Happy holidays, everybody!

Congratulations to Ethiopians Girmay Birhanu Gebru and Fatuma Sado Dergo, the men’s and women’s winners of the 34th Beijing International Marathon that was run today in “very unhealthy” to “hazardous” air. It was so bad that Xinhua even called it “smog” in an article that begins with this incredible factoid:

China’s bid to win the women’s race of the Beijing International Marathon for the 23rd straight year was thwarted on Sunday as Ethiopian Fatuma Sado Dergo braved the smog to finish first in the 42.195-kilometer run in two hours, 30 minutes and 3 seconds.

A twenty-two-year-old record was snapped, and every picture on the Internet is of runners in face masks. That’s what happens when you subject 30,000 runners to your headlong rush for GDP. Not that this guy seemed to mind:

Gebru (not pictured) won with the time of 2:10:42.

Gebru had hoped to break the tournament record of 2:07:16, set by Ethiopian Tadese Tola one year ago, but it turned out to be almost five minutes shy of his personal best (2:05:49).

“It was a tough game, but I was satisfied with what I did to finish the match. Looking forward to coming back to Beijing next year,” said Gebru.

Beijing welcomes you.

(Top image via @PDChina)

Forget human rights, which will not, I promise you, get the man on the 5F dancefloor to lose his groove. Forget censorship, because who cares about cultural emasculation? Forget Zhou Yongkang, school stabbings, Diaoyu Islands, corruption, Sichuan earthquakes, shoddy construction. Take a lesson from the New York Times when it wants to link-bait: head over to the US embassy’s Beijing air Twitter account and report the latest AQI, because nothing — absolutely nothing — unites the English-reading populace of China quite like bad air.

Knowing this, maybe the US embassy has done all of us a favor by posting Beijing air quality data dating back to 2008. Quartz has helpfully put it in an eye-catching chart, above. “Scary” chart, reads the headline. Feel scared, Beijingers? If only there were a way to leave.

Listen: all sympathy for you if your children live here and you’re legitimately concerned about their health. And if you’re making money off others’ fears, whether selling filters or jars of French air, more power to you. I’m not saying bad air is good. But what is it we hope to accomplish by complaining on our Facebook feeds? To make friends and family back home rubberneck at all our woe? Or to feel special? Do we think our voices will compel officials to do “something,” or “more,” as if their children live under a different sky and they remain blissfully ignorant of or unaffected by PM2.5? (Okay, actually — sometimes the children of rich people do have other options.) AQI obsession has gotten a bit cliched, no?

I think the answer is we — you, me, guvs, squids, the rest — have nothing else in common. We’re from too many different countries, to say nothing of cultures, and we need this to feel connected to, I don’t know, each other? We need something to agree upon and nod our heads to, because Xi Jinping falls short of the Great Uniter standard. I’m not going to take pollution away from you.

I just want to say I’m tired of seeing your AQI retweets.

If you think I’m being harsh, consider: traditional media routinely, flippantly compares living in Beijing to a nuclear winter. Seriously: a barren, gray hellscape caused by a force rivaling the explosion of stars resulting in death, destruction, and decay. That’s where we’re living. Tell that to the young lady sipping her Cosmopolitan in the hutong bar.

Where do you go talking sensibly about a subject after you’ve burned your last hyperbole?

Lily Kuo, author of the Quartz article, gives us this little sane tidbit to think about:

At the same time, the embassy’s motivations for publicizing the data in Beijing have been questioned. China’s bad air quality has been a source of international criticism, derision, and discontent at home. In contrast, the US embassy in New Delhi does not widely publish its air quality measures, despite air pollution that has hit levels twice as high as Beijing’s for several winters running and much lower public awareness of the problem.

Air quality is a problem in both capital cities, but perhaps the difference is their relationship with the US: India has long been a diplomatic ally, but China is increasingly seen as something of an economic rival.

Whether you believe it or not, it’s sure more interesting to ponder than “air is bad.”

