Airpocalypse: U.S. Embassy Stocks Up on Air Purifiers

Air pollution is driving expatriate workers away from China, or dissuading those outside China from taking postings here.

By EDWARD WONG

A sales manager for Blueair, a Swedish maker of air purifiers, said the United States Embassy had ordered more than a couple thousand but less than 5,000 units.

Companies and institutions employing foreigners in China are starting to realize that to keep workers in the cities, they need to make changes to the way they operate. 

Based on anecdotal evidence, air pollution, more than anything else, is driving expatriate workers away from China, or dissuading those outside China from taking postings here. 

News reports of various rounds of “airpocalypse” descending on Chinese cities have not helped.

In response, some employers are handing out hardship bonuses. 

Others are allowing employees more vacation or work time outside the country. 

In recent months, the United States Embassy in Beijing has come up with its own strategy to blunt the hazards and the fears that come with Chinese smog: It has ordered thousands of air purifiers for the homes of employees from the United States.
Blueair, the Swedish company that is filling the embassy order, said the purchase was among the largest from China. 

“This is an important order,” said Jonas Holst, international sales manager for Blueair. 

“It’s absolutely in the top end.”
Anxieties over air quality surged in January, when levels of fine particulate matter during a particularly smoggy spell in northern China reached, in some areas of Beijing, 40 times the recommended exposure limit set by the World Health Organization. 

The United States State Department sent a team of experts to China to evaluate employees’ homes and make recommendations on how to ensure relatively clean air quality indoors. 

American officials concluded they needed to place more air purifiers in frequently used residential spaces, such as bedrooms and living areas, even though new employees already get some units when they first arrive. (The embassy itself has a centralized air filtration system.)
After the team left, the United States government put out a call for proposals, and in the end it decided to go with an American supplier of Blueair products.
Some of the Blueair machines have begun arriving in Beijing. 

The United States Embassy declined to provide official comment on the purchase and did not specify the number of units bought. 

Mr. Holst also declined to give numbers, but he said the total was somewhere under 5,000 and more than a couple thousand.
He also declined to give details on the purchase price. 

It is safe to assume the price per unit for the embassy order is much less than the retail price in Beijing. Torana Clean Air, an official Blueair seller in the Chinese capital, said its least expensive unit, the 203 model, cost 3,231 renminbi, or about $530. 

That model is mainly used for bedrooms and offices up to 20 square meters, or 215 square feet. 

The best-selling larger model, the 503, costs 6,174 renminbi. 

There is a top-of-the-line model imported from Sweden that goes for 11,980 renminbi, but sales of that are rare. 

Most Blueair units are made for export in Shenzhen, in southern China.
Prices of Blueairs vary around the world because of taxation, import duties and transport costs, said Chris Buckley, the head of Torana Clean Air (who is not related to the Chris Buckley who reports on China for The New York Times). 

Mr. Buckley said he had supplied schools and embassies in Beijing, including those of France, Finland and the Netherlands.
Among foreigners, a popular — and pricier — alternative to Blueair purifiers are those from IQAir, a Swiss company. 

Other brands are edging into the market, given the growth prospects in China. 

Some medical experts have tried to give their assessments of the models. 

Among them is Dr. Richard St. Cyr, a doctor at Beijing United Family Hospital who writes a health blog and a column for the Chinese site of The Times. 

In his estimate, Blueair performs well in tests against other brands.
Mr. Holst said Blueair had had a “significant” increase in revenue from China sales in the last 12 to 15 months, though he declined to give numbers. 

The biggest revenues are from Beijing and Shanghai, he said, though Blueair has a sales presence in 50 Chinese cities.
Last week, Gary F. Locke, the American ambassador, announced he would leave his post early next year and return to Seattle. 

He has been in Beijing a little more than two years, a relatively short period for the job. 

His announcement prompted widespread speculation that he was fleeing the city’s notorious air. (After all, some Chinese are decamping to rural areas to lead greener lives.)
But Mr. Locke told The Los Angeles Times that he was leaving because he and his wife had agreed their children should spend their junior and senior years of high school in the United States. 

“We are concerned about it,” he said of the air quality, “but that’s not what motivated us to go back.”
On Friday and Saturday, the air quality index in the capital, as measured by a device on the rooftop of the United States Embassy, reached the “hazardous” level. 

That is when American officials recommend staying indoors, preferably with purifiers on.

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China's massive pollution problem

 

Air pollution has made many cities in China "barely suitable for living," and is making the population sick — and angry. 
By Keith Wagstaff

Quite literally sick and tired of the smog. 

How bad is China's smog?
Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China.
The air in some cities there is so bad that, at times, visibility drops to 30 feet, traffic slows to a crawl, and nearly everyone wears masks over their noses and mouths.
In Harbin, a city of 11 million people, government officials recently shut down roads, schools, and the airport when air pollution levels hit 40 times the safe limit set by the World Health Organization (WHO).
During the "airpocalypse" in Beijing earlier this year, the density of small, lung-penetrating particles reached 993 micrograms per cubic meter — a concentration normally not seen outside of forest fires.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers anything above 300 dangerous, and maxes out its scale at 500.
The smog was so thick in Beijing — which English-speaking residents call "Greyjing" — that a factory building burned for three hours before anyone even noticed that it was in flames.

Why is China's air so polluted?
It's the result of two decades of runaway economic development unrestrained by strong air-pollution laws, a dramatic increase in car ownership, and China's overwhelming reliance on coal.
China's cities were filled with bicycles as recently as the 1990s, but thanks to the explosive growth of the middle class, the Chinese now own more than 120 million cars and another 120 million motor vehicles of other kinds.
Fuel standards, set by a government committee stacked with oil industry members, have not kept pace.
Auto emissions, however, account for only about 25 percent of the problem.
Most of the blame rests on coal.
China burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined.
Despite making large investments in renewable energy, China still depends on coal to meet nearly 70 percent of its power needs.
While air pollution is almost always bad in northern China, it really soars after cities turn on their coal-fired collective heating systems for the winter "heating season."
Temperature inversions often trap bad air for days or weeks.

What are the health effects?
They're widespread and severe.
In 2010, air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China, according to a study.
Hospitals in Harbin reported a 30 percent increase in patients with respiratory problems after air pollution spiked in the city.
Lung cancer rates in China have climbed by 465 percent over the last three decades, despite there being no significant increase in smoking rates.
Scientists say the pollution in northern cities is so severe that 500 million people's lives will be shortened by an average of 5.5 years.

How else is smog hurting China?
It's damaging the country's economy.
In 2012, smog-related economic losses in four major Chinese cities totaled $1.08 billion, according to a study by Greenpeace and Peking University's School of Public Health.
Largely in response to the "airpocalypse," tourism in Beijing has dropped by 50 percent this year, the Beijing Youth Daily reported last week.
The pollution has also hurt efforts by Beijing-based businesses to recruit top foreign talent.
More potential employees are demanding hardship pay for having to deal with the city's awful air quality. With studies connecting prenatal exposure to air pollutants with autism, depression, and long-term lung damage, many foreign and local parents are "second-guessing their living in Beijing," said family physician Richard Saint Cyr, who is based there.

Are Chinese citizens angry?
Yes, and they are increasingly willing to show it.
Chinese netizens this year defied a government ban and began sharing hourly air quality measurements from the U.S. Embassy in downtown Beijing.
Microblogging sites like Sina Weibo have served as forums for citizens to express their frustrations with China's air quality.
"Our requirements aren't high," posted radio reporter Guo Yazhou. "We just want clean food, clean water, and clean air."
The dissatisfaction has given rise to a growing environmental movement, with 30,000 to 50,000 "mass incidents" of protest every year, according to former Communist Party official Chen Jiping.

