said. “It takes a conceptual flip to figure out what to do here.”
Patrick Zuo contributed research.