When it comes to toadying up to authority, you can’t beat foreign business. While smog comes and goes like a dissident in the night, its legacy lives on — for example, in the missive below from Savills, the London-based real estate agency, which wins our coveted Beijing Cream Corporate Whore of the Month Award with “Twelve tricks to protect you from haze.”

Click to enlarge

What exactly is “haze”? A nightclub — or do they mean the noxious pall of manmade fumes that hangs over the city like a perpetual funeral veil?

It’s smog, Savills. Smog. Which kills. You don’t have to play silly buggers with the word. Even the English-language dailies have given up fanciful uses of “fog” to describe the shit they’re breathing. Look, here’s a critical Global Times article that uses “smog” in the headline.

Anyway, here’s some of that time-proven Savills advice:

1. Wear a hat.
2. Wear a coat
3.Wash your hands
4. Drink more water

It’s like listening to a lecture from your Chinese grandmother. Yes, we should be encouraging people to wash their hands more — bathroom hygiene is very much in its infancy here, especially among chefs, I’ve noticed — but some of Savills’s advice (“wear a hat”) is barmy.

Don’t pick your nose? “Nose breathing helps stop PM10 and larger items like pollen and sand, but it’s totally useless against PM2.5,” explains Dr. Richard Saint Cyr, local medic and oft-quoted Beijing Family United expert on the topic of inhaling treacle.

The only really helpful “trick” — “wear a respirator” (an unfortunate mistranslation for “wear a face mask”) — is known to mostly everybody, but, crucially, doesn’t specify an N95 mask. (Every time someone’s out in the smog wearing a simple cotton mask, isn’t there an instinctive urge to grab them and shout, “It’s useless, you poor damn fool! Useless!”?)

Most foreigners are wise to this, because the overseas and expat media ram advice about wearing the right kind of protection practically down our throats. Sadly, there’s still plenty of naïveté among others about the risks and preventative measures. And bad advice, however well meaning, is still bad advice.

Like this: “Open your window wisely” makes sense, but (Dr. St Cyr again) “Opening at noontime makes no sense.” Why noon, exactly? Does the AQI have a schedule? Does the smog take lunch? Dr. St Cyr: “Their advice for a high-fiber diet is generally good because it implies a healthy anti-oxidant boost — but certainly not because of any ‘expelling gut toxin’ benefit.”

The doc also reiterated his point that, as far as smoking is concerned, an average day in Beijing is equivalent to less than one sixth of one cigarette. (What about an average day in Yinchuan?) So that guy standing with his mouth open in the middle of a 500+ AQI day, just sucking the stuff in? He’s healthier than your average bar or nightclub.

Still, if you’re getting your medical advice off Savills, why not fashion tips from the gurus at Knight Frank? Maybe Century 21 can help with your marriage.

Think pollution in Beijing’s bad? At least you’re not in Yinchuan, where the air quality index is currently at 999.

How do we know this? It’s thanks to a brilliant little website called Air Pollution in China (big hat tip to Josh Dyer), which utilizes a “Real-time Air Quality Index Visual Map” that puts Google Map pins on Chinese cities that register AQI readings. The numbers, though sometimes hard to read (there are a lot of overlapping pins), are color-coded to give you a general sense of which areas are blanketed in pollution and which are not. Green is safe and maroon is hazardous.

This website isn’t new — the first post on its FAQ is dated January 11, 2013, and there’s an Android app available for download — but it’s worth mentioning again here. Remember, all data is presented in real-time (to the best of the technology’s ability).

Play around with it. You can also check out the relative pollution levels of cities in other countries…

Image created by Andrew Frank. Quiz time: can you identify the neighborhood?

(H/T Madeline Gies)

Heavy smog couldn’t deter runners of the annual “naked pigs run” in Beijing’s Olympic Park on Sunday. According to China Daily, more than 300 participants — “only allowed to wear underwear” — partook in the event. (Clearly some people wore more than underwear, but let’s let that be neither here nor there.) Some wore gas masks, making for interesting photos:

Others brazenly flaunted their health amid pollution, which is, as they say, the spirit. China Daily with this:

Meng Guangping, 51, a worker at a Beijing machinery factory, joined the activity for the third time.