New invention could offer a solution for those forced to endure China's horrendous air quality. The device is essentially a helmet attached to a portable air filtration system that you carry on your waist. Shown off at the recent East China Fair, the anti-smog helmet is powered by a lithium battery that lasts for eight hours, after which a warning alarm goes off alerting the wearer of his impending exposure to the raw, unfiltered air of Beijing. Air pollution gear was apparently the biggest deal at the fair, and according to reports from Chinese media, the air filtration helmet was extremely popular. We wouldn't be surprised if this helmet-meet-fannypack filter look becomes the standard for Beijing businessmen in coming years, at least until this pollution problem gets solved.
Is the Chinese government listening?
The grumbling has become too loud to ignore.
This year, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang claimed that the country's smog made him "quite upset," while the state-run China Daily bluntly referred to major cities like Beijing as "barely suitable for living."
That is a big change from 2011, when the state media referred to China's choking air pollution with the euphemism "heavy fog."
Now, China says it will spend $817 billion on a plan to drastically cut pollution by 2017.
While that might sound like real progress, provincial officials and state-owned businesses in China have a history of ignoring policies handed down from the central government.
Critics also note that the new air-pollution plan calls for only a 2 percent reduction in coal consumption — the result of the Chinese coal industry's powerful influence.
Tong Zhu, an air pollution specialist who travels between Princeton University and Beijing, sees political infighting in China's giant bureaucracy as the biggest impediment to progress.
"There is technology available" to fix the problem, he told NPR.
"I think as long as there is political willingness, the environmental situation can be drastically improved."

Fashion-forward protection
Not everybody hates the smog.
Companies that make protective face masks are selling millions of them, surpassing records set after the SARS outbreak in 2003.
On the streets of Beijing, it's strange to see someone not wearing a mask, designer Chen Dawei told the South China Morning Post. 
The result has been a boom in fashion-forward face masks adorned with everything from animal prints to counterfeit designer logos.
Wealthy businessmen and government officials are also shelling out for indoor air purifiers, which sometimes sell in upscale showrooms for as much as $3,000.
In the first half of 2013, IQAir, a Swiss company, saw sales of its luxury air purifiers triple in China.
The trend, however, has bred some resentment from average Chinese families.
Their annual income? About $2,100 a year.

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China’s Soviet-Style Suburbia Heralds Environmental Pain

By Bloomberg News

China is now moving people to suburbia.

A pedestrian walks on a bridge in front of residential buildings in Tianjin, China.

Cars and taxis drive past a residential development under construction, in the suburb of Meijiang near Tianjin on Oct. 16, 2013.

Commuters wait for buses in the central business district (CBD) of Beijing. Transport currently produces about 26 percent of China’s carbon emissions from fuel combustion and is the fastest growing consumer of fossil fuels, the World Bank says.

A couple rides on a motorcycle over a bridge at the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city in Tianjin. Tianjin’s urban area has surged 30 percent since 2008 to 1,684 square kilometers while its population density has remained flat at 5,500 people per square kilometer, according to Demographia, a Belleville, Illinois-based research firm.

Take away the haze of air pollution and Waterfront Corso Mansions near Tianjin might seem like an urban idyll for China’s growing population of city dwellers.
Inside a gated compound, residential towers and houses overlook a lake and manicured gardens. 

What’s missing from the neighborhood are shops and amenities, turning the block and hundreds like it in the suburb of Meijiang into a giant dormitory for Tianjin, 40 minutes away by car.
“There’s no hospital nearby, no hair salon, hardly any restaurants,” said Wang Bo, 62, who lives with his daughter’s family in the complex and ferries his wife to work each day. 

“I have to drive 20 minutes just to buy vegetables.”
This is one of China’s superblocks, developments that are storing up a social, energy and environmental crisis by forcing millions of new urban middle-class residents to drive everywhere. 

As China’s ruling Communist Party convenes this week to debate an economic blueprint for the future, the Soviet-inspired urban plan pits municipal governments that rely on the land sales for a fifth of their revenue against Premier Li Keqiang, who is trying to balance urbanization with efforts to clean up the environment.
What the U.S. did in the 1950s with 160 million people, China is doing now with more than a billion -- moving to suburbia. 

Unlike the U.S. postwar sprawl, which mixed houses with schools, supermarkets and diners, the new Chinese commuters have to drive back to the city, or even across town for basic services, boosting energy consumption and emissions that have made the nation’s cities some of the most polluted in the world.

Li’s Task
China has shifted more than 300 million people into cities since 1995 -- about twice the population of Russia -- and Premier Li Keqiang must find a way to accommodate almost as many again from the countryside without further wrecking the environment and causing the nation’s fuel bill to soar. 

China’s metropolitan dwellers, already one tenth of the world’s population, use three times more energy than their countryside peers, according to the World Bank.
“If China doesn’t do the right thing now it will be locked into an inefficient infrastructure that leads to more congestion and more pollution,” said Shobhakar Dhakal, former executive director of the Global Carbon Project, an international scientific program hosted by the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan. 

“There’s an urgent need for the government to provide incentives for urban growth to follow a more efficient path.”

New Strategy
With China’s cities set to swallow another 276 million people by 2030, the nation needs a new strategy for municipal planning that brings residential and other land uses closer together with efficient public transport, said Peter Calthorpe, founder of Berkeley-based urban design firm Calthorpe Associates and author of “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.”
Under the superblock model, municipal authorities typically build four- to eight-lane highways to remote suburbs where they can sell building rights to developers on slabs of land about 500 meters square. 

The construction companies then erect apartment towers on the block separated from the rest of the community by fences and security guards.
Housing, industry and shopping districts are often zoned for different parts of the city, making long commutes the norm.
Even so, the rapid expansion of cities has helped drive average annual economic growth of 10.5 percent over the past decade, leading to better road and rail systems and increasing the incomes of millions.

Changing Landscape
“In the past 30 years China’s urbanization has transformed the landscape, upgraded public infrastructure and improved the quality of urban lives,” said Chang Jian, China economist at Barclays Plc in Hong Kong who previously worked for the World Bank. 

“There are problems, of course. Integrating hundreds of millions more migrant workers will be a challenge.”
The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the Tianjin Planning Bureau didn’t respond to faxed requests for comment.
The superblock system has also boosted revenue for local governments who can sell rights for otherwise marginal land faster, at higher prices and with lower planning and infrastructure costs than for small parcels.
Municipal authorities in China, with a combined debt of more than 10 trillion yuan ($1.6 trillion), get about 21 percent of their revenue from land sales, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. 

That reliance on the property market for revenue “has become a chronic problem,” wrote Citigroup Inc. Hong Kong-based analysts Oscar Choi and Marco Sze in a Nov. 5 research note.

Same Dilemma
As many as 90 percent of China’s cities are built this way, said He Dongquan, director of the China Sustainable Cities Program in Beijing at the Energy Foundation, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that promotes clean energy.
“The question is: Do the mid-size, second- and third-tier cities build their way into the same dilemma as Beijing and Shanghai or do they take a better path,” said Calthorpe. 

“If they don’t, the environmental burden will be huge. You don’t have to wait for the catastrophe: It’s already here.”
Energy use and carbon emissions from transportation will probably triple to 30 percent of the nation’s total by 2030, according to He.
Policies that promote the use of public transport in more compact and integrated communities could halve fuel consumption and carbon emissions from transport by 2030, said He. 

Last year, China’s carbon emissions grew by 300 million tons, more than any other country and about a quarter of the global increase.
Superblocks are “the standard for virtually all new housing” in China, said a report last year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Advanced Urbanism.

