Sure enough, the winds calmed the next day, a Friday, and over the
following 10 days I witnessed the sickening descent of Beijing into a
city of murk and gloom.
At noon on Saturday, after just 12 hours of still air, I took a bus
across town to a luncheon interview near Tiananmen Square. Straight
above me the sky was still blue, but in the distance a pale gray layer of
smog already frosted the skyline. When I came back outside 4 hours
later, the layer had nearly doubled in thickness. The pollution accumu-
lated with each passing day, and by Thursday I was used to waking up
to a gray-white haze that rested on the skyline like a lid on a wok. The
haze would grow palpably worse through the course of a day, as count-
less thousands of boilers were fired up and internal-combustion
engines spewed exhaust.
On Thursday, I was riding south on the ring road that skirts Purple
Bamboo Park on its way around the western edge of town. It was about
4:30 in the afternoon. My eyes should have been drawn to the Chinese
national television (CCTV) tower, by far the tallest structure in the city,
which lay directly ahead about 4 miles away. But by this hour the smog
had become so thick that what had been a basically sunny day at noon
now looked overcast and dark. Only because I knew the CCTV tower
was up ahead could I faintly make out its needle-nosed outline against
the sky.
Striding down the sidewalk to my right was a tall, young woman in
a smart black overcoat. Behind her, two young girls in bright red and
yellow athletic suits pedaled bicycles. A wizened old fellow in a blue
Mao cap bent over an upturned bike, trying to repair it. All of us were
inhaling lots of poison into our lungs.
On Friday morning, I took a taxi to the National People’s Congress.
Passing through the larger intersections of Beijing, I looked down the
cross streets but could see no farther than half a block; beyond that, an
impenetrable gray mass concealed everything. When I reached
Tiananmen Square at 8:45, the sun hung barely visible above the
southern gate to the Imperial Palace, like a weak light bulb in a bar-
room full of cigarette smoke. Gazing north, past Mao’s mausoleum
and the site of the 1989 massacre, I couldn’t see the far end of the
square, much less the Forbidden City beyond it. The pedestrians cross-
China 13