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China Web Users Seek Closer Read on Pollution
Published on: 2011-11-09
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Tens of thousands of Chinese are using an online vote to push for more accurate air-pollution measures, illustrating how the Internet challenges Beijing's hold on information.

The vote appears to represent small, but significant, progress for quiet efforts by the U.S.—whose Beijing embassy has Tweeted its own air readings since 2008—to use social media to reach out directly to Chinese citizens and to pressure Beijing to address the true scale of China's environmental problems.

Pan Shiyi, a well-known property developer, launched an unofficial online vote on whether China should adopt the U.S. air-measurement standards on Sunday through his Sina Weibo micro-blog—ahugelypopular service owned by Sina Corp. on which he alone has more than 7.4 million followers—after a string of choking-smog days in Beijing.

By late Tuesday, with five days to go until votes are due to be counted, more than 98% of 38,000 votes cast agreed that China should introduce the more-sensitive standard used by the U.S. embassy in Beijing, according to Mr. Pan's microblog. "If they know how serious the problem is, then people can consciously prevent air pollution, and change their unhealthy lifestyles and habits," Mr. Pan said in his appeal for the vote, the results of which he said he would send to China's environment minister.

Attempts to contactofficials fromthe Beijing Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection weren't successful Tuesday afternoon.

Among the celebrities who have joined in are Kai-fu Lee, the former head of Google Inc. in China, who has more than nine million followers on his micro-blog, and Hong Huang, a publisher, author, blogger and actress who has more than three million on hers.

Authorities in Beijing, and most Chinese cities, measure air pollution by counting only particles between 2.5 and 10 micrometers in diameter. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing counts ones of 2.5 micrometers and below, which experts say make up the most of the city's air pollution and cause more damage to the lungs.

The embassy broadcasts its readings via an iPhone app and through Twitter, which is blocked inside China but can be accessed by tech-savvy Chinese who use virtual private networks or other technology to circumvent the country's Web censorship system, known as the Great Firewall.

As a result, many Beijingers are becoming increasingly aware that the embassy's readings often contradict those from the environment bureau: On Oct. 30, for example, the embassy rated Beijing's air "hazardous," while the bureau called it "slight."

The issue has been a point of contention between Beijing and Washington. A U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks this year revealed that China's Foreign Ministry asked the embassy in 2009 to stop tweeting its readings, accusing it of confusing Chinese people and undermining the environmental bureau's authority. The embassy refused, according to the cable.

In November last year, the embassy monitoring station registered air pollution that was so far off the charts that the automated Twitter feed simply announced that it was "Crazy Bad"—a category that diplomats later said had been programmed in as a joke by staff who didn't expect such levels to be reached.

The U.S. Embassy hasn't spoken publicly about its motivation in providing the air readings via Twitter. But it has embraced social media as a way to interact with ordinary Chinese, regularly using Twitter and Chinese microblogs and often inviting popular bloggers to attend embassy functions. According to the WikiLeaks cable, the embassy started providing the readings to embassy staff, but is obliged by consular regulations to share information on safety and health issues with its citizens in foreign countries.

However, another leaked diplomatic cable from the embassy, written later in 2009, said, "The continuous flow of hourly data demonstrates how easy monitoring this pollutant and reporting it to the public can be, quietly applying pressure on the Chinese government to follow suit."

Online polls are notoriously unreliable as measures of public opinion. However, Mr. Pan's unauthorized vote demonstrates how the Communist Party's traditional stranglehold on information—long maintained through the state-run media—is being persistently undermined by the Internet, especially microblogs. Sina's Weibo, which barely existed two years ago, now boasts more than 200 million registered users.It also campaign highlights the extent of public anger with the government over issues that directly affect quality of life, such as air pollution, food quality, and transport safety—all hot Web topics.

A survey published last week by Bank of China Ltd. and wealth researcher Hurun Report showed that more than half of Chinese millionaires were considering emigrating, or had taken steps to do so, with pollution in China ranking among their main motivations.

New public-health studies and laboratory experiments suggest that, at every stage of life, traffic fumes—which in addition to factory emissions account for much of Beijing's air pollution— exact a measurable toll on mental capacity, intelligence and emotional stability.

But iIn an interview published in the Beijing Times newspaper on Friday, Du Shaozhong, an environment-bureau spokesman questioned the U.S. Embassy's readings, saying: "I'm not clear about their monitoring tools and methods, and how they ensure accuracy."

The bureau has said it plans to improve the way it measures air quality, and is capable of monitoring the smaller particles, but hasn't set a timetable for the more sensitive readings to be published.

Mr. Du, whose Sina microblog has 79,000 followers, appeared to be responding to an outpouring of anger last week from online Chinese, many of whom demanded to know when the bureau intended to adopt the more sensitive standard.
 

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