Opinion | Beijing should heed growing public anger at China’s filthy air

Cary Huang says the government must begin to see the problem as urgent and – as research has shown – more deadly than a natural disaster, and act to curb it

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People wear face masks as they cross a street on a polluted day, on January 4, in Beijing. Photo: Reuters

Published: 2:42pm, 17 Jan 2017Updated: 7:21pm, 17 Jan 2017

China ushered in the new year with a large part of its northern and central regions shrouded in thick smog.

Air pollution readings by the Beijing-based World Air Quality Index – which measures only PM 2.5, the tiny, toxic particles that damage lung tissue – were many times above 25 micrograms per cubic metre, a level considered safe by the World Health Organisation. In the first week of the new year, readings in more than 200 cities surpassed 200, with some exceeding 400.

The government declared a “war on pollution” two decades ago but the latest development showed it is losing the fight.

Beijing needs to declare war on smog and learn from other countries’ efforts

In recent years, credible research at home and abroad has provided scientific evidence that proves air pollution is deadly and in fact more harmful to health than a major natural disaster.

A recent study by Nanjing University’s School of the Environment suggests that smog is related to nearly one-third of deaths in China, putting it on a par with smoking as a threat to health. Some 31.8 per cent of 3.03 million deaths in 2013 in 74 cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta were thought to be linked to PM 2.5 pollution.

A Chinese driver uses his mobile phone to check a map as the haze causes a traffic jam in downtown Beijing on January 4. Photo: EPA

In 2015, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, estimated that smog led to 1.4 million premature deaths per year in China, while the California-based non-profit group Berkeley Earth reported an even higher figure, 1.6 million. Yet more research, this time by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University and Peking University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, concluded in 2013 that hazardous air had cut life expectancy by an average of 5.5 years in northern China.

Watch: Beijing choked by smog in the first days of 2017

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