Waiting Taxis
Along the four-lane avenue to Meijiang from Tianjin, the towers of dozens of those blocks loom out of the haze. 

Two workers eating an early lunch crouch on the pavement next to the road, which is almost deserted of cars in the late morning. 

Near Bo’s complex, half a dozen light green taxis wait on a corner, their drivers chatting and smoking. 

A 10-minute walk down the road finds not a single shop or restaurant.
Bo, who retired two years ago, drives about 40 minutes morning and night to take his wife to and from work at the Tianjin Medical Center. 

... Even his granddaughter has to be driven to kindergarten.
Tianjin’s 13.5 million people live in a city that is among China’s 10 most polluted, according to the environment ministry.

Polluted Air
“It’s really terrible,” said Lin Zhixin, 30, who lives in the same complex as Bo with her Korean husband and daughter, on a day when air pollution was five times the level the World Health Organization deems safe. “When I took my child to the hospital recently with a cough there were many other children there with the same problem. The doctor said pollution was partly to blame.”
Tianjin’s growth is being replicated across the nation’s cities.
China’s total urban area is set to expand by 220,000 square kilometers -- enough to blanket Great Britain with metropolises -- by 2030, from a total of 80,000 square kilometers in 2000, says Karen Seto, a professor at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
More than half of that expansion is probably yet to happen, said Seto, who uses satellite images, rates of metropolitan population growth and the historical relationship between income and urban land area to estimate increases.

Rising Emissions
At stake is whether China’s carbon dioxide emissions leap four times to match U.S. per capita output or peak about two thirds lower at levels on par with France, which may enable cuts by other nations to cap global greenhouse gas emissions, wrote Harvard University economics professor Edward Glaeser in his 2011 book “Triumph of the City.”
Building compact cities around mass transit systems that balance commercial and residential areas would slash reliance on cars, preventing as much as 800 million tons of carbon dioxide in total from spewing into the atmosphere by 2030, more than emitted by Germany in 2011, Energy Foundation’s He estimates.
Poor planning threatens to reduce any gains China might make by reducing pollution from traditional industries.
China’s cities eject more than 70 percent of the nation’s energy-related carbon emissions, about 80 percent of that from coal-fired power generation and industry.
As more people move from the country and increase energy use, the demand for power is set to climb. China’s coal-fired generating capacity will jump about 78 percent in the decade ending 2020, according to a forecast by China Development Bank.

Urban Path
“Because per capita energy use in cities is high and rising and the rate of urbanization is rapid, it’s inevitable that urban areas will increasingly determine the path of China’s CO2 emissions,” said Dhakal, associate professor at the Asian Institute of Technology’s School of Environment, Resources and Development in Bangkok, Thailand.
Spurred by the rising wealth and the current city design, China is putting about 20 million more cars on the roads each year.
As much as 30 percent of PM2.5, the fine particles that pose the greatest health risk, is caused by transportation.
Superblock neighborhoods in Jinan, capital of Shandong province, consume two to three times more energy than other neighborhoods in the city mainly because they cause more trips by car, according to MIT’s Dennis Frenchman and Christopher Zegras.
China’s “pointlessly wide roads and squares” are rooted in Soviet-style city planning intended to “project Communist Party Power,” wrote Tom Miller in “China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History.”

Jammed Roads
“The typical Chinese city is gray, ugly and congested,” wrote Miller.
“The roads are jammed, the air filthy, the streets often unwalkable.”
Premier Li is trying to change that.
China will adopt a “new type of urbanization” that puts the people at its “heart” and incorporates ideas of green and efficient growth, he said in March at a press conference in Beijing.
The World Bank and the State Council’s Development Research Center are working on a report focused on urbanization that Li requested.
It is scheduled for publication in December.
“Some of our priorities are building dense cities that keep people living close to where they work with better transport systems,” World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said at a briefing in Beijing in September. 

New Designs
Signs of change include experiments with new metropolitan designs in places including Kunming, capital of southwestern Yunnan province.
When its new district of Chenggong became known as a so-called “ghost city” because its streets remained deserted years after completion, the local government turned to the Energy Foundation and Calthorpe to help it develop another part of the city.
Four years later, that new suburb is under construction on 8.6 square kilometers of land, using “human-scale streets” with mass transit, bus stations and green spaces every 300 meters, said Calthorpe.
Schools, hospitals, restaurants and jobs will all be available within compact districts.
In Beijing, some infill redevelopments have begun to create more livable areas including the Nanluoguxiang and Qianmen areas, said Fang Yiping, assistant professor at the PSU-China Innovations in Urbanization Program at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

Human Scale
“They both attempted to create more human-scale urban spaces, and both are increasingly well received by the public,” said Fang.
Li Keqiang and his fellow Communist leaders have the opportunity of shifting the nation’s policy priorities at the conclave, known as a plenum, held in Beijing on Nov. 9-12.
A major obstacle to change is the local-government financing system that favors development of “excessive quantities of scattered urban land, at low densities, exceeding the level justified by demand,” wrote World Bank staffers Zhi Liu and Andrew Salzberg in a report last year.
City mayors and other senior officials are in office for three to five years and so have little incentive to try innovative approaches, said Seto.
“Once basic infrastructure is set in place it’s very difficult to change the form of the city,” she said.
“There are still a lot of cities to be built. But they need pretty quickly to change what they are doing.”

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How Big Formula bought China

By Alexandra Harney

A family looks at foreign imported milk powder products at a supermarket in Beijing in this July 3, 2013 file photo.

SHANGHAI -- In the two days after Lucy Yang gave birth at Peking University Third Hospital in August 2012, doctors and nurses told the 33-year-old technology executive that while breast milk was the best food for her son, she hadn't produced enough. 

They advised her instead to start him on infant formula made by Nestle.
"They support only this brand, and they don't let your baby drink other brands," Yang recalled. 

"The nurses told us not to use our own formula. They told us if we did, and something happened to the child, they wouldn't take any responsibility."
For Nestle and other infant formula producers, there is one significant complication for their China business: a 1995 Chinese regulation designed to ensure the impartiality of physicians and protect the health of newborns. It bars hospital personnel from promoting infant formula to the families of babies younger than six months, except in the rare cases when a woman has insufficient breast milk or cannot breastfeed for medical reasons. Nestle told Reuters it supports this code and has tried to strengthen its implementation. 

Peking University Third Hospital declined repeated requests for comment.
Most women have enough breast milk to feed their infants, scientific studies show. 

The World Health Organization advocates exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life, starting within an hour of delivery. 

Breastfeeding leads to better health for babies and mothers, including protection against infection for infants and lower rates of breast and ovarian cancer for women, WHO says.
A Reuters examination reveals that global infant formula companies have found ways to skirt and violate the 1995 code, which they support publicly. 

Reuters interviewed nearly two dozen Chinese women who have delivered babies at hospitals around China over the last two years. 

Like Lucy Yang, most experienced the aggressive tactics of formula makers.
Until very recently, enforcement of China's 1995 regulation had been rare. 

Neither WHO nor UNICEF can point to a single instance where fines had been imposed since it was introduced. 

Reuters contacted five prominent Chinese law firms and -- underlining the regulation's obscurity in Chinese legal circles -- not one was familiar with it.
The National Health and Family Planning Commission, one of the government bodies charged with enforcing the regulation, did not respond to a question about its enforcement. 

Neither did the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, which also has enforcement authority.
But the enforcement climate may be changing. 

The new Chinese government that took office this year is in the midst of a widespread crackdown on corruption, and the practices of big formula appear to be in its cross-hairs. 

