Beijing Is New ‘Air Apparent’ as Smog Capital

BEIJING — Miss Zhang has her regulars, customers who come looking for a hit as often as every other day. They lean back in recliners while she sticks a tube up one of their nostrils. They inhale deeply for up to 20 minutes. Then they leave feeling invigorated and better able to cope with the stresses of urban living.

What is the source of this high? “Pure, medical oxygen,” announces the poster on the wall of the Beijing Recreation Center, where Zhang welcomes her well-heeled patrons.

Welcome to one of the smoggiest cities on Earth, where the sheltering sky is a leaden gray and the people beneath pay for shots of good, clean air in a handful of “oxygen bars” around town.

The customers seek a variety of benefits--a better complexion, a longer life, a clearer mind. But the existence of these establishments underlines a single fact: In Beijing, air quality has become something of an oxymoron.

By one measure, the atmosphere here is two to five times dirtier than that in Los Angeles--a sobering statistic for this capital’s population of 11 million.

The level of pollutants in the Beijing air continually exceeds limits deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization. And experts say the situation is unlikely to improve demonstrably any time soon as China races pell-mell into both the industrial and consumer ages in one go, spewing soot from its factories and fumes from its growing fleet of privately owned cars.

“When I was a little boy in Beijing, the blue sky was really impressive. I can still remember that,” said Liang Congjie, president of Friends of Nature, a local environmental group. “Nowadays it’s so hard for you to see the blue.”

Things have reached such a pitch that the Chinese government, though loath to admit failings of any kind, has declared pollution a national crisis.

In a surprisingly frank assessment last year, China’s top environmental official, Xie Zhenhua, described the condition of the country’s ecosystem as “grave” and predicted that China would have to spend $50 billion over the next five years to bring air and water pollution under control. Beijing has appealed to the World Bank for help.

“Everyone recognizes the problem,” said Steve Judd, who studies energy and climate at the World Wildlife Fund’s new office here. “Now we have to focus on solutions.”

Already, China has spent millions of dollars in an effort to clean up its skies by phasing out leaded gasoline and shutting down thousands of the worst-offending factories. The government has toughened anti-pollution laws, even calling for the death penalty in severe cases of environmental crime.

But protecting the air remains a monumental task for a nation wedded to double-digit economic growth and saddled with political and geographical burdens that literally leave its citizens gasping for breath.

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In Beijing, breathing the air for a day is equal to smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes, one study concluded. Lung cancer is now the deadliest form of cancer in China’s urban areas, and a quarter of all deaths in China are caused by respiratory diseases, although it is impossible to separate the effects of pollution from those of actual cigarette smoking, a popular pastime.

“If you already have asthma, and then you go to Beijing, you’re killing yourself,” said Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at Canada’s University of Manitoba who studies pollution in China.

Much of Beijing’s pollution is flushed into the air by industrial works, such as the massive Capital Iron & Steel Corp., not far from the summer palaces and parks built by Chinese emperors to enjoy the city’s scenic beauty. The plant boasts a work force of 200,000 and unleashes high concentrations of sulfur dioxide, a major pollutant and contributor to acid rain.

“No capital in the world has such a big steel corporation, with 10 million tons of capacity a year,” Liang said.

In winter, the chill of which is just now fading, the factory’s enormous appetite for state-subsidized coal combines with that of thousands of household heaters to cloak Beijing with soot.

China, the world’s largest consumer of coal, burns 1.3 billion tons each year, the source of 75% of its energy--and most of its unhealthful air, according to government figures. Some Japanese scientists contend that China’s sulfur dioxide emissions from coal burning have caused acid rain to fall on Japan and pushed a huge cloud of smog out over the Pacific Ocean.

Yet because Capital Iron & Steel is a linchpin in the economy, the government will no more ask the company to slash production or move operations than it will order Beijingers to stop heating their homes with the coal briquettes delivered by young men on bikes.

The result: eyes that smart, throats that constrict, lungs that labor.

