BEIJING — I RECENTLY found myself hauling a bag filled with 12 boxes of milk powder and a cardboard container with two sets of air filters through San Francisco International Airport. I was heading to my home in Beijing at the end of a work trip, bringing back what have become two of the most sought-after items among parents here, and which were desperately needed in my own household.
Dispatch
Life in a Toxic Country
Li Wen/Xinhua, via Corbis
A baby being given nebulizer therapy at Beijing Children’s Hospital.
By EDWARD WONG
Published: August 3, 2013 292 Comments
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Liu Jin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The China Central Television headquarters building in Beijing, wreathed in haze.
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China is the world’s second largest economy, but the enormous costs of its growth are becoming apparent. Residents of its boom cities and a growing number of rural regions question the safety of the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat. It is as if they were living in the Chinese equivalent of the Chernobyl or Fukushima nuclear disaster areas.
Before this assignment, I spent three and a half years reporting in Iraq, where foreign correspondents talked endlessly of the variety of ways in which one could die — car bombs, firefights, being abducted and then beheaded. I survived those threats, only now to find myself wondering: Is China doing irreparable harm to me and my family?
The environmental hazards here are legion, and the consequences might not manifest themselves for years or even decades. The risks are magnified for young children. Expatriate workers confronted with the decision of whether to live in Beijing weigh these factors, perhaps more than at any time in recent decades. But for now, a correspondent’s job in China is still rewarding, and so I am toughing it out a while longer. So is my wife, Tini, who has worked for more than a dozen years as a journalist in Asia and has studied Chinese. That means we are subjecting our 9-month-old daughter to the same risks that are striking fear into residents of cities across northern China, and grappling with the guilt of doing so.
Like them, we take precautions. Here in Beijing, high-tech air purifiers are as coveted as luxury sedans. Soon after I was posted to Beijing, in 2008, I set up a couple of European-made air purifiers used by previous correspondents. In early April, I took out one of the filters for the first time to check it: the layer of dust was as thick as moss on a forest floor. It nauseated me. I ordered two new sets of filters to be picked up in San Francisco; those products are much cheaper in the United States. My colleague Amy told me that during the Lunar New Year in February, a family friend brought over a 35-pound purifier from California for her husband, a Chinese-American who had been posted to the Beijing office of a large American technology company. Before getting the purifier, the husband had considered moving to Suzhou, a smaller city lined with canals, because he could no longer tolerate the pollution in Beijing.
Every morning, when I roll out of bed, I check an app on my cellphone that tells me the air quality index as measured by the United States Embassy, whose monitoring device is near my home. I want to see whether I need to turn on the purifiers and whether my wife and I can take our daughter outside.
Most days, she ends up housebound. Statistics released Wednesday by the Ministry of Environmental Protection revealed that air quality in Beijing was deemed unsafe for more than 60 percent of the days in the first half of 2013. The national average was also dismal: it failed to meet the safety standard in nearly half the days of the same six-month period. The environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, told People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, that “China’s air quality is grim, and the amount of pollution emissions far exceeds the environment’s capacity.”
I want my daughter to grow up appreciating the outdoors — sunsets and birdcalls and the smell of grass or the shape of clouds. That will be impossible if we live for many more years in Beijing. Even with my adult-size lungs, I limit my time outdoors. Though I ran on the banks of the Tigris River while in Baghdad and competed in two marathons before moving to China, I am hesitant about doing long-distance training for that kind of race here.
One thing I refuse to forgo is biking, even if it means greater exposure to hazardous air than commuting by car or subway. Given the horrendous traffic here — itself a major contributor to the pollution — I go to the office and restaurants and my courtyard home in Beijing’s alleys on two wheels. This winter, I bought a British-made face mask after levels of fine particulate matter hit a record high in January in some areas — 40 times the exposure limit recommended by the World Health Organization. Foreigners called it the “airpocalypse,” and a growing number are leaving China because of the smog or demanding hardship pay from their employers.
One American doctor here has procured a mask for his infant son. My mask of sleek black fabric and plastic knobs makes me look like an Asian Darth Vader. Better that, though, than losing years of my life.
THIS spring, new data released from the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study, first published in The Lancet, revealed that China’s outdoor pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010, or 40 percent of the worldwide total. Another study, published by a prominent American science journal in July, found that northern Chinese lived five fewer years on average than their southern counterparts because of the widespread use of coal in the north.
Cancer rates are surging in China, and even the state news media are examining the relation between that and air pollution. Meanwhile, studies both in and outside of China have shown that children with prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollutants exhibit signs of slower mental development and of behavior disorders. Research from Los Angeles shows that children in polluted environments are also at risk for permanent lung damage.