On October 14, Paris-based Danone Corp said it would replace managers in China after state-owned CCTV broadcast a report that the company's formula unit — Dumex — had bribed doctors in the northern city of Tianjin to gain better access for its product.
Dumex China expressed "deep regret" over what it called "lapses" and promised "full accountability."
The same day, local officials said 13 medical workers in Tianjin had been dealt a range of punishments from warnings to dismissals.
Big formula's practices in China have also caught the attention of U.S. regulators. 

In August 2012, Pfizer Inc and its unit Wyeth agreed to pay more than $45 million combined as part of separate settlements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
In its complaint, the SEC charged that between 2005 and 2010, Wyeth paid bribes to officials outside the United States, including those in Chinese state-owned hospitals, to encourage them to recommend Wyeth's nutritional products and to gain access to records of new births that could be used for marketing, and then disguised these payments as expense claims. 

Under the terms of the settlement, Wyeth neither admitted nor denied the allegations.

GLOBAL BOYCOTT
Infant formula is controversial in many countries, and China is no exception. 

In the 1970s, growing concern that formula marketed to mothers in developing countries was contributing to malnutrition led to a global boycott of Nestle products. 

It prompted the World Health Assembly, the WHO's decision-making body, to pass a code curbing the marketing of baby formula. 

Since then, 103 countries, including China, have introduced legislation to implement parts of this code.
While campaigns promoting the benefits of breastfeeding have tainted formula's image in the West, in China, public debate about formula is mostly about safety. 

In 2004, at least 50 children died from malnutrition after drinking fake infant formula with little nutritive value. Four years later, formula sold by local brand Sanlu -- laced with the industrial chemical melamine -- sickened nearly 300,000 infants and killed six, fueling national outrage over government food safety controls.
The stain of Sanlu has proven hard to erase. 

Because many Chinese parents still doubt the quality of domestic brands, international formula makers can charge a premium to domestic brands. 

Foreign formula firms now control about a third of the Chinese market, according to consultancy Euromonitor International. 

In 2012, two of the three best-selling brands were foreign. 

Mead Johnson has a 14 percent market share, Danone controls 9 percent and Nestle 7.5 percent.
China is fertile ground for formula makers. 

A traditional Chinese belief that women should rest for the first month after delivery gives older family members greater say in the feeding and care of newborns. 

Relatives often prefer formula as it helps babies sleep for longer stretches. 

Many families, moreover, prize pudgy babies, who are seen as healthier. 

Formula-fed infants gain weight more quickly, studies show.
China's high rate of cesarean sections -- the world's second highest at 46 percent of all deliveries -- leads more mothers to start their babies on formula. 

Mothers fear drugs used in the operation will affect their breast milk. 

There is also a common belief that China's chronic air pollution is harming mothers' milk supply.
Government surveys show a low breastfeeding rate -- just 28 percent of Chinese women were exclusively breastfeeding at six months as of 2008, down from 51 percent in 2003. 

Independent researchers suggest the real figure is much lower. 

One study published in the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition in 2010 found exclusive breastfeeding rates at six months in parts of China were as low as 0.2 percent.
With infant formula sales in the United States declining because of a falling birth rate and a rise in breastfeeding, developing nations -- China foremost among them -- are formula companies' biggest opportunity.
In 2008, China surpassed the United States to become the world's largest formula market. 

Euromonitor expects sales of infant formula in China to double from $12 billion last year to $25 billion in 2017.

FREE SAMPLES
Under China's 1995 code, companies may not distribute free formula or samples to pregnant women, their families and hospitals. 

They can't sell products at a discount. 

Nor may they offer hospitals funding, equipment or information in order to promote their product.
The regulation bars hospitals and academic institutions from accepting gifts or help from formula companies or promoting infant formula products. 

It requires medical institutions to "actively advocate" the advantages of breastfeeding.
Penalties for violations, however, are lenient -- the maximum fine is 30,000 yuan ($4,900). 

Enforcement is complicated by its division across several government bodies: the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, and the General Administration of Press and Publication.
Public awareness of the regulation is low. 

Chinese research firm Beijing Shennong Kexin Agribusiness Consulting counts hospitals as one of the four primary channels for sales of infant formula, alongside supermarkets, baby product stores, and the Internet.
Doctors and their recommendations have the largest impact, it wrote in a November 2012 report. Consumers find "organizing activities inside hospitals around nutrition more scientific and persuasive."
Reuters found formula company advertising and promotion commonplace inside hospitals. 

In August, visitors to the maternity ward at Hangzhou Tianmushan Hospital in eastern China were greeted with banners from Mead Johnson that read: "Healthy babies, happy mothers" and "Give baby the best start in life!"
A picture of a baby drinking from a bottle and the Mead Johnson logo adorned the floor guide. 

On the VIP maternity wing, nurse Xia Lingling -- a new mother herself -- said Mead Johnson representatives regularly visited to drop off samples for new mothers and to give talks to the staff.
Xia explained that every patient who delivers at the hospital and stays on the VIP wing receives a free container of Mead Johnson upon the baby's birth. 

Mead Johnson "promotes their infant formula here . . . it's a form of advertising," said Zhang Yueqin, an obstetrician at the hospital.
A Hangzhou Tianmushan spokesman, who would only give his name as Fan, denied the hospital touted Mead Johnson formula to mothers. 

He said promotional materials were intended to improve the medical knowledge of expectant and new mothers. 

The hospital displayed no branded posters from Mead Johnson, he said. 

By late September, the posters had been taken down, Reuters confirmed.
In a statement emailed to Reuters, Mead Johnson said it does not provide formula directly to mothers in hospitals. 

It does give samples to health care professionals "for the purpose of professional evaluation or research, and all of them are clearly marked ‘For medical use only - Not for Resale' on the label," the statement said.
Mead Johnson said it provided posters and "other materials to display in or around maternity wings" if requested by hospital staff. 

These materials "fully comply with the laws and regulations in China," it said.

PUSHING FORMULA
Mothers whom Reuters interviewed said formula was pushed to them in myriad ways: doctors gave them discount cards for infant formula during prenatal checkups; hospital staff strapped identity bands branded by formula companies to their babies' limbs; formula representatives entered their hospital rooms to distribute samples as they recovered from giving birth.
At Beijing Tiantan Hospital, representatives from companies, including Nestle and Wyeth, visited with formula samples for mothers and presents for doctors, said Dr. Yang, who worked as an obstetrician there until 2009. 

"We weren't given a commission, just small gifts."
She declined to elaborate on the nature of the gifts, or be identified by her full name. 

Kuang Yuanshen, a hospital spokesman, said that without more detail, it was impossible to confirm Dr. Yang's allegations. 

Wyeth said by email that company representatives were "strictly forbidden" from visiting hospitals to distribute free samples.
Four former formula company representatives, however, confirmed these kinds of dealings take place. 

A former Nestle sales representative said she brought samples to doctors and took them to dinner. 

A former Nestle marketing executive said it was standard industry practice in China to provide financial incentives to doctors to recommend a certain brand of formula. 

Chinese doctors, she said, expect it.
In an emailed response to questions, Nestle confirmed it has "a medical-trained team who visits hospitals to provide factual information about our product features and up-to-date nutrition and health-related information to doctors." 

Nestle "does not provide any free supply to hospitals nor incentivize doctors to promote our products," it said.
Many underpaid and overworked doctors in China's state-dominated healthcare system have no choice but to rely on incentives from companies, however, says John Cai, director of the Centre for Healthcare Management and Policy at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. 

The official annual take-home pay for an obstetrician with nearly two decades' experience in a public hospital might be only $5,000, depending on the services she offers, doctors said.
"A company might approach you and say they'd like to support your work," says Qiu Liqian, an obstetrician and associate professor at the Women's Hospital at Zhejiang University Medical School. 

