25th February
This truly is one for the smog blog. Smog has a new name in Beijing. Everyone used to call it wu, which means fog, and that used to send me a little crazy, because fog is a natural phenomenon, and it seemed to me that there was a government-sponsored brain-washing initiative at work here, pretending that pollution didn’t exist. Fog moves with the air and it comes in waves. There are places where it is gossamer light, and places where it is so heavy it feels solid. Beijing smog is not like that, it’s a uniform haze that hangs, unmoving, above the city. It’s a combination of encroaching desert, and construction dirt, and car exhaust, and industrial emissions. As you come into land, pilots often comment on the limited visibility. It’s not there every day, of course, or a lot of us would have fled town by now. Beijing is in a hollow at the centre of mountains, and so whatever gunk goes into the air stays there until the wind comes and blows it away. One day earlier this week was vile, with air you could taste. Then the wind blew it away (I wonder where) and the sky became a gorgeous blue. Anyway, on another vile day a couple of weeks ago, I was informed by a Chinese friend that what was once called wu is now to be called mai, which Isuppose translates as haze, or smog. My friend explained that mai is different from wu, because it contains no moisture. (Indeed, it has neither snowed nor rained since I returned to Beijing in January.) Apparently the word mai emerged in the newspapers and on television in the form of promises to issue haze warnings. That day three Chinese Beijing residents, quite independently of each other, told me about mai. Whether it was intentional or not, the new word seems to have stimulated new interest in the cloud of pollution that hangs above the city.