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With just one day to go before the Opening Ceremony, the cleanliness of the host nation’s face is in the hands of a capricious force no practitioner of science or superstition prognosticates accurately: the weather. Whether you call it Mother Nature or the local equivalent, the Mandate of Heaven, China as the modern Middle Kingdom will take all the help it can get.
According to Kenneth A. Rahn, professor emeritus of oceanography with the Center of Atmospheric Chemistry Studies at the University of Rhode Island, cold front winds blowing from Mongolia and Siberia, north of Beijing, create blue sky conditions that silence critics, while winds from the south, China’s populous industrial heartland, portend a miasmic muck of pollution that turns the city into its filthy doppelganger dubbed Grayjing.
The official figure of US$17 billion dollars China has spent to reduce pollution since winning the right to host the games in 2001 counts for little if the weather doesn't conceal systemic problems with the air, land and water. Visibly bad air opens Pandora’s Box on China’s many other well-documented environmental maladies.
Deputy Director Du Shaozhong from the Beijing Environmental Bureau was recently quoted by state-run Xinhua News Agency saying, “Images don’t reflect the reality.” He urged outsiders not to base their assessment of air quality on photos, claiming they’re “not accurate.”
Du’s rhetoric was one month off for accurate obfuscation. On Sept. 8 he could have fled into “Bai Lu,” a term meaning “haze and mist,” one of 24 solar periods – each lasting a little more than two weeks – that have a special niche in China’s lunar agricultural calendar, used for the last 4,000 years.
Authorities like Du may be blowing smoke in the public’s face, but athletes who were promised they could breathe easy are proving harder to convince. The first indication of lowered expectations came Tuesday when members of the U.S. Olympic cycling team arrived at the Beijing airport wearing masks.
Their reaction reflects fear the air pollution severity in China might be five times as high as in the United States, a stance with credence depending on where and what you measure, plus who you trust.
There are longstanding concerns about the veracity of environmental data based upon Chinese government figures. Two independent sources, unwilling to jeopardize their status and organizations’ ability to work with the People’s Republic, talked frankly about the problem of air quality with United Press International in exchange for anonymity.
“Recent reports saying Beijing had better air than New York used biased numbers,” a scientist measuring pollution in both countries told UPI. “Data from the worst sites of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens gridlock were compared with remote traffic stations in Beijing’s suburban Haidian, Mentougou and Changping disticts,” another source said.
Several major Western media, including the Associated Press and BBC, have brought in their own pollution monitoring devices for independent assessment and reportage of air quality conditions in Beijing.
Aside from what you can breathe, questions as to what you can eat grown in the tainted soil, and drink from poisoned aquifers, are also major concerns in the Chinese capital and nationwide.
In the run-up to the start of the Games the World Health Organization placed a brochure at the airport and in more than 100 hotels around the city, “A Guide on Safe Food for Travelers,” which cautions anyone going to Beijing or any of the other Olympic sites not to eat raw or undercooked foods and to avoid contaminated drinking water, including ice used for cold drinks.
Hans Troedsson, the WHO’s top representative in China, said earlier this week that while the country has shown “strong leadership” in strengthening its national food-safety system, at the same time it also warned travelers to take precautionary measures themselves to ensure that “safety risks are minimized.”
While air quality will draw the world’s immediate attention on the topic of China’s environment during the Olympics, it is only one of the issues involved.