“I didn’t feel unwell after running,” Meng said. “I run regularly and will not stop when there is haze. I think I have become used to the haze.”

The very next paragraph:

The number of asthma and emphysema patients seeking help at Beijing hospitals has doubled since the smog started on Thursday, China National Radio reported.

Shine on you crazy diamonds.

“The smog has become so thick in Beijing that the city’s natural light-starved masses have begun flocking to huge digital commercial television screens across the city to observe virtual sunrises.”

Lied The Daily Mail in an article last week. Although they gave no proof for this assertion besides a photo, their horrible reporting inexplicably caught on at Time, Huffington Post, and CBS News.

There’s so many things I want to say here.

• First, this isn’t the first China lie that gets picked up and broadcast by Western news media. Mike Daisey’s fabricated NPR story on this American life comes prominently to mind. This is what happens when you cut foreign bureaus and let playwrights and people who know nothing about the country #Chinasplain on reputable platform.
• Second, it took the blog Tech In Asia to take down this story. It’s not even their beat. Hell yeah blogs. Even though we don’t have the kind of staff that these news organizations (don’t worry, I don’t count HuffPo or The Daily Mail) a good blog can sometimes get it really right.
• Third, we derive a good deal of satisfaction laughing at Global Times headlines, but when US news outlets get it wrong we don’t call them on it with enough force. At least Global Times is reasonably straightforward about being a state-run propaganda rag (with some nice people at it).
• Fourth, everything Quartz said in “Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape they’ll share anything that confirms it.”

So start making a hit list of news sites not to read on China. You might have a place to start.

Just as the monthly nationwide freakout over Chinese air was winding down, Chinese Central Television had to go ahead and publish an article, since deleted, that lauded the “Five Surprising Benefits From China’s Haze.” I really have nothing to add to a topic already covered by Tea Leaf Nation (“Although it may be satirical, the article reads more as a tin-eared attempt to wring an Upworthy.com-style listicle from a genuine environmental menace”), Time, The World of Chinese, etc., but I do want to share the below video, from The Onion, posted three years ago.

China Celebrates Its Status As World’s Number One Air Polluter

“China revels in a UN report that found it has the highest smog levels in the world, a sure sign of China’s progress and prosperity.”

Compare with Chinese state media’s benefits of smog (translation via TLN):

1. It unifies Chinese people.

2. It makes China more equal.

3. It raises citizen awareness.

4. Chinese people are funnier when they are contending with deadly smog.

5. The haze makes Chinese people more knowledgeable.

Really, how does one react to that, other than to stand and applaud?

POSTSCRIPT: Global Times, you also win.

(Image via)

REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Adapted with permission from Hug China.

Shanghai, China’s financial hub, appears determined to compete with Beijing, China’s political epicenter, in every aspect, including pollution.

Starting Thursday, smog has shrouded Shanghai and nearby provinces, with PM2.5 readings shooting from 200 micrograms per cubic meter to as high as 700 at some air quality monitoring stations.

As of 1 pm Friday, the average PM2.5 reading in Shanghai reached an off-the-charts level of 602.5; the PM10 reading reached 671, with the highest reading recorded at 726 in Putuo district.

In neighboring Jiangsu province, visibility was less than 200 meters, causing expressways to be shut down. Visibility was less than 50 meters in some areas of central and east China on Saturday.

Not surprisingly, the frequently occurring smog has sparked outrage and debate among Chinese netizens. But in a country where ordinary people have no say in the administration of their nation, they’re limited to criticizing, mocking, and sighing on the Internet.

As a result, a new buzzword has gone viral: “Feed People Smog” (喂人民服雾), or Wei renmin fuwu. It’s a homophone for “Serve the People” (为人民服务), a political slogan introduced by Mao Zedong as a requirement for all government officials and party cadres.

