Those who are old hands at life will tell you as far as air quality is concerned, it has not always been clear blue skies, butterflies, and rainbows. In past years, air pollution has reached levels classified as twenty times higher than what is considered healthy by the World Health Organization. Earlier this year, however, as the country and the city went into lockdown due to COVID-19 restrictions, Beijing residents saw a marked decline in the amount of air pollution. As the restrictions were slowly lifted, Beijingers returned to life almost as normal with the added bonus of clean air and blue skies.

With the advent of winter, however, comes a sharp spike in air pollution levels. Just this past Saturday, the Beijing Government issued a yellow alert for heavy air pollution which was to start on Sunday through to Tuesday due to a forecast of heavy smog. This yellow alert is only ever issued when the air-quality index surpasses 200 for two consecutive days. The Beijing Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau responded by suspending a number of outdoor construction operations and the restriction of operations by some manufacturing companies. Though this is expected to have passed by today, there is no telling what the air quality will be like, and it might be time to return to our trusty N-95 masks. Earlier this year, we at beijingkids also assembled several resources for those who wish to buy masks online, at one of the many outlets serviced by waimai delivery apps. This winter, be sure to not only have a mask, but the right mask to keep you and your family’s lungs happy and healthy.

KEEP READING: Wintertime Woes: Extreme Eczema

Photo: Unsplash 

A new study published on Monday in the journal, Nature Sustainability, detailed the alarming links between air pollution and “silent” miscarriages, or those pregnancies that are lost without showing any outward physical symptoms commonly associated with a miscarriage.

The research, conducted by scientists at five Chinese universities and funded in part by grants from three Chinese government-backed research foundations, used the clinical records of more than 250,000 pregnant women in Beijing between 2009 and 2017. Of the population, 17,497, or 6.8 percent, experienced a silent miscarriage in the first trimester.

Over the course of the eight-year study, researchers gauged the participants’ exposure to air pollution in their neighborhoods and at work, specifically measuring the threat of four common pollutants: PM2.5, sulfur dioxide, ozone, and carbon monoxide, using a series of air monitoring systems around the city. Even when the participants’ varied ages and occupations were taken into account, the researchers still concluded that, “in all groups, maternal exposure to each air pollutant was associated with the risk.”

While this study sheds much-needed light on an issue that has long plagued Beijing’s expectant mothers, the very nature of the study’s methodologies provided a limited data set that isn’t as comprehensive as the researchers would have liked. For instance, Zhang Liqiang, a researcher at Beijing Normal University and lead author of the study, acknowledged the fact that of the four pollutants monitored, some may have played a larger part in the causation than others. What’s more, there may have been other contributing factors such as indoor air pollution from stoves, construction materials, and tobacco smoke.

Nevertheless, Tom Clemens, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh who was familiar with the study, but did not participate in it, told the New York Times that “There has been a lot of evidence suggesting a link between air pollution and pregnancy outcomes in general, particularly the risk of a premature birth and a low weight baby.” However he goes on to point out that, “This is one of the first studies to link particle pollution to this particular outcome of pregnancy so in that sense it’s very important.”

And indeed it is. According to a report published last month by the Switzerland-based group IQAir AirVisual, Beijing is on track to drop out of the world’s 200 most polluted cities this year. While that is great news for the capital, it’s bad news for the roughly 200 cities that sit above it on that list. Nevertheless, with lessons learned in Beijing, and solutions to curb pollution being developed here, the overall benefits of the study will be felt by expectant parents worldwide.

Aside from the trauma that parents are subjected to when they suffer a miscarriage, the authors of the study also linked their research to another issue facing China; a glaring age disparity in its population. According to Zhang, “China is an aging society and our study provides an additional motivation for the country to reduce ambient air pollution for the sake of enhancing the birth rate.”

Photos: Sputnik News

It’s notable that we consider a blue sky a rare occurrence in Beijing. They were even rarer in the first few years of this decade, when the capital was shrouded in a cocktail of toxic gray fumes belched by hundreds of factories from the developing zones in China.

