ond-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, trailing only the
United States.
I bounced out of bed in Beijing that December morning and
eagerly headed out for my first walk in the People’s Republic. The tem-
perature was a bracing 19° F, but the real shock was the brilliantly blue
and sunny sky—not a hint of smog anywhere. How could this be?
It was just before 8 A.M. and the four-lane boulevard outside my hotel
was crowded with a stream of humanity so dense and fast-moving that I
could only stand back and watch. A few people traveled by car, rather
more by bus, but the vast majority were on bicycles, usually the stolid
black Chinese model called Flying Pigeons. There were also lots of three-
wheeled cargo bikes whose wooden flatbeds carried everything from
bulging sacks of fruit to freshly skinned sides of pork, to couches, televi-
sions, and small mountains of crushed cardboard destined for recycling.
I was especially intrigued by the flatbeds I saw carrying the coal
briquettes known as “honeycombs” (because of the holes drilled in the
briquettes to encourage cleaner burning). Round, black, the size of
small coffee cakes, the honeycombs were stacked by the hundreds into
squat pyramids and sold off the carts for burning in the home stoves
of the poor. Honeycombs were supposed to be the cause of much of
China’s pollution, but where was that pollution?
After a 45-minute walk around the neighborhood, I returned to my
hotel chilled and bewildered: Beijing was grungy and strewn with
trash, but it sure didn’t live up to its advance billing as one of the most
polluted cities in the world. That afternoon a government press aide
proudly explained to me that the government had moved most of the
city’s heavy industry out of the downtown area. It sounded plausible,
and I later learned that some factories had indeed been relocated. But
I got the real story later that evening from a Beijing taxi driver.
It turned out that I had been witnessing a statistical fluke. The only
time Beijing was graced by blue skies in winter was immediately after
Siberian winds had roared through and flushed away all the smog; by
chance, such winds had struck the night I arrived and continued blow-
ing through the following day. As the taxi driver told me, the only rea-
son Beijing’s air did not look dirtier was that “it’s very windy today. If
there were no wind, you’d notice [the pollution] very strongly.”
12 Mark Hertsgaard