In northern China, shades of gray distinguish one day from another. My wife and I sometimes choose our vacation destinations based on how much blue we can expect to see — thus a recent trip to Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast. I will never take such skies for granted again. “We still can’t get over how blue the skies are here,” the wife of an American diplomat told me over dinner in Georgetown more than half a year after the couple had moved back to Washington from Beijing.
Food safety is the other issue weighing on us. We have heard the stories of rat meat being passed off as lamb at hotpot restaurants, cooking oil being recycled and crops being grown in soil polluted by heavy metals or wastewater from factories. The food catastrophe that most frightened both Chinese and foreign parents was the milk scandal of 2008, in which six babies died and at least 300,000 children fell ill after drinking milk products tainted with melamine, a toxic chemical. Since then, many parents of newborns have gone to great lengths to bring into China foreign-made infant milk powder when it is needed to supplement breast-feeding.
Months after my trip back from San Francisco, my wife and I realized that our supply of formula was dwindling. We sent e-mails to friends we thought might be traveling soon to China, asking for volunteers to be “mules.” Our friend Alexa flew in from New York this week with two boxes of powder. We have two other friends who promise to bring more this summer.
I recently spoke to a woman in Beijing, Zhao Jun, who pays Chinese students and housewives living in Europe to mail her cans of Cow & Gate, a British brand. “We’re constantly worried, so we want to find a good brand from overseas with a long history,” she said.
So widespread is the phenomenon of Chinese buying milk powder abroad that it has led to shortages in at least a half-dozen countries. Hong Kong has even cracked down on what customs officials call “syndicates” smuggling foreign-made powder to mainland China.
The anxieties do not end with milk. Our daughter has begun eating solids, so that means many more questions for us about how we source our food. Do we continue buying fruits and vegetables from the small shops in the alleys around our home? Do we buy from more expensive stores aimed at foreigners and wealthier Chinese? Do we buy from local organic farms? Last weekend, I went with a friend to visit a village home an hour’s drive northeast of Beijing. He and his wife wanted to lease it as a weekend house, but I was more interested in gauging whether I could use the garden to grow our own vegetables. Some people I know here have done that.
“It’s so difficult to protect yourself on the food issue,” said Li Bo, a proponent of communal gardening and a board member of Friends of Nature, an environmental advocacy group. “I never thought I would become a vegetarian. Then in 2011, I said enough of meat, after so many examples of wrongdoing in animal husbandry.”
Each day that passes in Beijing makes it harder to discern the fine line between paranoia and precaution. Six years ago, when I was back in my hometown Alexandria, Va., to pack for my move to China, my mother handed me several tubes of toothpaste. She had read stories that summer of toxic toothpaste made in China. I felt as if I was going off to college for my freshman year all over again. I put the tubes back in my parents’ bathroom. When I go home these days, my mother still on occasion gives me toothpaste to bring back to Beijing, and I no longer hesitate to pack it in my bag.
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In 2008 I was offered a position in China for a major international firm. My first son was barely one year old, so before accepting the position I started investigating about air quality and food quality around major Chinese cities. What I found out was really scary.
Even the (very informative and detailed, I must say!) official website of the Chinese environmental agency reported historical graphs of air quality for pretty much every city in China - and even these official government numbers were scary.
I compared them to equivalent numbers measured in European and North American cities, and I found out that basically the "best clean air" days in Nanjing (the city where I was going to be transferred to) were on the same level as the worst "pollution emergency" days in European cities. The worst pollution days of Chinese cities were so far off the charts to have virtually nothing to compare with in the Western world.
I weighed my career prospects against my family's good health, and I decided to choose life over money. I never made it to China, but I have no regrets. Health is not a tradeable commodity.
We are all, together, cooking the planet into a toxic waste dump that ultimately will challenge our very will live. The generations living now are failing their progeny like no other time in the history of the human race.
It may be that all emerging economies are doomed to develop as China's has, given our focus on short-term profits and an international business community that gets to make things wherever it likes regardless of the consequences.
But the result? China can no longer provide its citizens with breathable air and America is filled with jobless cities and cheap plastic junk nobody really needs. How sad.
"Life in a Toxic Country" is an apt title for this remarkably personal article from a writer I follow for just such coverage of pollution in China.
Having lived in Chongqing for 2 years, I find it no exaggeration to refer to Chernobyl and war zones when seeking to illustrate life in these conditions. I remember consoling myself when considering the pollution by thinking, "well, at least it is not a war zone."
