Beijing smog prompts unusual transparency

While welcomed by residents and environmentalists, Beijing's new openness about smog also put more pressure on the government to address underlying causes, including a lag in efforts to expand Western-style emissions limits to all of the vehicles in Beijing's notoriously thick traffic.

“Really awful. Extremely awful,” Beijing office worker Cindy Lu said of the haze as she walked along a downtown sidewalk. But she added: “Now that we have better information, we know how bad things really are and can protect ourselves and decide whether we want to go out.”

“Before, you just saw the air was bad but didn't know how bad it really was,” she said.

Even state-run media gave the smog remarkably critical and prominent play. “More suffocating than the haze is the weakness in response,” read the headline of a front-page commentary by the Communist Party-run China Youth Daily.

Government officials — who have played down past periods of heavy smog — held news conferences and posted messages on microblogs discussing the pollution.

The wave of pollution peaked Saturday with off-the-charts levels that shrouded Beijing's skyscrapers in thick gray haze. Expected to last through Tuesday, it was the severest smog since the government began releasing figures on PM2.5 particles — among the worst pollutants — early last year in response to a public outcry.

Public demands for more air quality information were prompted in part by a Twitter feed from the U.S. Embassy that gave hourly PM2.5 readings from the building's roof.

The Chinese government now issues hourly air quality updates online for more than 70 cities.

“I think there's been a very big change,” prominent Beijing environmental campaigner Ma Jun said, adding that the government knows it no longer has a monopoly on information about the environment. “Given the public's ability to spread this information, especially on social media, the government itself has to make adjustments.”

“The pollution has affected large areas, lasted for a long time and is of great density. This is rare for Beijing in recent years,” Zhang Dawei, director of Beijing's environment monitoring center, told a news conference Monday.

According to the government monitoring, levels of PM2.5 particles were above 700 micrograms per cubic meter on Saturday, and declined by Monday to levels around 350 micrograms — but still way above the World Health Organization's safety levels of 25.

Beijing authorities said readings for PM2.5 hit 993 micrograms per cubic meter at the height of the pollution, almost 40 times the WHO safe limit.

In separate monitoring by the U.S. Embassy, levels peaked Saturday at 886 micrograms — and the air quality was labeled as “beyond index.”

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