Zou Yi

And that was exactly what engineer Zou Yi saw on a winter day in January 2013. The tower opposite his apartment in Dawanglu, just east of CBD, became almost invisible, and he took a photo to document the strange occurrence. He photographed the same view every day for the next two months, and pieced the photographs together in a collage. “It’s very shocking that we breathed in that air for two months,” Zou said.

From that episode, Zou found his new calling: to appeal to the public to participate in the management of air pollution, in line with the government’s anti-pollution plan which encourages everyone at the community level to get involved in monitoring. His independent research project and non-profit group, BeijingAirNow or 一目了然 (yīmùliǎorán, “At a Glance”) was born shortly afterwards.

BeijingAirNow is Zou Yi’s independent project where he captures the progress in Beijing’s air quality, as shown in this collage.

Zou has taken more than 2,200 photographs of the same view since he started documenting pollution in 2013. The progression is so strikingly visible that the published collage became a hot topic on Chinese social media and featured on various media channels, including state networks and publications.

For Zou, addressing the problem of air pollution goes beyond the boundaries of governments and even generations. In March 2019, he was invited to present his photographs and research work at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya. But before anyone from that worldwide conference heard about his outstanding project, he visited the International Montessori School of Beijing (MSB) and answered the questions of Grade 6 students about environmental protection and pollution management.

Shiraz, 12: As a child, did you know that you wanted to become an environmentalist? When did you find your passion for studying air pollution?
Zou: I never thought I would be an environmentalist. I’m a structural engineer by profession and I do high-rise buildings, including the tallest one in Beijing. In January 2013, Beijing suffered bad air days so that I couldn’t open the window because it was very smoggy. Instead, I took a picture. The following day, it was the same scene so I took another picture again. I did this every day for two months and put 64 photos together, and it was a big shock for me. I couldn’t believe that those were the days that we had just passed. So that gave me a goal to continue it for a year to know what a year’s worth of photos of Beijing’s air would look like. And I’ve been doing that up to this present day.

Hector, 11: What is the deadliest source of pollution, and why?
Zou: China is now a big factory, and we understand that several industries that use chemicals and generators discharge too many waste products. And there are too many vehicles on the road too, and all of these are the main causes of pollution. So what can we do to reduce air pollution? We should ride cars less and instead take the subway or use bicycles when we go out.

Isabella, 12: You’re an engineer, so why did you choose to record Beijing’s air pollution?
Zou: I quit my work in 2018 to focus on air pollution. I have a son and I don’t want him and this generation to suffer. So we must do something. We must stop air pollution for the future of this generation. In March 2019, I will go to Nairobi, Kenya and attend the United Nations Environment Assembly. I will talk about air quality, and they want me to tell the world my story about taking those photos and to encourage people that they can do something to save the Earth.

Matthew, 11: Does PM 2.5 stay in your lungs forever?
Zou: I was told by other experts that it is possible. PM 2.5 is a very fine and harmful particle that reaches the lungs through the bloodstream so you cannot just cough it out. And according to the World Health Organization, at least 6 million people die of pollution and half of those come from Asia. That’s why we need to protect ourselves and always wear a mask when it’s a polluted day.

Abril, 12: What is the most polluted city in the world, and why is it so polluted?
Zou: The most air-polluted country is India. Out of the ten most polluted cities in the world, eight of them are in India and two in China. And that pollution comes from people, because we strive for a higher quality of life. But we need to be concerned about the other things that would affect the environment.

Oscar, 11: How long do you think you will keep on taking photos of Beijing?
Zou: I will dedicate the rest of my life to work on getting better air quality. But for taking photos of Beijing’s air, I will take at least three more years to document the progress.

Emily, 11: In 2017, the government shut down many factories and it turned out to be one of the best years in terms of air quality. If the government decides to do it again, will we be able to have another good year?
Zou: Yes, I believe the factories that use coal for energy need to be shut down. But there are factories that are moving towards becoming more sustainable. So if we can do that, we have the confidence that we will have much better days within three to five years.