“Feed people smog” first appeared in the comment section of an article and was subsequently reposted on news portals and social media. The comment reads:

Currently many netizens are discussing a Chinese name for PM2.5. Some propose serious names such as “public smog source” (a homophone for civil servants), high-end names as “capital dust” or “Beijing dust,” hegemonic names as “dust-caused disease misses sweet” (a homophone for Genghis Khan), optimistic names as “dust world beautiful” (a homophone for the ancient Chinese heartbreaker Chen Shimei), and entertaining names as “keep inhaling dust” (a homophone for the Hong Kong actor Edison Chan). But all these names are just so-so in my opinion. I didn’t understand the power of the Chinese language until five characters came to me: “Feed the people smog!”

Cynical Chinese netizens have added more sarcastic comments:

A NetEase netizen from Shanghai: What the Japanese 731 army did not achieve has been all realized! Feed the people smog!

NetEase netizen 天一的天天下第一的一: A special scenery. Shanghai shall repackage and promote it and property prices will soon double.

NetEase netizen billlee2013: The atmosphere is good. Shanghai deserves its nickname Demon Capital.

A NetEase netizen from Shenzhen: Good phenomenon! Smog can enhance the immune system for Shanghai residents.

‘Feed people smog’ becomes new buzz word in China… (Hug China)

An eight-year-old girl from Jiangsu province has contracted lung cancer, with the blame falling squarely on the environment. Via SCMP:

The girl from Jiangsu lived by a busy road where she inhaled all kinds of dust and particles, China News Service cited Dr Feng Dongjie of Jiangsu Cancer Hospital as saying. These included superfine PM2.5 particles, less than 2.5 microns wide, that are considered the most dangerous component of smog, Feng said.

Note that this is not technically the same as getting lung cancer from pollution. It’s inhaling dust and other probably toxic, superfine particles, much of which from the ground. But don’t let that stop you from revisiting these scary stats:

In Beijing, which has suffered frequent, severe smog in recent years, deaths from lung cancer rose by 56 per cent from 2001 to 2010. A fifth of all cancer patients suffer lung cancer, figures from the Beijing Health Bureau show. It became the leading cause of cancer deaths among men in the capital and the second-biggest among women, after breast cancer, in 2010.

In addition, according to Xinhua, hospital staff said while most lung cancer patients are around 50 years old, in the past few years the fastest growing demographic of new patients have been between the ages of 3 and 50. (We’re not sure why the range would start from three, since the youngest patient is eight; Chinese media is weird.)

Economics or environment? We all reap the benefits of speedy growth, basking in opportunities and increasing salaries. Meanwhile, we all continue to suffer the consequences, too.

Smog blamed as girl, 8, becomes youngest lung cancer patient (SCMP) (Image via)

While Harbin continues to wheeze under a blanket of pollution, Beijing’s municipal government announced measures yesterday to combat smog should when it returns to the nation’s capital. Here’s Sina:

The city government said Tuesday the strictest emergency measures will take effect when the pollution index for fine particulate matter, PM2.5, is forecast to exceed 300 micrograms per cubic meter for three days running.

Private vehicles will be allowed to operate only on alternating days, depending on the last number of their license plates. Factory emissions will be cut 30 percent by suspending or limiting production, and construction sites must halt excavation and demolition work. Classes will be suspended, a measure likely to cause inconvenience in a city where most parents both work.

The odd-even license plate measure would be the first time we’ve seen it since the Olympics. It was at that time — and I’ve repeated myself since — that I said the plate restriction should be permanent. People would inevitably take advantage of the situation by buying extra sets of plates, but the net effect would be to take vehicles off the road. Considering the traffic on most days, many commuters, I daresay, wouldn’t even be inconvenienced by being forced to take public transportation.

Sina points out that Chinese reporters were skeptical about this plan. When will the government actually initiate these measures, and how often? Once a year, if even? Also, they don’t seem to be preventative. Only after pollution is off the charts will the government act.

