For Beijing residents, big diplomatic events
are like birthday parties for children. We look
forward to them eagerly – because along
with the landing of presidents and potentates
comes a clearing of the skies, a guaranteed
week of perfect crystalline blueness. The Belt
and Road Forum was welcomed by locals not
so much for the exciting possibilities it offers
for the extension of Chinese investment into
Central Asian infrastructure, as for the hopes
of an ecstatic spring week.
Those hopes were more than fulfilled.
Along with the posters promising friendship,
win-win cooperation and mutual benefit (ac-
companied by random security checks on
foreigners’ papers), the Beijing sky cleared of
even a particle of pollution. Children danced
and sang, asthmatic old folk went jogging,
and moods brightened. As ever, when the
skies are clear, the hills were visible in the
distance; a reminder of Beijing’s remarkably
beautiful positioning between mountain
ranges, something usually shrouded in the
smog of modernity.
There’s all kinds of positive knock-on ef-
fects from the clean-up. Traffic comes off the
roads, the streets are sparkling clean as an
army of old folks is mobilised, and everybody
is just in a generally better mood. Chinese
cities live or die on their outdoors life, and
the more everyone is happy to be outside, the
better everything works.
But after the party comes the hangover,
and while the post forum spike in pollution,
as factories revved up once more for busi-
ness, wasn’t that huge by Beijing standards,
the smog was enough to take the edge off
the spring for a few days. It was a reminder
that, as much as the authorities struggle to
keep the darkness of smog from swallowing
the city entirely, it’s always still there, creeping
around the edges.
The danger of any unliveable situation is
that it becomes liveable, that we normalise
what should be intolerable. That’s what’s hap-
pened with pollution across whole swathes of
China; cancer-causing clouds have becomea ‘natural’ hazard that people treat with the
same attitude as they do thunderstorms or
the tides. It can be hard to remember how
new – in some cases – the pollution is, but
also how things have got better.
That doesn’t just go for the sky. I talked
with my friend Hongmei about the rivers of
her childhood. “I went back four years ago
to a river I used to swim in as a child,” she
said, talking about the waters in the hills of
Heilongjiang - ‘black dragon river.’ “And it
was black! I always used to think that was a
metaphor, but it was literally black. I think I’d
die if I went swimming in it today.”
Hongmei is rich enough to have travelled.
She was lyrical about the rivers and lakes of
Canada – and the space. “So good to go out
and be alone, for miles around.” “What doyou do about the pollution with your little
girl?” I asked. “I worry,” she said, “And I buy
air filters.”
But others thought of it differently. Mrs Che,
one of our older neighbours, told it straight. “I
know the air is bad today, because my phone
says so” – she showed me her weather app –
“But you can’t see it. I remember when I was a
young woman in 1981, and I came to the big
city for the first time. Then I was living in He-
bei, in Shijiazhuang. Ai-ya, you couldn’t believe
it! Even on a good day, the smokestacks would
be putting out black clouds.”
Our conversation had attracted interested
onlookers. “I’m from Taiyuan,” said one
gummy-mouthed elder, “To Taiyuan people,
Beijing is nothing! Even your bad days are
like our good days! You see this!” He grasped
my white shirt in a familiar fashion. “This
is a nice shirt! But if you hung it out to dry
in Taiyuan, it would go black in an hour!”
Taiyuan is the coal-producing heartland of
China, and our interlocutor seemed almost
proud of its pollution. “One day, I was com-
ing home, and I heard my sister ahead of me
on the road. “Older brother, where are you?”
she called out. “Little sister, where are you?” I
answered. We weren’t even twenty feet apart
from each other – not further than that bush
over there – and still we couldn’t see each
other! That’s how bad our pollution is!”
“Is it still that bad?” I asked. “I don’t know,”
he said, “I haven’t been back for ten years.
What is England like? I read you have a lot
of factories there.”
“Where did you read that?” I asked, curi-
ously.
“In your Di geng si,” he said.
“In our what?” I asked, thinking it was
some kind of report or newspaper. “You
know,” he said, “Your Di geng si. Very famous
writer.”
“Ah,” I said, “In Charles Dickens. We don’t
have many factories anymore. But the air is
better.”
Mrs Che nodded. “You were smart,” she
said. “You sent all the factories to China!”The danger of any unliveable
situation is that it becomes
liveable, that we normalise
what should be intolerable.
That’s what’s happened with
pollution across whole swathes
of China; cancer-causing clouds
have become a ‘natural’
hazard that people treat with
the same attitude as they do
thunderstorms or the tidesUnhealthy Competition
By James Palmer
Illustration by Liu Xiaochao