Marshall, 12: What is the best form of transportation that doesn’t make too much pollution?
Zou: When I found that many forms of transportation increase pollution, I stopped driving my car about 5 years ago. Each day when I go to the office, I take the subway. Compared to cars, the subway is a much cleaner form of transportation.

Aishling, 11: Why does a lot of pollution come suddenly and then goes away the following day? 
Zou: That’s because of the wind, which blows away pollution particles. But Beijing’s geography makes it difficult for polluted air to dissipate completely. We have mountains in the north and we need a strong wind to blow the pollution away.

This article first appeared in the beijingkids March 2019 Sustainability issue.
Photos: Uni You; courtesy of Zou Yi

Find the Right School for You and Your Kids at BISE 2017

Whether you’re newly arrived, looking to change schools or have a child coming up to school age, you can find out all about the choices available at the Beijing International Schools Expo. Over forty schools will be represented, and there will be talks and discussions, so that you can compare curricula, facilities, activities and of course fees. Perhaps most importantly when making this critical decision, you can get a feel for the attitude and ethos of different schools before making a shortlist. The event takes place on the weekend of February 18-19, at Crowne Plaze Beijing. For more information, and to sign up, visit our website, beijing-kids.com.

Airpocalypse Now… or Then?

The end of 2016 brought unwelcome attention to our city, as news media from across the globe reported on the worst smog for several years. Striking images, like the shiny silver bullet train turned mud brown simply from driving through pollution, were circulated all round the world. Ironically this came after a year in which the average AQI had fallen by 8 percent. And China leads the world in developing renewable energy, currently investing twice as much as the US. So we can at least hope for a brighter future, where clear skies in Beijing don’t make headlines as they did last month…

New Faces at bjk

The new year brings new faces to the beijingkids team. Andy Peñafuerte III is our new Deputy Managing Director. He previously worked at CGTN (formerly CCTV News), and GMA News in the Philippines. He enjoys travel and food. Pauline van Hasselt, our Shunyi Correspondent, is originally Dutch, but has lived in Belgium, Paraguay, Texas, and London, and has lived in Beijing since June 2016 with her husband and 3 year old daughter.

Goodbye to Old Friends

2016 saw the sad passing of many stars, from David Bowie to Carrie Fisher. And Beijing lost a few stars from its firmament too, with the closure of several much-loved establishments. Counting Sheep will no longer be offering high quality imported baby goods at either location. Marks and Spencer at The Place is living on borrowed time, leaving homesick Brits searching for a new source of crumpets and jam. And most traumatic of all, veteran indoor play center, Fundazzle, grubby and loved like an old security blanket, finally closed its doors in January.

Ever since I got my Laser Egg in 2015, I’ve been a little obsessed with the pollution levels inside my apartment. When we moved to our current apartment over the summer I was thrilled to see that on a “good” day of between 100-200, the Laser Egg would routinely read 4-16 US AQI in all rooms of our apartment. I was not thrilled to see that my living room filters struggled to keep up when it got above 200 outside. After some investigation with the Laser Egg, I found leaks at both patio doors and the main apartment door. We sealed the living room patio door with packing tape, but we need to access the kitchen patio on a regular basis, so sealing it for the winter wasn’t an option. I ended up putting a towel across the threshold to cut down on the pollution. It helped quite a bit. Until today we have been putting a long towel down to block the airflow of the front door, but it gets moved easily and is difficult to fit snugly against the door.

My family is visiting us and in the midst of reorganization projects, I realized that I had a long amount of spare fabric from an unfortunate purchase at Muxiyuan. My mother-in-law helped me measure and plan out a draft stopper. We measured the fabric against the door and decided to make it 3-4 cm wider than the door on both sides. Then we folded it over and tried to determine how big we wanted it once it was filled with rice. I measured it and marked the fabric down the length of it to make a guide-line for sewing. Folded, it was about 10 cm from the fold to the guide-line, making it roughly 20 cm in circumference. My MIL then put a few tack stitches in down the length of the fabric so it wouldn’t come unfolded at the tailors. The kitchen door one was a bit tricky, but we managed to get one to the right length after leaving about 2.5 cm length in extra fabric to allow us to sew.