But the truth is that it is a threat, a "long dying" and "slow violence" to use Rob Nixon's terminology. The underestimated and poorly understood threat is across all dimensions of one's existence: to never really see the sun and blue sky is inhumane.
Wong rightly points out the issues of air and water pollution and food safety. Recently, soil pollution has been coming to the fore as the greatest long-term problem. The situation is worsening, with estimates of soil pollution already as high as 40%, and in a country where roughly 70% of the world's arsenic is found. It is also a country where a lawyer who requested access to such data was refused on the grounds of that data being classified as a state secret.
Wong's family and myself have the resources to leave China because of the pollution, despite whatever strong desires there may be to stay. So many others clearly do not have such a choice. But what happens to the "disposable people" that remain behind, matters to all of us--in more ways than one.
It was not that long ago, before Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970 which created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce the new environmental regulations, that the air quality in many urban areas in the United States was quite poor. I remember growing up with leaded gasoline and not being able to see the Manhattan skylines in as a youth. Under the Clean Air Act, companies were forced to employ technologies available at the time to reduce emissions to meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. The air was not cleaned overnight but between 1980 through 2010, there were improvements in all measured pollutant levels year by year in most urban areas.
One would think China needs an Earth Day Movement and an enlightened Communist Party leadership that would establish similar regulations. However that might be somewhat simplistic. Northern China has worse air pollution than the south because it is colder there. Air pollution comes not just from the major power plants, it also comes from homes and rural areas that have no alternative to burning cheap dirty coal. Cleaning the skies of China require mass urbanization as well as clean alternatives.
This article is what I fear what will happen here if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is slashed, or even totally de-funded, as Republicans dream.
Financially, it would turn into yet another example of privatized profits and socialized costs. (Remember the financial crisis and how taxpayers got soaked, and are still getting soaked, for the mayhem caused by banks and rating agencies, while they make their top employees rich?)
The costs of goods sold that should have been borne by the manufacturers for controlling the pollution their plants cause would be passed on to society at large, or other companies, via elevated rates of illness and healthcare costs.
I am actually quite jealous of someone who only has to deal with outdoor air pollution. I rented an apartment in Chengdu in March and soon discovered that I had an enormous formaldehyde problem on my hands. After spending hundreds of dollars on air purifiers, filter replacements, and dozens of pounds of activated carbon to try and absorb the gas that has irritated my eyes, lungs, nose, and has given me painful skin rashes (whether directly from the gas or from my clothes absorbing it and then my skin getting it from the clothes) I am still suffering as the summer temperatures and humidity have increased emission levels. If I open all the windows I am sweltering and of course the outdoor air is less than sparkling clean. Selling products that allegedly mitigate formaldehyde is in fact big business here in China where emissions are minimally regulated. It's caused this life-long free market guy to appreciate the value of product safety regulation. I don't have a legal recourse to move out without losing the many months of rent I paid prior to moving in.
I am going to be travelling for to Hong Kong 5 days starting Wednesday and my body is very much looking forward to getting out of this house while my mind looks forward to not having to use the unreliable software I use to occasionally read the New York Times from behind the Great Firewall of China.
The situation is not lost. Frankly, the picture looks like what LA, NYC and Denver looked like circa 1970.
All China has to do is do what the U.S. did:
Pass and enforce the equivalent of the Clean Air and Water Act so that vehicles (cars, trucks, locomotives, aircraft) all have clean engine emissions, industrial plants (power plants and factories) are required to filter their tower emissions and fuel standards are established to eliminate particulate emissions.
It took time but, by the 1990s, despite all of the warnings of industry that it would destroy the economy, the economy was larger, grew faster than it did in the 1970s, cars were better and energy prices went down. And, oh, yes, the air and water is cleaner too.
All very nice to bash China, but this is a worldwide problem. Just because most places don't have visible haze doesn't mean they don't have dangerously high fine particulates, for instance. Like in every big city. Asthma rates are soaring everywhere. Leaving China solves nothing. You can't run away from madness. We have to stop burning our way to success.
I was born in China when the environment was not as bad. After emigrating out, people have been constantly telling me that knowing how Chinese is going to be a great advantage in the coming years.
And yeah I suppose I agree. It does come in handy once a while, and I do have the opportunity to move back to China and really utilize it.
It seems we are really just taking advantage of China, juicing it for all it has got. Then leaving the people to fend for themselves while we breath this air here that I can only call divine after a recent trip to Beijing.
