Neither November rain nor November fog pleases us.
When I arrived in BJ Tuesday morning, I was with mixed feelings: excited(as I expected) and disappointed(as many friends predicted). To finally see the capital city of China for the first time was a good thing, obviously; but to find the city tucked among the grey fog in the noon was…astonishing.
The weather was so bad, for some worse reason. Two days later I read this:
Over the past few days, air pollution levels in Beijing and large parts of northern China were reported to be especially bad. Visibility in some areas were limited to 500 metres. In fact the pollution index peaked at the hazardous level on Tuesday.
In one October issue of TIMEasia, the article “Visions of Green” written by Bryan Walsh tells more.
It begins with sentences that I’ll never forget:
If you want a sense of the challenges facing Asia’s physical environment, just go to Beijing and breathe. The Chinese capital’s constant swirl of production, construction and transportation creates a noxious smog that blankets the city on bad days, cutting both visibility and life expectancy.
My friend C.M. translated this article to Chinese. I was the first one to read her translated article, and I couldn’t help asking:”Are these all true? Any possible exaggeration?”
C.M. actually translated 6 articles. Other than this one, they are: Running Out of Breath, A New Day Dawns, Awash in Trash, China’s Water Woes and Rising to the Challenge. All of them, are about pollution, drought, deserts…, mostly of China; while some other Asian countries are also mentioned. After she finished the translation, she simply told me:”You can’t imagine how shocked I was.”
We had thought we knew a lot, as students of Environmental Science, and as inhabitants in China, that the environment we were living in was bad. We didn’t know it was this bad.
And they mentioned Japan, fast-industrializing Japan that was commonly expected to become an environmental dystopia. But today, Tokyo is one of the world’s cleanest megacities, with the view often clear all the way to Mount Fuji.
For the translated version, please see here.
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why do i see super big size font in this blog these day?but other pages are normal.
It’s bad of the environment in bj so i hesitant to go to Beijing for working and life.
Otherwise there are many friends in bj,too many bookshop,bar and so on ,i like these.
It’s ambivalent ,this is beijing.
You travelled to BJ to write this as a students of Environmental Science?
Atlas: I’m not a student anymore.
Gideon: There might be some css problems in this blog(maybe you can change the font size in IE view tab to small or medium)…but as long as it looks fine to me, I’m not changing anything. haha.
consider moving to beijing for career advancement? well, if you enjoy the life in shanghai, better stay where you were, for the striking difference between the two cities would take you a long time to fit in here. beijing is “tough”, meteorologically and socially; and even the cultrual appeal that everyone loves to brag about is usually revealed in a hippie rather than “petit bourgeois” manner. if shanghai is a lady that dresses in couture and walks in grace, then beijing is like a girl who is fashionally sensitive but too cool to care. it’s not a matter of better or worse, there’s only preference. that being said, i’d be more than willing to give you a warm welcome, if you’d like to venture a little difference :em06:
ps: there seems to be a little problem with your site feed, bloglines has stopped reporting update on your blog.
pps: i’ve switched to ftp publishing to solve the gfw problem once for all. you can check the new address left above, or access it with the old one. NO proxy server needed this time, since the Nanny forgot to take her medicine and blogger is unblocked again.
When is it bad weather why do people get insane???
I have noticed , that anytime it rains, or there is a freeze, the public panics, rushes out to the stores and buy up all the
bottled water, batteries, flash lights, firelogs, and canned food. Why is this. You would think people that have been through
this kinda weather before would understand that it will not last more than a day or two at the most.
Another thing I have noticed is when it rains that all the dumb people again get on the roads and cause wrecks and everything
else.
What is wrong with the people? I would really like to know.