A Tale of Two Tianjin Skylines

By Andrew Smith

Last week I got a bit of a shock at work. One of my colleagues turned to me and said “Hey, have you seen the PM2.5 readings in Tianjin today?” Expecting to breathe yet another sign of despair at the prospect of an air pollution-induced early grave, I looked over at her phone to see what kind of horrific stats she had been talking about. To my surprise, it turned out that she had come over to my desk to announce that the city’s PM2.5 levels where actually around the 38 range – a reading that is considered to be a ‘healthy’ amount of pollution particles floating around us.

At that point I remembered waking up a few hours before, looking outside the window to yet another run of the mill ‘misty’ Tianjin skyline, thinking to myself “oh great, here we go again, yet another day of breathing poisonous fumes”. It dawned on me that perhaps my perceptions of how bad the air quality was that day were well and truly out of sync with reality. I got thinking about it again on Sunday morning when, after a short weekend trip to Shanghai, my plane was landing at Tianjin’s Binhai International Airport in almost zero visibility due to what I assumed was a thick blanket of smog. Yet again I was surprised when I got home and checked the vital air stats, which indicated that levels of air pollution were not particularly high by Tianjin standards. I got to thinking: could it be that my visual sense of how smoggy the skies are is fundamentally flawed, or moreover, could it be that Tianjin residents are so well conditioned to expect horrific levels of pollution that even the slightest bit of natural fog sends us into a state of panic?

There is no denying of course that air pollution is a very real part of everyday life in this part of China. The so called Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei triangle is notoriously bad for smog. Factories, power stations and other industrial sites in the surrounding area have long been a source of severe environmental degradation. In recent years local authorities have taken steps to reduce the levels of smog, including measures such as limiting the amount of cars on the road, but there are still very few days in the year when people can rest assured that they are breathing in a safe amount of toxic chemicals. When asked about the current state of play, some locals say the situation has been improving this year. Others simply sigh and express their despair at this ongoing problem that has literally cast a dark cloud over their lives.

With this in mind it is easy to understand why so many people confuse a mild fog with heavy toxic smog. As well as being synonymous with air pollution, this particular area of the world is highly susceptible to foggy conditions, particularly in the winter months. Earlier this year a report in the South China Morning Post referred to this as “Northern China’s ‘Double Jeopardy’”. On the one hand there is a great deal of naturally-occurring fog on any given day of the year, but there is also a vast amount of hazardous chemicals floating around in the skies above us. When the fog is particularly bad we logically assume that all of the crap from the air above us has been pushed down and into our lungs.

The other side to this is that by using fogginess as a gauge for air quality, people could be mistaking clear skies with clean air. That is of course another deceptively easy trap to fall into. Just this morning I was sat outside the wonderful new Starbucks in Wudadao enjoying a cappuccino under what was at the time a beautiful clear blue skyline. It was only when I turned on my phone and checked the current PM2.5 data that I realised my eyes were playing tricks on me. As I’m sat writing this article Tianjin’s skies are fairly clear. From my apartment in the centre of Heping District I can easily look out of my window and see the TV Tower in the distance. If I were to look out of my neighbour’s window in the apartment opposite I would no doubt be able to see the Hai River and beyond. Yet at this point in time the PM2.5 data tells me that the air quality is well above 200 – indicating a hazardous level of lung destroying particles.

An important point to take away from this short article is that looks can be deceiving. The most important thing to remember though is that wearing a face mask and taking other necessary precautions isn’t a bad idea in any weather conditions!

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