Where to breathe easy
BEIJING— You’re moving to China with your family, and you’re excited but also concerned: What might the country’s notorious smog do to your and your children’s lungs?
Here’s how you can feel the fear and move to China anyway, while minimizing your health risks:
Relocate to Guangzhou, the capital of the southern province of Guangdong, near Hong Kong. Second best: move to Shanghai.
Don’t move to Beijing, Chengdu or Shenyang, if you can help it.
Those are some conclusions to be drawn from a new study of air quality in five major cities by a team of researchers at Peking University led by Chen Songxi, a statistician at the university’s Guanghua School of Management.
In an interview, Chen said the study was prompted by a sense of “disgust” at air pollution. “I felt that as scientists we should do something about the situation facing a billion Chinese people,” he said.
There was both good and bad news in the report. The good news is that the Chinese government’s air quality data appears trustworthy and that in all five cities levels of fine particulate matter declined over the past three years.
The bad news is that in all five cities, the air pollution readings remained higher than the World Health Organization’s upper safety limit.
The North China Plain, where Beijing is, and the Sichuan Basin, where Chengdu is, “are not good places to be. They’re not suitable for heavy industry,’’ Chen said. Their physical settings trap pollutants. “If you have heavy industry there, this is what you’ll get.”
“Shanghai and Guangzhou are more fortunate,’’ he said, “because they’re close to the sea and have more rainfall.”
Beijing’s saving grace: a strong northwesterly wind in winter that helps clear the air. But that doesn’t address the source of the problem. Another recommendation: reduce emissions.