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本帖最后由 lilyma06 于 2011-12-29 14:41 编辑
英国《每日电讯报》12月25日文章，原题：灰色清晨：在北京的阴霾下生活 如大多数周日清晨一样，我又被7岁儿子颠球的声音弄醒了。比利热衷足球，更喜欢他名为“北京猎豹”的少儿足球队。在我大喊“比利！别在屋里踢球！”之前，球队教练那令人心慌意乱的手机短信就响了。不用打开窗帘查看隐没在北京浓雾中的附近建筑，我就知道短信的内容了。这是一个月内球队活动第二次“因大雾而取消。”
作为在北京生活的父母，这是大雾真正令人心痛之处：为孩子生活在空气污染严重到每周都有几天不能外出玩耍的地方而愧疚。在北京，碳排放并非仅仅是某些用来在联合国气候大会上讨价还价的概念。这是种随处可见的东西，每日在衣领、窗玻璃和我孩子的肺部留下脏兮兮的痕迹。
除非你每天生活在烟雾中，否则很难理解其最大影响并非在于身体而是精神折磨。让北京不宜居住的是一种难以言表的灰色。在每天清晨将你笼罩之前，这是一团你能深切体会到的灰色浓雾。前段时间，它导致飞机延误和交通堵塞，令你感觉像在穿越科马克·麦卡锡小说《路》中的末日世界。
你必须学会与现实隔绝，因为沉湎其中只能自寻烦恼。作为父母，你要多想想好的方面，此类事情确实不胜枚举：学校质量、孩子们流利的中文以及与这个将改变其世纪的国家成为朋友等现实（都令人欣慰）。
但是，努力适应浓雾中的生活并不意味着熟视无睹。它实际上已成为日常生活不可分割的一部分。在校车停车点、在办公室内、在公园和酒吧内，当天的空气质量无疑成了标准的开场白。尽管民众不久前才知道PM2.5，但它已成为热议话题。随着中国人的受教育水平提高和信息愈发透明，传统做法已很难奏效。
在经济增长改变中国后出生的一代人面临着某些紧迫问题：谁正为经济“奇迹”埋单，谁才是真正的受惠者？这些都是一个即将震撼世界的国家成长中的烦恼。只有中国人用自己的时间和方式才能解决此类日益严峻的国内问题。▲（作者彼得·福斯特，王会聪译）
Where the mornings taste grey: living under a cloud of smog in Beijing
It was one Sunday last month when the really painful part of living under Beijing's almost perpetual smogs finally hit home.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8970444/Where-the-mornings-taste-grey-living-under-a-cloud-of-smog-in-Beijing.html
 Buildings and the Guomao Bridge are pictured amid heavy haze and smog in Beijing Photo: REUTERS
By Peter Foster, Beijing
As on most Sundays, I awoke to the sound of my seven-year-old son dribbling a football up and down the corridor that runs the length of our 16th-floor apartment: pit-pat, pit-pat, pit-boom as he "scored" against the door of the parental bedroom, just in case we might still be asleep.
Like many small boys, Billy lives for football – and more particularly for his team and his team-mates (a band of little brothers called the Beijing Cheetahs), for whom he had tucked home a crucial equaliser the previous week. But even before my wife or I could yell "Billy! No football in the house!" the dreaded 7am text message arrived from the team's coach. We both knew what it said, even before we opened the curtains to see the adjacent apartment blocks reduced to ghostly shadows in the murk of a lowering Beijing sky.
For the second time that month, football had been "smogged off". Looking at the crestfallen lad (already in his kit), I remembered my own childhood and waking on summer mornings to the patter of rain, knowing there would be no cricket that day. And as a Beijing parent, that's what makes the smog really hurt: the guilt about living in a place where, several days a week, the air is so toxic that the children cannot play outside at school.
In Beijing, carbon emissions are not some notional future figures whose levels can be haggled over at UN climate change conferences like the one that has just finished in Durban. Emissions are a here-and-now reality whose dirty footprints are stamped daily on shirt-collars, windowpanes and my children's lungs.
Durban promised a "Platform for Enhanced Action" on climate change by 2020, but that's the kind of promise that elicits only weary laughter in this city, where "action plans" and "strike-hard" campaigns are the earnest mechanisms by which things that need doing never get done. Only last week, China ordered local governments to reduce emissions of "major pollutants" by as much as 10 per cent by 2015.
Until you have lived day-to-day in the smog, it is hard to understand that the most serious impacts are psychological, rather than – we hope – physical, although friends with asthmatic children who cough themselves to sleep every night might disagree.
