An Introduction

On the first weekend since I came to London, I skyped with my parents. One of the first questions they asked me was “How is the air quality there?” As if they were asking about the weather. In fact, many Chinese people check the air quality index daily on their phone, just like you would check the weather.  

Here is a picture of our particle counter.

Credit: Zhanbin Yuan (my dad)

This is our car air purifier.

Credit: Zhanbin Yuan

And this is our air purifier at home.

Credit: Zhanbin Yuan

My dad is now considering getting a ducking kit and combining it with the air purifier, so that they can serve as a ventilation and filtration system as a whole.

I was born and raised in Taiyuan, one of the major centres for energy production and heavy industry in North China. What I am trying to do here is to display an epitome of millions of Chinese people who are concerned with the air they are breathing. And they have every right to. Just take a glance at the real time air quality index map: half of China is covered by labels of orange, red, purple and even brown, which indicates an air quality index from 101 to over 300 (the colour codes and indices are explained lower down the page). And although it has only become a major issue since 2012/2013, air pollution has been around since the start-off of the economic growth in the late 1970s. The outlook remains grave, given the ever-increasing demand for energy on the one hand and the heavy reliance on coal on the other.

As the assignment of the Global Environmental Change module that I am taking at UCL, we are asked to set up our own blogs and write about one environmental issue in the course of this term. I have chosen air pollution in China as the theme, because it is something that I am not only interested in but I can also personally relate to. So despite the intimidating facts that this my first blogging experience, I will be blogging in a foreign language and it will be viewed and assessed, there is actually quite a lot of excitement as well. In the upcoming months, I intend to cover (but not limit myself to) the following aspects of the theme: the status quo of air pollution in China, its local and regional to global impacts, the causes, current policy and measures taken, lessons from developed countries in the past and lessons for the future, air pollution and global warming as well as China on COP 21. By the end of the term, I hope that air pollution is no longer merely an area of concern, but an area that I actually know something about.

All in all, welcome and please feel free to comment and argue, as I believe every feedback is constructive. And finally, check out this short film “Smog Journeys” made by Jia Zhangke, one of the most celebrated directors in China and my personal favourite, for Greenpeace. I hope this seven-minute, dialogue-free piece arouses your attention, as it aroused my emotions about the subject matter.