I explained to my ayi what we wanted done, and she went off to the market to buy rice and have the tailor sew it. Our intention was to fill it and sew it shut when she got back, but she came back it was completely done. We put them in front of the doors and put the Laser egg down to test. I’m pretty pleased with the results!

I don’t remember how much I paid for the fabric years ago, but the sewing was 5 RMB and the rice was around 30 RMB for enough to fill both tubes. Well worth the cost as I’m currently typing this in an apartment with 37 US AQI when it is 420 outside!

For those less craftily minded, Taobao finally has a draft blocker available. Search in English for “Twin Draft Guard dust door stop” and there are several options that come up. They are only 90 cm wide, so it wouldn’t have worked as well for my door that is about a meter wide.

On a recent Hitch ride I took, a man in my neighborhood picked me up early one morning on my way to work. I had stood outside for a solid ten minutes waiting for him, so the chill was bone-cracking cold. Seeing how cold I was, he was very embarrassed that he couldn’t figure out how to make the heat work since the main service panel was a touch screen. Some of the nobs below the service dashboard would change things, but he still wasn’t getting heat. I told him I would have helped him if I could read Chinese, and he again mentioned that he was really so sorry, that this was his wife’s new car.

As were were merging into traffic, I told him, “Really, it’s not a problem, I’m more worried about you watching the road than looking at the screen.” He laughed and said he was an experienced driver, but then he finally stopped worrying about the heat.

As we continued down the road, I noticed a label on the dash in Chinese that included PM 2.5. When I pointed to this and asked him about it, he turned on the filtering function for me (though the air was beautiful that day).

Called Xinshang, this car with seemingly-super-power air-filtering-functions turns out to be manufactured by BYD, the world’s leading manufacturer of electric cars. They’d be a perfect buy for families during these red alert days (or spoiled breaks) when the air prevents most from wanting to venture out.

BYD just recently announced Leonardo DiCaprio as their brand ambassador, and he’ll be promoting the brand in China through 2017.

My suggestion for an ad campaign would be DiCaprio driving a Xinshang through the streets of Beijing during a red alert day with a crazy egg air monitor and happy, carefree children in the backseat. I wonder if he’ll pass the infamous China paper driving test on the first try?

Photos: Vanessa Jencks, BYD Official Weibo Account

More stories by this author here.
Email: vanessajencks@truerun.com
Twitter: @vanessa_jencks
WeChat: vanessajencks

While researching an article for the upcoming issue of beijingkids, I found out about a company called Cambridge Mask founded by young British entrepreneur Chris Dobbing (formerly of Vogmask). According to the website, the masks use technology originally invented by the UK Ministry of Defense for protection against biological, chemical, and nuclear warfare.

The company’s masks are all manufactured near Cambridge, UK and distributed in China through the Beijing offices. Sizes are available for children and adults.

The products were independently tested by a third party called Nelson Labs of America, a US Food and Drug Administration-approved center that tests for National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health compliance. Cambridge Mask products met the N99 standard of filtration – a level higher than the N95 standard often recommended for pollution masks. Official test results are available on the Cambridge Mask website.

Featuring twee British-inspired names like the Sherlock and the Prince George, the masks retail for RMB 175-215 and are available online through Taobao, WeChat (account name: CambridgeMask), and Jinkou.

They can also be found in Beijing at the International SOS Beijing Clinic, Parkway Health, and ICVS. Click here for a full list.

Sijia Chen is a contributing editor at beijingkids and a freelance writer specializing in parenting, education, travel, environment, and culture. Her work has appeared in Travel + Leisure, The Independent, Midnight Poutine, Rover Arts, and more. Follow her on Twitter at @sijiawrites or email her at sijiachen@beijing-kids.com.

Photo: Cambridge Mask

Beijing’s recent red alerts and ensuing school closures may have been designed, in part, to keep children safe at home and away from heavy smog. But many parents say more drastic measures are needed to truly protect students from pollution on a day to day basis.Xudong "Clive" Zhang, whose daughter is enrolled in a public kindergarten in Beijing’s Haidian district, tells beijingkids: "I think schools should have at least one air purifier for each class. The kids need some protection."