But it appears that, finally, policymakers and those in the Environmental Protection Bureau are nearing the end of their patience for high-volume polluters. The decision-makers, even those who own multiple cars, live in the same city as the rest of us, with children who go to school under the same sky. It’s easier to have the backdone to enact change when you have something personally at stake.

By now you surely know: Harbin in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, a city of 11 million, is blanketed in cancer-gray, toxic-smelling, blindingly thick smog. The AQI is over 500 and the PM2.5 measurement hit one thousand – higher than it ever was during the worst of times in Beijing. Everything has closed down, from highways to airports to schools. Sinosphere and the Atlantic both have pictures and anecdotes. And AFP has this bit of funny:

Drivers who jumped red lights because they could not see them “will not be penalised”, the state news agency Xinhua quoted local traffic official Xue Yuqing as saying.

My God, it’s anarchy. Smogarchy.

But you know what? In these harsh times, it’s a strong nation — a proud nation — that rallies together to fight a common enemy. Only together can we prevail. At least, this is the message in the above ad for 3M air filter masks (as noticed by Eric Jou of Kotaku / China Daily). Harbin, We Are With You, it reads. As if a bomb had just gone off in the streets and as a country of big-hearted, good people we should all light candles, pray, and donate.

Well, a bomb did kind of go off, if these pictures are any indication:

Yes, let us pray for Harbin. Because someday this winter, perhaps they’ll need to pray for us.

Oh, great. Another unwinnable war.

Beijing’s Environmental Protection Agency is serious about efforts to curb pollution this time, like, really serious. Cower in fear, Pollution, you will soon be driven hence. Beijing will hear the lamentation of your women.

“It’s a declaration of war against PM2.5,” Beijing’s Environmental Protection Bureau said in a statement on its website, referring to tiny particles in the air that pose the greatest risk to human health.

That’s from Shanghai Daily (via “Agencies”), which explains that the city has basically done everything it can wants to — shutting factories, building more subway lines — without seeing improvement. Huh. I wonder fucking why.

So what big weapons in this new War Against Pollution will the authorities have at their disposal?

In the newly unveiled measures, Beijing will place tougher restrictions on the number of new vehicles allowed on the roads each year, curbing annual growth to nearly zero.

The government aims to cap the number of vehicles in the city at 6 million by the end of 2017, compared with 5.35 million by the end of July, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Who am I? YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE, pollution. I… wait a minute. Isn’t 6 million greater than 5.35 million?

Beijing also aims to reduce total vehicle fuel consumption by at least 5 percent from 2012, by promoting the sale of new energy and small vehicles, and encouraging people to drive less frequently.

So this war involves politely asking people to buy a type of cars no one wants, instead of Audis?

The city government will also restrict the number of vehicles allowed in specific areas during certain times of the day, starting next year, it added.

“In order to curb vehicle emissions, we have to introduce a market mechanism to reduce intensity of vehicle use,” Xinhua quoted city environmental official Li Kunsheng as saying.

But at least government agencies are going to tell auto makers, in no uncertain terms — martial, you might say — to get in line with these new policies, even if that means taking a revenue hit, lest they want to pack up and GTFO.

Carmakers including Volkswagen AG, General Motors Co, Toyota Motor Corp and Ford Motor Co have all said they are shifting their attention to China’s lower-tier cities, as sales growth in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai starts to stagnate.

Oh, I see. They’re just moving to the inner provinces, where pesky journalists and foreigners and influential microbloggers don’t live.

But there is a second front to this war, of course: the factories. Like with a cruise missile, they’re being told…

Other measures to be introduced to clean up Beijing’s air include ordering 1,200 polluting companies to upgrade or close some or all their facilities in the years to 2016.

Fuck it. The terrorists have already won.

This isn’t too bizarre — when else is one to get a chance to take a souvenir photo in front of a gigantic poster of the Hong Kong skyline? I mean, holy moly, everyone — it’s a gigantic photo of the Hong Kong skyline!

August 21, CFP, via NetEase, which has more photos.

(H/T Shanghaiist)