Smog and the suffering city

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes… the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes… ” – T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Substitute yellow for white, or some indeterminate shade of grey, and you have a vision of China’s capital city for much of the past month.

T.S. Eliot wasn’t writing about Beijing’s great smog emergency of 2013, but London in 1915.

Living in the smog is strange, depressing, and triggers the same kind of low-level dread you feel when you think of all the cigarettes you may have smoked, or all the hundreds of hours you’ve spent irradiating your brain with a cell phone.

Does it do permanent damage? Has it shortened my life already? By how much? Months? Years?

The thoughts intensify as the city skyline dissolves into the white haze. Sometimes in the span of just a couple of hours. The fear turns to anger as your colleagues, one by one, develop a chronic hack, and you hear small children having coughing fits in stores. You hardly speak any Mandarin, but the look in a mother’s eye tells you everything you need to know.

We all know the cause. China’s economic “miracle” of the last 30 years. Hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty. China’s growing middle classes that can now afford the refrigerators and space heaters and video games that create the demand for more electricity. So they burn more and more coal every year to generate it.

China is now burning almost as much coal as the rest of the world’s coal-burning countries combined.

In some ways you have to restrain your anger, because as a Westerner this is nothing particularly new. Almost 40 years after T.S. Eliot wrote so vividly about London’s air pollution, the killer smog of 1952 claimed the lives of more than 4,000 Londoners and shortened the lives of countless others.

That same year in Clevelend, Ohio, the Cayuga river actually caught on fire because of the toxic sheen of pollutants on its surface. We all demanded our cheap fridges and washing machines too.

But there is still a nagging issue that’s particular to Beijing’s problems.

As other countries struggled with their environmental issues, there was the knowledge that to some degree, politicians would have to face their citizens at some point. Would be held accountable by ballot and voting booth. Cancer clusters and birth defects would make front page news.

As far as I know, the Chinese people who must live under this toxic cloud have never been consulted about whether they think their sacrifice is worth it.

If they want to research the medical consequences of raising their children in smog, their ability to do so is inhibited by the government’s censorship of the Internet.

Yes, Greenpeace has an office here in Beijing. But no, they won’t likely be scaling any smokestacks and unfurling banners in China any time soon.

Some commentators here are saying the Communist government gets it, and will act. But in the absence of real, open news conferences or questioning by citizens, how would we ever know for sure?

Meantime, Beijingers put their heads down and muddle through the smog as people have for hundreds of years.

It would be interesting to know though, what they would do about the smog if the choice was theirs.

Paul is Global National’s Asia correspondent, based in Beijing. Follow him on Twitter: @PJohnsonGlobal.