“Yesterday I could actually taste the sulfur in the air in my office,” said Seamus Ryan, an Irish doctor who works in Beijing. “It really is dreadful.”

But for many of China’s leaders and citizens, the war on pollution and the war on poverty cannot be fought at the same time, forcing a grim political choice in which the environment loses.

“You cannot close down all the factories overnight. They’re the backbone of economic development,” Liang said. “How would you deal with all these unemployed workers?”

Nor can you remove Beijing from the north of China, among the dustiest settled regions on the planet. Winds sweep in sand from the Gobi Desert, which gets caught up with fuel-combustion byproducts to turn the air into a thick stew of particulate matter.

Indeed, northern China has some of the worst levels of polluted air on record. Until a recent cleanup campaign, Benxi, an industrial town in the northeast, regularly disappeared from satellite photos underneath its impenetrable shield of smog. Residents of Shenyang, which experts say is the smoggiest major city in Asia, suck in up to 10 times the limit of sulfur dioxide and particulate matter set by Chinese authorities.

“No other cities in human history have been in a position like that,” Smil said.

China as a whole has five of the world’s Top 10 smoggiest cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, according to the World Bank, which ranks Mexico City at the top of the list.

Anything left outdoors in Beijing, from playground equipment to bicycles, is coated with a fine layer of grime by day’s end.

The dirt also finds its way inside: One survey showed that Beijing families, on average, spend nine more days a year cleaning their houses than families in unpolluted rural areas. The filth comes from coal-burning, the Gobi, the city’s myriad construction projects--another sign of China’s relentless economy--and a relatively new culprit: cars.

Private automobiles have exploded onto the scene in Beijing. An independent local polling firm recently found that two-thirds of residents are in favor of private cars, symbols of personal wealth in China’s rapid modernization.

Compared with Los Angeles, home of 6.2 million cars in 1994, Beijing lags far behind, with just more than 1 million at the end of last year. But the number is steadily climbing.

“With more cars on the road, the air has become much dirtier,” said one 30-year-old woman who sits by the street throughout the day hawking fresh fruit.

The cars burn leaded fuel, which not only pumps tons of lead into the air but also renders catalytic converters useless--devices, now standard in California cars, that reduce pollutants. By the new year, Beijing motorists are supposed to switch to unleaded gas, followed by the rest of the nation in 2000.

With the increasing supply of cars, however, “even if these cars are cleaner and more efficient, at best you can hope that [Beijing] will be standing still” in terms of pollution, Smil said. “That’s optimistic.”

Smil and others doubt that China will be able to pull itself out of its ecological morass in the near future. But they draw some hope from the government’s stated commitment to improving the environment, while understanding that political and economic realities often prevail.

Last year, President Jiang Zemin reportedly denounced the old formula of pursuing economic gains first, then cleaning up afterward. The state-run China Daily reported last month that the government shut down nearly 63,000 small factories between September and the end of March in a bid to stop the nation’s worst air and water polluters.

Chinese journalists have been ordered to beef up their coverage of environmental issues, such as Beijing’s successful push to install natural gas for heating and cooking in new apartments. Beginning in June, television stations in major Chinese cities will broadcast weekly air-quality readings. And the National Environment Protection Agency plans to set up a group of “green” schools within a few years to teach environmental protection and conservation to students of all ages.

Liang’s Friends of Nature has promoted environmental awareness for three years now, through lectures in schools and the community. His organization, possibly China’s only government-allowed activist group, wants to spur the kind of indignation and initiative shown a year ago by the residents of Tangshan, a suburb east of Beijing.

Fed up with a small tire-recycling plant in their midst, which was belching foul-smelling smoke, neighbors took their displeasure to the streets. Hundreds of people blockaded the factory. A pedicab rolled through town broadcasting Jiang’s statements on protecting the environment.

Surprised by the outburst of negative public opinion, local officials shut the factory. “That’s one case where the ordinary people won a victory against the factories,” Liang said. “For ordinary citizens, it’s easy [to get motivated]. For decision-makers, it’s difficult.”