"If you're organizing an academic conference, or you're organizing an event on nutrition, or an event on preventing infection, they would offer their assistance." 

Formula companies pay for prominent Chinese doctors to attend academic conferences, which she called "free holidays".
Bribery to obtain an unfair business advantage is illegal under both China's Anti-Unfair Competition and Criminal Laws. 

Bribery can include paying for sponsorship, scientific research and travel expenses under the Anti-Unfair Competition Law; under an interpretation of the Criminal Law, paying travel costs is one of many recognized forms of bribery.

UNDERGROUND MARKET
Some formula companies also utilize a large underground market in hospital patient information. 

This gives them immediate access to the names, phone numbers and due dates of pregnant women and new mothers, according to a medical researcher and sales executive who have seen name lists of pregnant women for sale at hospitals in Beijing and Shanghai.
Under a 2009 amendment to China's Criminal Law, it is illegal for employees in the medical sector to sell patients' personal data. 

Stealing or acquiring such information illegally is also a crime.
Contacting mothers through prenatal classes is one way formula companies get access to expecting mothers. At one such class taught by Abbott at Shanghai East International Medical Center, participants received a 400-gram (15-oz) tub of Abbott formula, according to Gao Meng, a 33-year-old office manager from Shanghai who attended.
Shanghai East confirmed that Abbott representatives had trained their nurses in Lamaze breathing techniques and taught prenatal classes at the hospital between April and July this year, because of their "expertise" in Lamaze breathing. 

No infant formula was distributed at these classes, a spokeswoman said. 

A spokesman for Abbott declined to comment.
Hospitals and doctors sell access to prenatal classes to third-party companies, including formula manufacturers, said a sales executive who uses Shanghai hospitals as a marketing platform for his company's nanny services. 

That access allows companies to lead classes, distribute promotional materials or make an appearance to plug their products, he said.
Eighteen mothers in cities around China interviewed by Reuters said infant formula companies contacted them by phone or text message, both during their pregnancies and starting as soon as an hour after they had delivered their babies.
Yang Jing, a 33-year-old department store manager in Beijing who had a baby in 2011, said formula companies including Wyeth called her to ask about her son's development. 

Formula would help her son be stronger, they told her. 

Samples arrived at her home. 

She said she had never given a formula company her address.
Wyeth said it "has clear guidelines for our sales activities to exclude any sales or marketing activities relating to breast milk substitutes that would target consumers, either by phone or face to face contact." 

It promised an investigation into this case.

IT'S ACADEMIC
Most of the major infant formula companies have cultivated ties with the government in China — including departments affiliated with the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), one of the agencies tasked with enforcing the 1995 regulation on formula marketing.
Companies fund hospital research and awards for doctors, sponsor conferences and train state medical personnel -- the same medical professionals who are supposed to be actively advocating breastfeeding.

Nestle has been among the most active in the government relations area, breastfeeding advocates say. 

It has sponsored training for officials from mother-and child clinics. 

It backed a Chinese academic study analyzing the composition of Chinese mothers' breast milk. 

Peking University Third, where Lucy Yang had her baby, was among the hospitals the Swiss food giant chose to conduct clinical trials on the use of breast milk "fortifier" for premature infants between 2010 and 2011.
Nestle said it "works with the Ministry of Health and healthcare institutions to promote public awareness and knowledge of health and nutrition."
Last year, Mead Johnson launched a three-year training program for medical personnel in the southwestern province of Yunnan, working with a Chinese foundation. 

The program focused on improving staff's understanding of nutrition and "scientific feeding" for children from birth to age three, according to company publicity materials.
Training of medical personnel that is intended as a gift is a clear violation of both the 1981 WHO code and China's 1995 regulation, said Beijing-based WHO technical officer Wen Chunmei.
In a statement, Mead Johnson described its training project as "philanthropic".

ACCESS TO POLICYMAKERS
Nestle and other foreign formula companies also enjoy direct access to Chinese policymakers. 

During discussions about revising the 1995 regulation that began in December 2011, the Ministry of Health (now the NHFPC) solicited opinions from big foreign formula brands as well as global health and children's organizations.
Nestle sought to weaken some of the proposed provisions, some of which were more stringent than the 1995 regulation and would have brought China closer in line with WHO regulations, according to a copy of its submission obtained by Reuters.
Despite publicly supporting the WHO code, Nestle objected to a proposed rule that formula packaging should display in a conspicuous way the wording "breastfeeding is recommended". 

The WHO code says formula containers should clearly and conspicuously display a statement on the superiority of breastfeeding.
Nestle told Reuters that the proposed labeling risked inconsistency with a Chinese infant food safety standard "which provides clear guidelines to ensure that messages on labels are displayed in a standardized manner".
Nestle further opposed a proposed ban in the revised code on formula companies funding hospital research into breast milk alternatives. 

In its statement to Reuters, Nestle said the research was "necessary for the development of science-based products that can save the lives of those infants who cannot have adequate breast feeding." 

Nestle also sought to limit the proposed code's application to formula for "full term, healthy babies", an exclusion not in the WHO code, though it says it did not try to make an exception for specialty formulas.
"Quite frankly," Nestle wrote Reuters, "all our recommendations were meant to introduce a stricter local code as well as implementation." 

Nestle added that it urged extending the curb on promoting formula from infants' first six months to their first 12.

SIGNS OF CHANGE
The Chinese government is showing signs of taking the 1995 regulation more seriously. 

After the Chinese television story about Dumex, the health ministry warned hospitals to strengthen enforcement of the code. 

Three government agencies jointly issued a notice reinforcing its main principles.
But while the 1995 regulation is getting more attention, the attempt to revise it remains in limbo. 

The NFPHC, in a faxed response to questions, said the number of government departments involved and the number of sectors the code covered, as well as the reorganization of government departments, had slowed the process of revision.
Wen, the WHO technical officer, said there may not have been sufficient public education about the 1995 code. 

But she stressed that infant feeding was an issue that "all of society" needed to address. 

"If training is confined to the medical system," she said, "it will only have a limited impact on raising the exclusive breastfeeding rate."

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On the Chinese Internet, Big Interest in Smog’s Threat to Fertility

By AUSTIN RAMZY

How do you get online readers to click on a story about a long, official report about climate change? 

One answer, grabbed by editors of Chinese news sites Tuesday, was to play up a single line about a link between air pollution and fertility rates.
The subsequent headline — “Climate Change Green Paper: Smog Can Influence Reproductive Ability” — was a bit of a head-scratcher. 

It referred to a report issued Monday by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the China Meteorological Administration on climate change, a subject related to but different from the physical impacts of air pollution. 

The widely republished story, from the Xi’an-based China Business Review, gave the subject of reproductive health little more than a passing mention.
Instead, it focused on the rising numbers of smoggy days in China. 

Last week the meteorological administration said that the past 10 months had seen the highest number of smoggy days since 1961 in much of China, including the northeast, east and parts of the country’s southern region. 

Last month heavy pollution shut down schools and the airport in the northeastern city of Harbin. 

Earlier this fall the central government released an action plan to control toxic emissions, a sign of a new willingness to publicly confront the poor air quality.
Now it seems that a sure way to grab the attention of Chinese news consumers is to discuss the threat to human health. 

The initial announcement on Monday of the publication of the government paper, which has been released annually since 2009, didn’t hit such a frightening note. 

It focused on how to incorporate low-carbon development amid China’s increasing urbanization.
But by Tuesday, editors of many Chinese media outlets had posted headlines that emphasized the reproductive health discussion buried in the report. 

The story took off online. 