It is the impenetrable greyness of the days that makes Beijing a difficult city in which to live; and by that I don't mean the drizzly, cloudy sky-scapes familiar to the English. No, this is a greyness that you can taste, sooty and sweet, every morning before it envelops you. When the bad days pile up, as they did recently, causing flight delays and traffic jams, it can feel as though you are wandering through the post-apocalypse world of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road.
If that sounds like exaggeration, it is perhaps because the smog does tend to send everyone a little crazy. You know this because in the brief interludes when it clears, everyone suddenly cheers up as though it is the first day of spring again.
For most of the time – except when it's impossible, because football is cancelled – you have to learn to shut out the reality, because to dwell on it is a sure route to madness. So instead, as parents, you focus on the good things – and there are many. On the quality of the schools and the fact that the children now speak rapid-fire Mandarin and are making friends with a country that, for better or worse, is going to shape their century.
In practical terms, children are sent to play indoors in soft-play areas while, at vast expense, their parents purchase air purifying machines that in Britain you find only in intensive care units. No one really knows if they make a difference but, as one smog-hardened resident of Beijing disparagingly observes, at least the machines give everyone "a button to push".
But the fact that you adjust to life in the smog does not mean you forget about it. In every sense, it looms over daily life. At the school bus stop, in the office, down at the park and in the pub, the state of that day's air quality is the standard conversation opener, much like the English talking about their beloved weather.
Everyone consults their mobile phones for the latest readings provided by an air-monitoring station on the roof of the US Embassy. New arrivals quickly learn the lexicon, talking naturally about PM2.5s – particles of 2.5 microns or less – and the significance of the index that measures them on a scale of 1-500.
The index is frequently around 400, which would be a national emergency in Britain. At one point earlier this month the levels even burst the 500 barrier, recorded in deadpan officialese as "beyond index" or, in more colourful parlance as "crazy bad".
That was the phrase that caused a diplomatic incident last year when it was posted on the US Embassy site, flatly contradicting the official Chinese government's official air quality measurements which reckon that Beijing has "good" or "excellent" air quality 80 per cent of the time.
Everyone knows this is nonsense, and increasingly in modern China, is prepared to say so. Even the state-run propaganda sheets such as the China Daily have started penning editorials warning of the folly of trying to conceal what everyone can perfectly well see for themselves.
Until recently, it might have been just us fly-by expats whingeing about the smog, but not any more. In the age of Twitter (banned in China, but there is a vibrant local equivalent called Weibo) it gets harder and harder for everyone to sustain the required levels of doublethink. As education levels rise and access to information improves, the old methods no longer work. Simply telling the people that there are more "blue-sky days" when every morning they awake feeling like they've smoked a box of Monte Cristos no longer washes.
The smog damages people's lung-tissue, but the government's fudging of the figures in defiance of reality (they rearrange measuring stations to get more acceptable readings) corrodes the basic level of trust needed to sustain effective government.
The vociferous debates over the smog these past few months in many ways encapsulate the big story of China these last three years; the explosive growth of microblogging that has created a reactive and rowdy virtual coffee shop in which the government's sluggish propaganda machine is now often openly scorned.
China's urban society is flying forward, internationalising pell-mell, while China's dogged authoritarian political machine, like many an ancien regime before it, remains defiantly resistant to change. A new generation of young, net-savvy Chinese worry almost to the point of paranoia about the cost to their health and not just from the great smogs, but all sorts of ancillary woes: the melamine tainted milk, the cooking oil saved from sewers and the vegetables found in the markets drenched in pesticide.
Anyone with an internet connection (China has nearly 500 million) can discover that lung cancer is now one of the biggest killers on the Chinese mainland, accounting for 600,000 people last year, and according to one analysis published by China Daily, has soared 60 per cent in the past decade alone.
For the generation too young to remember life before economic growth transformed China, that raises urgent questions about who is paying the price for China's economic "miracle", and who, in an era of property billionaires and unaffordable housing, is really reaping the rewards?
These are the growing pains of a country that is going to shake the world; a Dickensian land riven by internal contradictions, of Dombey-like investment booms and stinking Coketowns with their purplish rivers and granite-faced Circumlocution Offices.
Only the Chinese people, in their own time and own way, can resolve these growing internal stresses. For my part, I leave promising only that I will never again open my bedroom curtains, look out at a blue sky, and not give thanks from the bottom of my heart.
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狗仔卡
发表于 2011-12-26 10:37
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楼主
发表于 2011-12-29 20:31
