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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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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Big Brother blinded: Security fears in China as smog disrupts surveillance cameras

China discovers that pollution makes it really hard to spy on íts people.
By Stephen Chen

Big Brother isn't watching.

As well as health issues, heavy smog in cities such as Jilin is creating serious security concerns for authorities.

To the central government, the smog that blankets the country is not just a health hazard, it's a threat to national security.
Last month visibility in Harbin dropped to below three metres because of heavy smog.

On days like these, no surveillance camera can see through the thick layers of particles, say scientists and engineers.
To the authorities, this is a serious national security concern. 

Beijing has invested heavily to build up a nationwide surveillance network that lets police watch every major street and corner in main cities.
But with smoggy days becoming more frequent, the effectiveness of the system has been greatly compromised. 

Some fear "terrorists" may choose a smoggy day to launch attacks.
Kong Zilong, a senior project engineer with Shenzhen Yichengan Technology and an expert in video surveillance technology, said the security devices that could function in heavy smogs had yet to be invented.
Existing technology, such as infrared imaging, can help cameras see through fog or smoke at a certain level, but the smog on the mainland these days is a different story. 

The particles are so many and so solid, they block light almost as effectively as a brick wall.
"According to our experience, as the visibility drops below three metres, even the best camera cannot see beyond a dozen metres," he said.
His company sells products from some of the world's leading security camera makers, such as Raymax from Japan, Bewator from Britain, FLIR from the United States and VisSim from Norway.
The government has come to realise the seriousness of the issue and commissioned scientists to come up with a solution.
The National Natural Science Foundation of China funded two teams, one civilian and one military, to study the issue and has told the scientists involved to find solutions within four years.
Professor Yang Aiping, an expert in digital imaging with the School of Electronic Information Engineering of Tianjin University and leader of the civilian team, said she was facing tremendous pressure because of the enormous technological challenges.
"Most studies in other countries are to do with fog. In China, most people think that fog and smog can be dealt by the same method. Our preliminary research shows that the smog particles are quite different from the small water droplets of fog in terms of optical properties," she said.
"We need to heavily revise, if not completely rewrite, algorithms in some mathematical models. We also need to do lots of computer simulation and extensive field tests."
The military team is led by professor Bi Duyan of the Air Force Engineering University of the People's Liberation Army in Xi'an, Shaanxi province. 

Bi could not be reached for comment on the research.
Professor Zhang Li, an image processing expert with the department of electronic engineering of Tsinghua University, said the researchers might have to think out of the box.
"On the smoggiest days, we may need to use radar to ensure security in some sensitive areas," he said.
Microwaves or electromagnetic waves could travel through smog easily and bounce back if they hit an object. 

With the help of good software, sharp and clear images could be produced. 

But a radar camera would also generate radiation that harms people's health.
"It has to be a contingency device," Zhang said.

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China Is Choking on Its Success

Walking the streets of Beijing, it’s hard not to feel like you are trapped in an airport smoking lounge. The only tourists heading to Beijing in the years ahead will be adventure seekers donning gas masks.

By William Pesek 

Walking through Beijing’s Tiananmen Square last week, a German family of five surrounded me, all wearing large face masks and sunglasses. 

They weren’t robbing me, just asking me to take their photo. 

When I yelled the customary “Say ‘cheese,’” the dad joked: “We are smiling under here.”
Only China’s pollution bubble is no laughing matter, and tourists tell the story. 

Thanks to extreme air pollution, foreign arrivals plunged by roughly 50 percent in the first three-quarters of the year. 

Beijing could see even fewer visitors to the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and the famous square dominated by a painting of Mao Zedong thanks to images of acrid smog that have been beaming around the globe.
The timing doesn’t help. 

Jokes about renaming the city “Grayjing” or “Beige-jing” coincide with the Communist Party’s much-anticipated Third Plenum meeting Nov. 9-12. 

In a more democratic system, that might increase the urgency to act boldly to address a bad-air crisis that’s literally impossible not to see. 

But early signals aren’t encouraging. 

News media leaks have the more than 200 members of the party’s Central Committee crafting a vague blueprint for readjusting China’s economic structure. 

Nowhere are there hints the plan will do what China really needs to do: Ban coal.

China’s Crisis
The conventional wisdom is that China will eventually get serious about the environment, and when it does, the skies will turn blue before we know it. 

This view finds comfort in the experiences of the U.K. and the U.S. and concludes that Beijing’s toxic-air challenge pales in comparison with London’s back in the days of Charles Dickens. 

But what if the comparison is a false one? 

What if China’s crisis is different and harder to reverse?
Neither London in the 1850s or 1950s nor Pennsylvania in the 1940s was at the mercy of a paranoid authoritarian government whose legitimacy relies on 8 percent growth. 

Case studies of the past weren’t as linearly reliant on manufacturing. 

They weren’t dealing with urbanization anywhere near the scale of modern-day China. 

They didn’t rely on huge overseas investment predicated partly on the ability to pollute freely. 

Large numbers of their politicians weren’t becoming multimillionaires from the existing system.
China is entering completely uncharted territory -- navigating the demands of a newly vocal middle class without the democratic and civil institutions that helped Japan and the U.S. clean up environmental damage in the 1970s. 

It’s also doing so with higher levels of corruption.
The party is playing with fire. 

Anger over pollution has replaced land grabs as the primary cause of social unrest. 

The last 12 months have seen a sharp increase in protests against chemical plants and oil refineries. 

Fewer than 1 percent of China’s 500 largest cities meet the World Health Organization’s air-quality standards, while seven are ranked among the 10 most polluted in the world. 

Walking the streets of Beijing, it’s hard not to feel like you are trapped in an airport smoking lounge.
As China chokes on its success, the solution is obvious: Phase out the use of coal immediately. 

Flush with $3.7 trillion of currency reserves, China could finance a transition to natural gas. 

Doing so requires political will of the kind that neither President Xi Jinping nor Premier Li Keqiang has displayed. 

When China does make the transition away from coal, the economy will slow significantly in ways that would damage the state-owned enterprises that dominate the economy and enrich the Communist Party and its cronies.

Embarrassing Year

China’s new leaders are acting in other ways. 

A series of embarrassments this year -- not least of them thousands of dead pigs floating in the Huangpu River near Shanghai and myriad food-contamination scandals -- and the increased frequency of protests leave them little choice. 

In August, China promised to spend the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Singapore, or about $275 billion, to improve air quality.
“Of course, the country continues to be an investment destination and expats will come here in numbers, but it is definitely harder to sell Beijing as a posting,” says Kobus van der Wath, founder of the Beijing Axis, an international advisory firm. 

“Also, the level of dissatisfaction among Chinese is very high at the times when pollution is at its worst.”
But there’s little sign China understands the extent to which bad air is imperiling investment. 

Many of the government’s ideas about cleaning up first-tier cities such as Beijing involve moving coal-burning plants toward Shanxi province and inner Mongolia -- in other words, redistributing pollution to less populated areas. 

Better emissions standards are vital, too. 

In 2012 alone, China added more cars than the total number that plied its roads in 1999.
Once the U.K. and U.S. got serious about reducing carbon emissions, the transition away from coal took a few decades. 

But China doesn’t have decades. 

So Beijing can rail against the foreign media for exaggerating its gray air. 

It can pretend wind turbines, solar farms and other renewables alone will do the trick. 

But China should do the inevitable and curb coal use today. 

Otherwise, the only tourists heading to Beijing in the years ahead will be adventure seekers donning gas masks.

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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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