One version of the story on the Sina news portal had more than 10,000 comments.
“This is really shocking,” wrote Xu Shaolin, a freelance writer, on his widely followed Sina Weibo account. “People who want to have children should pay attention. In the future we won’t have to worry about family planning, smog will solve the problem.”
The government report, however, focused on environmentally friendly construction and low-carbon development pilot projects now underway around China. 

It also examined recent natural disasters, like Hurricane Sandy and deadly floods in Beijing last year, that are expected to become a greater threat as global temperatures rise.
The discussion of health effects, which cited the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Integrated Science Assessment for Particulate Matter, was offered as a bit of context, a couple of sentences in a report that was hundreds of pages long.

It said that inhaling fine airborne pollutants causes health effects that cannot be ignored, including increased mortality rates. 

Inhaled pollutants, it said, “also change the lung’s functions and structure, affect reproductive ability and change the body’s immune system structure, among other effects.”
The extensive 2009 EPA report said that a review of studies “was suggestive of a causal relationship” between long-term exposure to fine particles known as PM2.5, because they have a diameter of 2.5 microns or less, and “reproductive and developmental outcomes.” 

One large international study has found that women who have been exposed to air pollution during their pregnancy are more likely to have a low birth-weight baby.

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Too Big to Breathe?

What if China meets every criteria of economic success except one: You can’t live there.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

SHANGHAI — I arrived here on Oct. 19th and was greeted with this news: A combination of cold weather, lack of wind, coal-powered heating and farmers burning off post-harvest debris had created a perfect storm of pollution in the northeastern industrial city of Harbin, home to 10 million people. 

It was so bad that bus drivers were getting lost because the smog-enveloped roads would only permit them to see a few yards ahead. 

Harbin’s official website reportedly warned that “cars with headlights turned on were moving no faster than pedestrians and honking frequently as drivers struggled to see traffic lights meters away.”
The NASA Earth Observatory declared that some Harbin neighborhoods “experienced concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) as high as 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter. 

For comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality standards say PM2.5 should remain below 35 micrograms per cubic meter.” 

This means that Harbin would need a 97 percent reduction in pollution in order to reach the maximum level our government would recommend. 

NASA said Harbin hospitals reported “a 30 percent increase in admissions related to respiratory problems, and several Harbin pharmacies were sold out of pollution face masks.” 

The American jazz singer Patti Austin canceled a concert in smoggy Beijing because of “a severe asthma attack in combination with respiratory infection,” according to the event’s website.
It was no wonder that at a gathering of environmental activists in Shanghai I attended, organized by the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, or Juccce, the conversation was dominated by moms and dads talking about where in China to live, when to send their kids outdoors and what food and water to trust. While swapping notes on China’s latest “airpocalypse” a few days later, Hal Harvey, the American chief executive of Energy Innovation, who is working with China’s government to try to get its air quality back under control, asked a powerful question: “What if China meets every criteria of economic success except one: You can’t live there.”
Indeed, what good is it having all those sparkling new buildings if you’re trapped inside them? 

What good is it if China’s rapid growth has enabled four million people in Beijing to own cars, but the traffic never moves? 

What good is it if China’s per capita incomes have risen to a level affording tens of millions of once-poor peasants diets rich in milk and meat, but they can’t trust the labels? 

What good is all that rising G.D.P., if there is no clean air to breathe?
China has built amazing hardware in 30 years — modern cities, roads, airports, ports and telecoms — bringing more people out of poverty faster than any country in the history of the world. 

The Chinese have much to be proud of. 

Every healthy economy, though, depends on a healthy environment. 

China will stall if President Xi Jinping and his government do not now build the software — the institutionalized laws, courts and norms — that can ensure that all this growth will not be undermined by an epidemic of despoiled land and dirty air.
That is easier said than done. 

China is a one-party system with multiple, competing interests inside. 

More enlightened party leaders in Beijing may declare, “We have to clean this up,” but they still have to get the local bosses — whose bonuses depend largely on generating economic growth — “to assert environmental interests at least as strongly as economic interests,” said Harvey. 

That requires assigning real value, and giving real institutional power and weight, to those in the system who believe that it is just as important to protect the commons — air, water, land, food safety — as it is to grow the commons, that it is just as important to have decent ingredients in the pie as it is to grow the pie. 

“At the end of the day,” said Harvey, “if the pie’s not edible, it doesn’t matter how big it is.”
(We can thank our lucky stars that foresighted Americans, starting around 1970, built the institutions to protect our air and water. Next time you hear someone beat up on the E.P.A., send them to Harbin for a week.)
Peggy Liu, the founder of Juccce, is working with Chinese consumers, producers and bureaucrats to define and implement a more sustainable “Chinese dream” that must be different from the American dream of a house, a car, a yard and a throwaway economy for all. 

I think building the institutional support for a sustainable Chinese dream is the most important thing President Xi can do.
“China doesn’t have to have rivers that run bright red with industrial waste, or our lakes and beaches smothered by thick, green algae, or 18,000 dead virused pigs floating down the Huangpu River,” Liu recently wrote. 

“We shouldn’t have to check our air quality index app on our phone every day to determine whether we should let our children outside to play. There shouldn’t be any more Chinese children who, when they go abroad for the first time, ask: ‘Mommy, why is the sky so blue?’... China can be better than this. China needs to carve our own unique way to a thriving life and stable community — a path that is a sustainable path. If we don’t do this soon, we will end up with a China Nightmare.”

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China’s Youngest Lung-Cancer Patient Is Just 8 Years Old, and Pollution Is to Blame

Smog-related cancer deaths in China are soaring. Now children are being affected
By Emily Rauhala / Beijing

A woman and her son wearing masks walk along a road as heavy smog engulfs the city on Oct. 21, 2013 in Changchun, China

To the list of China’s environmental horrors, add one: an 8-year-old with lung cancer. 

Doctors at a hospital in coastal Jiangsu province blamed the girl’s condition on pollution, according to a state media. 

The child, who has not been identified, reportedly lived near a busy road and was exposed to harmful particles and dust. 

She is being called China’s youngest-ever lung-cancer patient.
The news comes amid growing concern about the health effects of air pollution. 

Last month the World Health Organization for the first time classified air pollution as a cause of cancer. 

The agency said air pollution caused 220,000 cancer deaths in 2010 and that more than half of lung-cancer deaths from particulate matter were in China. 

Lung-cancer deaths in China have multiplied more than four times in the past three decades, according to government statistics.
The problem is particularly bad in northern China, where coal-powered heating systems add extra filth to the mix. 

These emissions have shortened the lifespans of Chinese people living north of the Huai River by an average of five years, according to a study published this year by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an American journal. 

In Beijing, the smog-addled capital, cancer is now the leading cause of death, with lung-cancer rates jumping 60% in a period of 10 years.
Chinese urbanites are all too familiar with chest-rattling smog. 

In the northern Chinese city of Harbin last month, the pollution was so thick that kids were granted a “smog day” off school, roads were closed and planes grounded. 

State media said the PM 2.5 reading (which measures the level of dangerous particulate matter in the air) “exceeded” 500. 

A Reuters report put the figure at 1,000, or 40 times higher than what the World Health Organization deems safe. 

Last year, Beijing endured weeks of off-the-chart pollution that English speakers now refer to as the “airpocalypse.”
Perhaps the only upside of the city-shuttering smog is that it has forced the Chinese government to own up to the problem. 

This fall, the government announced a new blueprint for cleaning up the air by 2017. 

The plan calls for 5 billion yuan, or $817 million, to fight pollution. 

There will also be color-coded emergency measures for bad pollution days in Beijing. 

On red days, for instance, half the city’s cars will be idled and schools closed. 

