Five days of clear, blue skies.
That may sound like nothing extraordinary, but in China’s capital city, where the skies are usually filled with a noxious haze because of the city’s air pollution, it is something of an anomaly. The latest round of blue skies is a result of efforts from the Chinese government.
Ahead of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, government officials have implemented an air-pollution reduction plan intended to achieve what is roughly translated as “parade blue” or as the media refers to it, “APEC blue.”
Following the air pollution reduction plan, the government has met its air pollution target for the first time ever, according to Greenpeace.
The Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Monitoring Centre found that the concentration of PM 2.5 — particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter — to be much less than the national air quality standard’s 35 mg/m³ target, according to Caixin.
Air pollution is a major source of concern in China, where 1.6 million deaths can be attributed in part to particulate matter, according to a new study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley. This works out to roughly 4,000 deaths per day, mainly due to stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, pulmonary disease and respiratory infections.
While Beijing is often the focus for media outlets covering air pollution in China, the area between Beijing and Shanghai is where air pollution is often the worst.
Plans for reducing air pollution have been in place since late July in preparation for the commemorations celebrating the end of the war, scheduled for September 3.
The measures include limiting the number of cars that can be on the road on a given day, depending on the license plate number, and stopping industrial factory production. A thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven companies have stopped their production as a result, Caixin reported. This is around five times the number of companies that shut down production ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference last November, according to the South China Morning Post. The purpose was also to have clear skies for that conference.
Air pollution has been a notorious political issue for the Chinese government in the past. It started when the U.S. Embassy started tweeting out its own air pollution readings in 2008 that contradicted the more optimistic, and some would say, inaccurate measures by China’s government. This led to friction and China tried to stop the embassy from publishing the data.