However, such standards have yet to be met in the Chinese public school system. A recent CCTV report detailed the frustration of a group of Shanghai parents whose proposal to have air purifiers installed in every classroom was denied by the authorities because of “potential safety risks.” A Global Times editorial, meanwhile, decried the bureaucracy that has stalled such anti-pollution efforts, while a China Daily editorial insisted that the authorities should "heed parents’ call to better protect students from smog."

Many of those parents are not content to wait for the authorities to take action. Xiaoli Tang, whose daughter attends third grade at a public school in Haidian, says she and a few fellow parents banded together to purchase two air purifiers for their children’s classroom. But they could only do so if all student’s parents signed a consent form, and even after the device was installed the issue was still not entirely resolved."One purifier had some problems, so we had to return it. Maybe next semester we will buy another one, because one is not enough to protect them," she says. Worse still: the needed maintenance of those devices fell on already overworked teachers. Xiaoli explains: "One purifier stopped working, and it gave the head teachers many troubles because they had to clean it and call the service phone number to fix it."

That is unacceptable for Xiaoli, who says: "I think all these things should be done by the government, not the children or parents."And yet, both Zhang and Xiaoli say they are happy to contribute to an air purifier fund in order to protect their children. But an equally contentious issue lies in the instalation such devices. The aforementioned parent group in Shanghai not only insisted that air purifiers were a necessity at their children’s school, but also volunteered to pay for the machines. However, the authorities even refuted that offer, writing in a reply: “Purifiers tend to be too large in size to be positioned in a crammed classroom without endangering children’s safety. In addition [it would]put strain on the school’s old electricity network, posing an extra threat."

Sometimes the opposition lies not with the authorities, but with fellow parents. Jerry Chan, one of my colleagues at The Beijinger, took to our blog’s comment section to write about such a standoff at his daughter’s local public primary school in Chaoyang. His post outlined how he and some fellow parents offered to buy an air purifier for the classroom, only to have their proposal blocked by another parental group who "decided they didn’t want to pay, so they ran to the Ministry of Education and complained that the school was ‘charging extra fees.’" He added that those gripes prompted the school’s administration to ban air purifiers from all classrooms, "because they are afraid of getting in trouble with the Ministry of Education," compelling Chan and his wife to get "our daughter out of this school as soon as possible, but words cannot describe the ignorance and cowardice at play here…"

In a subsequent interview, Chan went on to describe his frustration about "how general ignorance could cause people to consider their pocketbooks over the health of their children – particularly since we hadn’t even asked them to pay. They just assumed this was to be the case." Troubling as that outcome was, it also spoke to an even deeper problem. He explains: "Aside from not wanting to pay, I think they are generally uninformed about the dangers of air pollution on their childrens’ health."

Hu Tao recently dealt with a similar spat at his at his daughter’s primary school in Haidian. He recalls meeting with fellow parents who hoped to purchase a pricey purifier, only to have others complain about the cost."They wanted to buy a cheaper one, which we finally ended up doing," he says, adding that thrifty resolution left him with little consolation. "The teachers told us that they turned it on when there was smog, but I’m not sure how effective this cheaper purifier is."

Xiaoli is optimistic that such frugal attitudes will eventually change. She’s also pragmatic enough to know that she and likeminded parents need to push for such breakthroughs now. As public pressure mounts for authorities to install purifiers at schools, and studies by publications like Environmental Health Perspectives reveal the harm that pollution inflicts on not only the lungs, but also the mind (the study said: "On average, cognitive scores were 61 percent higher" on days with better air quality), she believes the government will have massive incentive to act.

In the meantime, she is more than content to do her part to ensure her daughter’s safety, explaining: "The government should do this, but the bureaucracy is so big, and developing countries like ours have so many issues, so they need time. So it can’t be the government’s fault entirely if the people do not try to do something. Everyone needs to try and work together to give our kids the proper care."

Photo: The Guardian