Under a code orange, factories will slow and activities like fireworks and outdoor barbecues will be restricted.
These plans are better than nothing, but many wonder why the government hasn’t done more to keep people safe. 

After news of the 8-year-old’s diagnosis broke, hundreds of people commented on the story, wishing the child luck and expressing their own fears about living in a region where the air kills.
Channeling the sentiment of many here, one reader invoked a Chinese idiom: “Hao hao xuexi, tian tian xiang shang,” or, roughly, “Study hard and make progress every day.” 

Parents and teachers have been saying it for years, urging children to work harder, do better. 

But to this old phrase, they added a second bit of advice that reflects the dark mood as the country heads into another toxic winter: “Study hard and make progress every day,” they wrote. 

“And then leave China.”

NASA snaps pics of China's 'Airpocalypse' pollution disaster

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Jokes, Lies and Pollution in China

By YU HUA

Clean and Dirty: China’s Energy Binge

ELECTRICITY FROM NONFOSSIL FUELS In 2011 (billions of kilowatt-hours).

AVERAGE ANNUAL GROWTH 2005 to 2011. China’s growth rate in nonfossil electricity far exceeded that of the U.S.

%

%

319

687

+3

+10

U.S.

CHINA

Hydro

790

83

+0.2

+9

Nuclear

120

73

+37

+82

Wind

+22

+85

2

3

Solar

FOSSIL FUELS CONSUMED National totals in 2011 (quadrillion B.T.U.’s).

AVERAGE ANNUAL GROWTH RATE 2005 to 2011.

20

76

–2

+8

U.S.

CHINA

Coal

35

20

–2

+7

Oil

25

5

+2

+19

Natural

gas

Chinese man wearing gas mask to avoid polluted air

BEIJING — After my physical exam this year, the doctor showed me his findings. 

Next to an irregularity he had noted concerning lung function, I was surprised to see the words “air pollution.” 

It was first time this had ever appeared in my health report.
This reminded me of the uproar in China in June of last year regarding PM 2.5 — the airborne particles with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less that are particularly harmful to our health. 

Reports of high PM 2.5 levels, monitored and revealed by the U.S. Embassy and various consulates across China, fueled public concerns about air pollution. 

But the government went on the defensive, with Wu Xiaoqing, vice minister for environmental protection, rebuking the United States and claiming its monitoring had violated international conventions and Chinese law.
After a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry issued a similar protest, a joker on the Internet took things a step further. 

“As everyone knows, in keeping with international norms, U.S. Embassies count as American territory. Data obtained in such locations show only that U.S. air quality is poor.”
Prior to these PM 2.5 reports, hardly anyone in China except for a few environmental professionals knew that these tiny particles can directly enter the bronchial tubes, interfere with gas exchange in the lungs and cause a variety of serious health problems. 

While Chinese officials criticized America and minimized the dangers of PM 2.5, Chinese citizens went online to vent their dissatisfaction with the government. 

Face masks sold out and cans of compressed air were hawked on the streets.
Hazardous smog has enveloped many areas of China. 

Last January the smog was so thick in Anji County in Zhejiang Province that a fire there went unnoticed by local residents for three hours. 

Last week, visibility in the northeastern city of Harbin was less than 10 meters, forcing the closure of all schools.
As China’s two most important political congresses were being held in the early part of the year, and the new president and prime minister were named, Beijing and other northern cities were shrouded in toxic smog, setting records in some areas for the most days with hazardous air. 

The pollution was a hot topic for everyone while the congresses were under way.
It’s widely assumed that air purifiers have been installed in our leaders’ offices and homes, but they still have to go outside, and when they do they have to breathe the same polluted air as everyone else. 

Maybe because our leaders are also suffering from the effects of pollution, or maybe because there’s increasing pressure from society, our government has made a sudden about-face in its attitude toward PM 2.5, no longer chafing about monitoring by the Americans or minimizing the hazards.
In the summer, Zhou Shengxian, the environment minister, announced that the total budget for the next five years for measures to combat air pollution would amount to about $280 billion. 

He did not provide specifics on how this money would be spent, indicating only that thousands of PM 2.5 monitoring stations would be added per year.
The safety guideline for PM 2.5 set by the World Health Organization is 25 micrograms per cubic meter, whereas the Chinese government sets a limit of 75 micrograms per cubic meter. 

The official explanation for this gap is that China is still a developing country and so cannot yet reach the W.H.O. targets. 

The public’s understanding takes the form of a joke: A fish falls into a vat of soybean sauce, and goes around complaining about how awful the environment is. 

A big fat maggot comes crawling over. 

“Why don’t you shut the hell up?” it curses. “You can’t judge a bean-sauce vat by the standards of a fishbowl!”

Reducing air pollution involves a lot more than just setting up more PM 2.5 monitoring stations. 

It’s clear that steel and chemical plants are the main source of air pollution. 

The government has in recent years closed down some small privately owned plants, but it’s the large and medium-sized state-owned plants that are the main culprits, and the government has done little to reduce their impact, merely limiting the number of new plants. 

That’s because new environmental regulations could be detrimental to the economy, at least in the short term, and our leaders’ biggest fear is that economic pain could affect the stability of their rule.
In the Mao era, the government maintained its authority by coercive indoctrination, whereas today economic growth is one of the keys to holding power. 

Thus, some cities’ main response to air pollution is to restrict drivers to using their cars on alternating days, based on their license plate numbers, and we see half-baked policies instead of serious action. 

One of the measures for alleviating air pollution in Beijing, for example, is banning outdoor barbecue stalls.
Hebei Province, which surrounds Beijing, is China’s top steel-producing province. 

Steel plants play a big role in air and water pollution, but the city of Cangzhou’s answer to the problem is an anti-smoking campaign.
A Hebei official newspaper, Yanzhao Dushi Bao, reported in July that local officials in Cangzhou held a public meeting pledging their commitment to the anti-smoking cause. 

With smoke billowing from the chimneys of factories in the distance, officials promoted the slogan: “Curbing air pollution starts with me!”
On Oct. 12, I posted the following message on my microblog: “Since my arrival in Hong Kong four days ago, I’ve been staying in an apartment by the sea. Yesterday I developed a throbbing headache, but I don’t have cold symptoms. I guess I’ve just been living in Beijing so long that clean air doesn’t suit me.”

Many readers came up with the same treatment plan — that I hurry up and breathe some car exhaust.
For years “air pollution” had been trying to claim a place in my health report. 

At last, it has. 

Sad to say, it will be much more difficult to purge this term from the report than it was to let it in.

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Beautiful China tourism pitch misfires amid smog

"When you have all the stories about the pollution, and the air pollution in particular, people are not going to buy the myth that China is beautiful." -- Tourism expert

The Associated Press

What a wonderful world

Forget all the headlines about eye-watering pollution in Beijing and Shanghai -- the Middle Kingdom's latest tourism slogan invites visitors to "Beautiful China."
Adorning buses and trains in cities such as London, the international marketing effort has been derided as particularly inept at a time when record-busting smog has drawn attention to the environmental and health costs of China's unfettered industrialization.
Like this year's typically clunky theme for visitors "China Ocean Tourism Year," the slogan highlights the tin ear of an industry that has ridden the coattails of China's rapid economic growth and increased global prominence but failed to keep up with international travel trends.
"Beauty can be looked at in many different ways, but when you have all the stories about the pollution, and the air pollution in particular, people are not going to buy the fact that China is 100 percent beautiful," said Alastair Morrison, a Beijing-based expert in tourism destination marketing and development.
China's tourism industry has grown at a fast pace since the country began free market-style economic reforms three decades ago. 

In 2011, travel and tourism generated $644 billion, or more than 9 percent of China's GDP, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, mostly propelled by its huge domestic market of 1.1 billion people.
China is also the world's third most visited country after France and the U.S.

