Wo Shi Laowai – Wo Pa Shui

Further to a previous blogpost, here’s a quick comparison between various places, using the Air Pollution Index as a yardstick:

Beijing, China – 184
Riverside County Metro, California, USA (which is on fire) – 173
Los Angeles, California, USA – 41

Note also that the Chinese data is based on, well, Chinese data. Which means that the reality is almost certainly far worse. This is only what they admit to. Anyone who actually believes what they are told here is a naive fool.

In other news, the Olympics is coming up. Xinhua, the Party mouthpiece, has this story:

Beijing going all out to achieve ‘Green Olympics’

The blue bright sky Beijing enjoyed over the past days had been mistaken by some foreign journalists as “a result of government intervention” to polish the city’s image while a significant congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was going on.

Beijing Vice Major Liu Jingmin, a delegate to the five-yearly Party congress, said at a news conference on Friday it actually was the wind coming down from the north that cleaned the air in the host city of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. “Frankly speaking, we didn’t take any measures. It’s the weather that played the role, ” he said.

But with a longer view of the city’s environment and air quality, the improvement is explicit. In 2006, Beijing registered 240 “blue sky” days, or days with fairly good air quality, a rise of 64 days from the previous year.

Nice.