【今日美国12.26】一些中国人跑到美国大使馆求空气数据

lilyma06

Some Chinese turn to U.S. Embassy for clarity in smog data
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2011-12-26/beijing-smog-china/52234198/1?csp=34news

BEIJING–The Beijing smog often keeps Zhushen Zhenyu trapped at home, on his mother's orders, when he'd rather be playing basketball outside, but the 8-year-old still hopes for a silver lining in the clouds of pollution choking China's capital.

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  By Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images
  Cars travel on a ring road around Beijing on Dec. 5, a day the U.S. Embassy said had hazardous air-quality levels.
  

Cars travel on a ring road around Beijing on Dec. 5, a day the U.S. Embassy said had hazardous air-quality levels.

"When will the air quality be so bad we don't have to go to school?" he asked a city official one recent smoggy day.

"That depends on government policy," was the cryptic reply of Li Yunting, an engineer at the Beijing Environmental Monitoring Center, which  opened to public visits last month.

The doubts about official pollution data keep piling up for China's government, as green activists, celebrity bloggers and ordinary citizens increasingly demand action and information to halt the environmental fall-out from decades of breakneck economic growth.

Burning coal  is largely responsible for the oppressive smog, which the United Nations has rated the worst in the world. China has more than doubled its coal consumption in the past 10 years but has not kept pace with the clean-air technology found in the West. It also relies on cheaper forms of coal that emit more pollutants, and Beijing's nearly 5 million cars do not generally meet the  standards of the USA.

U.S. Embassy keeps tabs

The past two months have been dire. The high incidence of heavy air pollution has sent many residents rushing to buy face masks, air purifiers and  household plants believed to clean dirty air.

The haze has highlighted discrepancies between the government's robustly sunny statistics and the far scarier numbers recorded and issued by the U.S. Embassy here. Beijing described the air pollution as "light" on December 4, a smog-filled day that forced the city airport, the world's second busiest, to cancel hundreds of flights because of poor visibility. The embassy reading was "beyond index," literally off the measurement charts that stop at "hazardous."

The embassy measurements, begun in 2008 and issued hourly via Twitter, use a standard employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to measure tiny airborne particles, such as soot from burning gas in cars, that are under 2.5 micrometers in diameter.

Experts consider these particles most damaging to human health, as they are small enough to penetrate the lungs and blood, potentially causing lung cancer and other diseases.

China publishes figures using a standard that measures coarser particular matter such as dust and keeps secret, for internal research, the  measurements of smaller particles its scientists collect.

Despite the Chinese government's blocking of Twitter, the U.S. Embassy figures are widely circulated in Beijing  on Chinese websites or microblogs. In recent weeks, celebrity bloggers such as real estate mogul Pan Shiyi and children's author Zheng Yuanjie have pressured Chinese officials to  give a more accurate picture of air quality.

Yu Ping, a Beijing journalist and father of a 6-year-old boy who, like him, has suffered a sore throat in recent weeks, threatens to sue the municipal environmental protection agency if they don't respond to his  request for the recent  data.

"This is very important for me, my son and all citizens of Beijing and China," he says.

Yu's quest  has  inspired several other Chinese to demand data from their city governments, Yu says. He is grateful to the U.S. government for its transparency, but "it should be the Chinese government that does this," he says.

Some Beijingers, such as Wang Jinlan, say the U.S. government should mind its own business. Her daughter Du Lanxin, 8, says they filled their house with special plants last month to purify the air.

"Our home is better now, but when I go out, it's sometimes very hard to breathe," she says. Her mother drives her to school every day rather than breathe the smog on a bicycle or bus, but in doing so, she adds to the city's clogged, polluted streets.

Public 'won't understand'

Hua Lei, vice director of the center, insists that, over the past two years, Beijing's air quality has  improved. She says the center measures small particulates in the air but  does not release the data because the public  "won't understand the figures."

Environmentalist Feng Yongfeng, founder of the environmental group Green Beagle, has been lending air-quality monitoring equipment to companies and communities since May.

"As a government, you must let the people know the worst level of air quality," he says.

Under growing pressure, Beijing is now revising national air-quality monitoring standards and promises to require the release of data on smaller particulates — by 2016.

Environmental consultant Steven Andrews, an American based in Beijing, says the problem is that China's "target culture" means officials, fearful for their jobs, distort pollution levels to ensure they meet government benchmarks.

Even under the new standards, "levels will still be called good in Beijing that would be in the unhealthy range in the U.S," he says.

"The air is dangerous; it will cause cancer," says Sam Zhang, 41, a vegetable wholesaler who signed up for the monitoring center visit. He says he trusts the U.S. Embassy figures over his own government's data.

"Taxpayers pay the government officials' salaries, so they should tell the truth about air quality," he says, "but they are not elected by the people, so we have no hope they will tell the truth."

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