I would not consider relocating there for two reasons. One, I don't want to subject myself to the environment, and two, I don't think the exploitation is justified.
Next thing you know, there's going to be a market in China for pressured air shipped straight from the Alps.
I have heard horror stories from China - and the migration of its toxic air is effecting life here in Seoul (and in Japan as well). What struck me as amazing, however, is that my wife and I have had the same conversations about air quality (our 3-year old son is pre-asthmatic), food, and gardening as a necessity while in rural Pennsylvania, where we live during the school year. I imagined fresh air, green grass, etc. for our son as one of the perks of life at a university in the country, only to discover that we are surrounded by gravel pits, gypsum factories, quarries, and fields full of crops that are pesticide and fertilizer dependent. Living in a world that turns on industry means confronting toxins everywhere. I'm sure Beijing is really bad, but I think people would be shocked to look at the air quality index for the area they live in.
Before we get too smug read about what insults to the environment occurred here not that long ago. Like what W.R. Grace did in Woburn, MA. Or
the Love Canal. Or the time the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Ohio in 1969. Or the PCBs that were dumped into the Hudson. This is what you get when the people in charge value the profits of their wealthy backers above the interests of society overall. We were lucky to have once had enough responsible leaders who recognized the problems that irresponsible companies were creating and took steps to remedy most of it. But many incidents are still mired in litigation and far from over with. Moreover, today we have too many anti-regulation zealots that are all too willing to do the bidding of those hostile to environmental protections.
This is the real price of our cheap toys and household goods. It's also why I always shake my head and laugh when people go on about bringing manufacturing back to the US. This is what will happen to our air quality, either that or our factories would have to spend so much on environmental protection we can't afford to buy anything they produce.
Excellent review, Edward, of the situation here in Beijing and the daily concerns we all deal with. My wife and I have been dealing with these issues for seven years and it's even more relevant now that we have a new baby. We are always reassessing why we are here -- but for now we still feel the benefits are more than the risks, for us and for our baby growing up. The differences for me are even more striking as I lived in perfect and pristine Sonoma county before this. Still, I have an incredibly rich and varied life here, and we take all precautions we can, and we are ok with that. I think people have a lot more control of their lives and their environment than they think. But we certainly look forward to our vacations -- anywhere with blue skies!
It seems to me that all those "high-tech air purifiers" -- consuming energy that in China is largely produced from filthy power plants burning high sulfur coal -- are emblematic of the source of the air quality problems: A growing consumer class stuck in a downward spiral of protecting themselves at the detriment of the common welfare.
There was a time when I wanted to visit China. I wanted to see Beijing, visit historical temples, walk on the Great Wall. I relished the idea of learning about this centuries old culture. I was intrigued by the magical nature of the Silk Road, the oddly shaped towering peaks of Huangshan, the Army of Terracotta Warriors in Xian and so on.
Enter Walmart and all the other corporations that have turned China into a gigantic factory of human slavery --- just for a cheaper price tag. We, in America and Europe, who buy "made in China" are every day responsible for China's horrible climate and food problems. If we hadn't been so readily and greedily attracted to buying cheap, perhaps in the end result the Chinese might have been poorer, but with a better quality of life.
I no longer have a desire to travel to a China that looks like an architects nightmare of 2014. Skyscrapers and apartment boxes? Cities whose landscapes are filled with building cranes.... Land and history scraped away to make room for what? More junk? More cheep THINGS to send to other countries?
And I haven't even started in on the jobs that were erased from America (and Europe) because of all that greed.
It's a strange cycle which, when it turns, it points the finger right back at us here in this country, the grand consumer of cheap stuff!
It was Jan. 1973, I was a new mother with a 3 month old son, we lived in Lintorf (Ratingen) Germany - a small city centered between Essen, Duisburg and Duesseldorf. A temperature inversion brought us to the brink of a total smog alarm (the German TV was in the process of making a doomsday film about such a scenario). What did that mean? For about 2 weeks, one couldn't open a window. If you went out on the street, the air seared your lungs. I took the baby to a doctor who gave me some tips on keeping the air in his room as clean as possible and was told not to take him out unless absolutely necessary. This was back in the day when the Ruhr valley still ran on coal. While cooped up in the apartment, many thoughts came and went - my sister sent me a sample "Pampers" which just made things worse thinking about the manufacture and disposal of such an object - and as soon as the winds came, we began making plans to leave the area. This experience changed my habits for life, I buy only what I need, we try not to throw things away, we have solar on the roof, we grow our own food (as much as possible), and I still try to keep my footprint as tiny as possible.
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