April 18, 2015
A child playing in Qingdao, China, in 2013.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On a recent morning in Arizona, my two young sons padded out into their grandparents’ garden to marvel at the flowers of a hedgehog cactus. The spectacular pink and yellow blossoms of this particular plant burst open once a year and last for only a day.
The boys seemed a bit like those flowers. We were on a lung-clearing holiday from the pollution belt of eastern China, where we live, and after a winter spent blanketed in gray smog, they flourished in the bright sunshine and crystalline desert air. At one point that morning, my 5-year-old son looked up at the half-moon still hanging above a distant mountain range. “Grandpa,” he said, “is the sky here always so blue?”
My wife and I are writers based in China, and our sons have spent most of their lives there. One of the first words they learned in Chinese was “wuran,” or “pollution.” Growing up in Beijing, they developed a disconcerting knack for guessing the air-quality index, a measurement of tiny particulates in the air. China now produces more pollutants than any other nation on earth, and 66 of the country’s 74 largest cities still fall far short of the government’s air-pollution standards. Beijing, our home until last autumn, rates among the worst.
After three decades of rapid industrialization, China is starting to grapple with the toxic pollution that, like an evil twin, has shadowed its rise in prosperity. It’s a process fraught with contradictions, as shown by the chain reaction set off in March by “Under the Dome,” a documentary by the former state television reporter Chai Jing that probes how pollution regulations have been steamrollered by industrial growth. The film exploded online, drawing hundreds of millions of viewers — and praise from China’s top environmental minister — before government censors tried to erase it from the Internet less than a week after its release.
On the same day, President Xi Jinping vowed to punish heavy polluters “with an iron hand.” There is no guarantee that the government will be able (or willing) to meaningfully rein in the biggest culprits — motor vehicles and coal, which accounts for nearly 70 percent of the nation’s energy production. But in late March, Beijing announced that it would shut down the last of the capital’s four coal-burning power plants.
Foreigners living in Beijing have obsessed over its pollution for years; the air got so poisonous a year ago that I started compulsively charting air-quality index statistics in Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese concern, however, is a relatively new phenomenon. When my family moved to Beijing in 2010, many of our local friends still seemed to be in denial about pollution. One Chinese acquaintance, worldly and well-educated, insisted that the gray pall hanging over the city was merely fog — “just like in San Francisco.” Many others used the passive term favored by Chinese state media, “wumai,” meaning “haze,” rather than “wuran,” literally “dirty contamination,” with its suggestion of human responsibility.
Among friends in Beijing, we joke, darkly, that we all suffer from a sort of battered-spouse syndrome. When the oppression lifts — usually when a north wind blasts away the smog — the city sparkles in surreal high-definition. People rush outdoors to gulp in the air, to soak in the sun, to enjoy a freedom so long withheld. On those miraculous days, it’s easy to forgive the city for all the suffering it has inflicted, to half-believe that the worst is over. Then, inevitably, the heavy smog descends again, along with our spirits.
But this grudging acceptance has lately turned into concern, especially among parents in China’s growing middle class. They have enjoyed the benefits of rising prosperity; now they are facing its darker consequences — not just air pollution, but also pervasive soil and water contamination and recurring food-safety scandals.
