By Matthew Brooker
(Bloomberg) There are downsides to living in an economic miracle, not least of them being poisoned by the air.
We know from experience that sufferers have a tendency to minimize the damage: look, I can see my hand today. Young Johnny coughing up his guts in the corner just has a cold. He’ll improve when the weather gets warmer.
Sometimes, though, an arrow from reality pierces the protective illusion in which we encase ourselves. Friends arrive from overseas and look around with wonder and distaste. You live here? Really?
Or the government just admits that it’s killing you.
“Beijing is not a livable city at the moment,” Wang Anshun, the mayor of Beijing, said in a work report to the local Communist Party congress last week, according to the state-run China Youth Daily.
If you can’t rely on China’s information-controlling, Internet-censoring government to stay on message and sustain the soothing belief that all is well under the party’s guidance, who can you trust? In a world where Swedish air purifiers and face masks for the kids become part of normal life (as they are in Beijing), too harsh a dose of candor can be disorienting.
At least the mayor is showing a personal commitment to tackle the issue. Wang said last year he will kill himself if there isn’t a substantial improvement by 2017, according to state broadcaster China Central Television, in what may have been an over-enthusiastic translation. (That’s what we call leadership, though. Can we get a similar commitment from Hong Kong?)
Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong all have their issues with air pollution, to varying degrees (this Opening Line has lived in two of the three.) It’s not all bad. Twitter lights up with pictures of Beijing’s crystal blue skies every time the wind sweeps through and clears all the toxins away.
China’s capital, in fact, has had a good run just recently. The concentration of PM2.5 particles, the smallest and most dangerous to health, was at 10 per cubic meter yesterday afternoon, with air quality classed as good, according to the U.S. Embassy’s index.
Not so Hong Kong, where the government last week told people to stay indoors as air pollution reached the highest level on its gauge at more than half of monitoring stations.
China’s cities at least have some respite in view. Economic rebalancing looks like it’s for real, which in the long term means fewer smoke-stack industries and, for Hong Kong, less factory smog being blown south in the winter months.
For the real misery, look to India, where economic growth is forecast to pick up rather than slow down. New Delhi, which waved goodbye to U.S. President Barack Obama through the smog yesterday, has the world’s highest levels of PM2.5: 15 times higher than the average annual exposure recommended by the World Health Organization in 2013.
Blizzards? You don’t know how lucky you are.-BLOOMBERG
