Last year, Shanghai’s favourite winter sport was checking the air pollution readings in Beijing and gloating over how high they were. That’s not so much fun this year. In the past week Shanghai has wracked up its worst pollution since records began, with the concentration of deadly PM2.5 fine particles topping 600 micrograms per cubic metre on Friday afternoon, at a time when Beijing’s level was half that. (The World Health Organisation’s safe level is 25 µg/m3 as a daily mean.)
The Shanghai government has the perfect solution to the current “airpocalypse”: it “adjusted” the city’s pollution standard so that it would trigger fewer hazard warnings. What a relief, it was so annoying constantly being warned about the deadly assault on my lungs. Now my lungs are on their own – what they don’t know, won’t hurt them.
Then some Communist party media outlets helpfully pointed out that smog is actually good for me. In an online commentary titled “Five unexpected gains the haze has brought”, state media said air pollution made people funnier, more knowledgeable and more “united”. “People all over the country have found sadly that we are equal in front of smog . . . no one is better than anyone else,” it said. Then Global Times opined that smog is actually part of China’s air defence strategy, protecting us from enemy bombs. It’s enough to make a girl feel lucky she doesn’t live in, say, New Zealand.