Despite that status, the numbers are less significant economically than domestic tourism. 

On top of that, the growth in foreign tourists has lagged world averages.
According to the World Tourism Organization, whose data is based on national sources, the average growth rate in overnight visitors worldwide was 2.8 percent from 2008 to 2012. 

The average growth rate in China was 2.1 percent.
And in the first nine months of this year, a period during which China's image as a destination has been tainted by worsening air pollution and unprecedented coverage of it, foreign overnight visitors dropped 7 percent to 15 million people.
"For a destination like China, which is a large country that many foreigners have not been to, and with the interest in China, you would expect above average growth rates," said Morrison. 

"You have to question what's going on."
Some point to unsophisticated marketing as an explanation.
Whereas tourism offices all over the world use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Chinese tourism authorities stick with what they know: trade shows and magazine advertising.
They are fond of using wordy theme years to promote China, having used one annually since its "Friendly Sightseeing Year" of 1992. 

The busy looking website of the national tourism body has been likened to a company newsletter.
"Most government tourism administrations in China prefer the traditional way of promotion to attract foreigners, such as holding promotions in targeted places overseas," said Wang Sheng, assistant general manager at D & J Global Communications. 

"But this practice has one major shortcoming in that they are still not close enough to the potential individual customer."
Some local tourism authorities recognize the problem and are leading the way in changing their strategy to attract foreign tourists, particularly those from Europe and North America.
The tourism authority in Shandong province, home of Confucius' birthplace and Tsingtao beer, has enlisted Google Inc. to act as a digital consultant to improve its advertising reach. 

Google helped them set up a channel on YouTube and increase their adverts' visibility alongside search results and on its partner websites.

It also suggests advertising ideas and online designs.
Sun Shue, director of the international tourism marketing department at Shandong Tourism Administration, said they were working with Google to target primarily the European and American markets to make their inbound tourism market more balanced.
Nearly half of inbound tourists to Shandong on the eastern coast come from regional neighbors Japan and South Korea, with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia also providing many visitors, she said. 

European visitors are currently few in number and this structure is "not conducive to long-term stable growth," she said.
Hangzhou city's tourism office has a Facebook page and a website in several languages including English and German. 

The city's marketing and the image of Hangzhou's scenic West Lake has extended to dozens of buses and taxis in four European capitals and Tokyo and Seoul. 

This year, Hangzhou city has mainly targeted Britain, France, Germany and the United States and says it works with local PR companies to promote its brand.
Other problems in the industry are organizational.
Tour operators abroad complain that instead of cooperating with them to draw up cultural, historical and other themed itineraries, which is customary in the global industry, Chinese tourism authorities prefer to market directly to foreigners through travel magazines and other media.
Terry Dale, president and CEO of the United States Tour Operators Association, said it was a "cumbersome process" dealing with Chinese tourism authorities.
The national tourism body unveiled its new logo and tagline "Beautiful China" in February -- a square blue logo with "Beautiful China" written in English and Chinese. 

It is competing with South Korea's use of "Gangnam Style" star Psy as the face of its tourism adverts abroad, and is expected to be discussed at this week's China International Travel Mart in south China, one of the country's most influential travel industry events. 

The China National Tourism Administration declined to be interviewed.
On a recent day, tourists on a hill overlooking the Forbidden City imperial palace in Beijing said they thought the slogan could have been more sophisticated.
"Well indeed China is beautiful, that's what we have seen for the last few days, yet I find it a little bit general because there have been a lot of beautiful places we have been to," said backpacker Maciek Pielok, 26, from Naleczow in Poland.
"I guess that you could even call it Epic China or the oldest country in the world, something like that."

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‘Airpocalypse’ Hits Harbin, Closing Schools

By MIA LI

Harbin’s landmark San Sophia church was barely visible Monday as heavy pollution forced the closure of schools and highways.

School was canceled and traffic was nearly paralyzed in the northeast Chinese city of Harbin on Monday as off-the-charts pollution dropped visibility to less than 10 meters in parts of the provincial capital.
A dark, gray cloud that the local weather bureau described as “heavy fog” has shrouded the city of 10 million since Thursday, but the smoke thickened significantly on Sunday, soon after the government turned on the coal-powered municipal heating system for the winter.
“You can’t see your own fingers in front of you,” the city’s official news site explained helpfully.

In the same vein, a resident of Harbin commented on Sina Weibo, the popular microblog platform, “You can hear the person you are talking to, but not see him.” 

Another resident added that he couldn’t see the person he was holding hands with.
The Harbin government reported an air quality index (AQI) score of 500, the highest possible reading, with some neighborhoods posting concentrations of PM2.5 — fine particulate matter that are 2.5 microns in diameter or smaller and especially harmful to health — as high as 1,000 milligrams per cubic meter, according to the China News Service.
(By comparison, the air quality index in New York was 41 on Monday morning.)
The Chinese government describes air with an AQI between 301 and 500 as “heavily polluted” and urges people to refrain from exercising outdoors; the elderly and other vulnerable populations are supposed to stay indoors entirely. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency uses a similar index that labels any reading between 301 and 500 as “hazardous.”
Both scales reach their limit at 500, leaving creative citizens of polluted cities to come up with their own labels when the air gets worse. 

Foreign residents in Beijing declared an “airpocalpyse” last January when the U.S. Embassy reported an AQI equivalent of 755, with a PM2.5 concentration of 866 milligrams per cubic meter. 

The World Health Organization has standards that judge a score above 500 to be more than 20 times the level of particulate matter in the air deemed safe.
On Monday, people in Harbin were covering their heads and mouths with scarves and masks to ward off the choking smell in the air. 

Despite government warnings to stay home, cars with headlights turned on were moving no faster than pedestrians and honking frequently as drivers struggled to see traffic lights meters away, the city’s official news site said.
At an emergency meeting called at 6 a.m., the authorities decided to close all schools and kindergartens, the report said. 

The local police also shut several highways at 7 a.m., but not before the smog caused two pile-ups, which left one truck driver injured, the official Xinhua news agency reported. (Nearby Jilin Province also reported 14 road accidents on Sunday night; the authorities there issued a red alert for pollution Monday morning.)
The pollution in Harbin has caused a 30 percent surge in hospital admissions of patients with respiratory problems, according to the local news media. 

Residents have been told by doctors to wear masks and eat pears, a fruit commonly believed in northern China to help heal lungs.
The city weather bureau blamed the pollution on three factors: a lack of wind; local farms burning corn leaves and stalks after the harvest; and the start of the municipal central heating system, which provides heat to millions of homes and offices and relies on large coal-burning boilers across the city.
The system pumps hot water into radiators and is supposed to heat residences to at least 18 degrees Celsius (64 degrees Fahrenheit). 

But Harbin, located not far from the Russian border in Heilongjiang Province, is one of China’s coldest cities, and its coal-dependent heating system means it must choose each year between heat and clean air.
Harbin has been battling air pollution for years, destroying hundreds of smaller boilers, banning the use of high-sulfur coal, and adopting cleaner fuel standards for cars. 

On Monday, the city dispatched environmental protection personnel to conduct inspections of factory smokestacks, traffic police to perform spot checks of motor vehicle emissions, and village officials to stop farmers from burning corn waste.
Temperatures are forecast to drop to the freezing point this week, but the local weather bureau said the cold front could also bring rain that could clear out some of the pollution.
In the meantime, residents were left comparing the air to something out of a horror film. 

Said an Internet user going by the screen name Han Doudou, “If you think this is the movie set for Silent Hill, Resident Evil or The Walking Dead, you are wrong — this is Harbin.”

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