[In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s anniversary events, authorities have turned to their usual playbook to make sure the capital’s often-smoggy skies are blue for the huge military parade through Tiananmen Square, complete with fighter jets streaking multicolored smoke trails.]
By Anna Fifield
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Chinese tourists stand in
front of a large screen set up for the 70th National Day
celebrations as they
visit Tiananmen Square on Sept. 27 in Beijing.
(Kevin Frayer/Getty
Images)
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BEIJING
— There are many things that
the Chinese Communist Party can control as it gears up to celebrate the 70th
anniversary of the People’s Republic on Tuesday. It can dictate what people
read and say on the Internet. It can say where people sleep and eat and drink.
It decides whether they fly kites or sing karaoke.
But not even the Chinese Communist Party can
control the weather — although it is trying.
In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s
anniversary events, authorities have turned to their usual playbook to make
sure the capital’s often-smoggy skies are blue for the huge military parade
through Tiananmen Square, complete with fighter jets streaking multicolored
smoke trails.
Trucks have been banned from Beijing since
Aug. 20, and all construction in the city center was forced to halt before
Sept. 1. Industrial companies within 300 miles of Beijing were asked to
“voluntarily” control emissions or stop production. Mining activities,
especially drilling and blasting, have been suspended until Oct. 7, and no one
in Beijing is allowed to set off fireworks.
Vice Premier Hu Chunhua even visited the
China Meteorological Administration and called for “meteorological support to
ensure the success of the activities” around the anniversary.
The meteorologists should provide “targeted
services” for the celebrations and have “response plans” to deal with adverse
weather, Hu said.
It has worked in the past.
Even as Beijing’s air quality deteriorated
rapidly in recent decades, the party has tried to eliminate pollution before
big events and create the semblance of clean air, ordering the factories around
Beijing to grind to a halt and heavy trucks to get off the road.
The ability to clear the skies on an order
has given rise to the term “APEC blue” to describe a particularly bright day.
It is a reference to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting that Beijing
hosted in 2014, creating blue skies for the event after months of heavy
pollution that often sent the Air Quality Index off the charts.
During a China-Africa forum last year, some
Beijingers started joking that it had cost them $60 billion to enjoy blue skies. That was how
much China pledged in aid to African nations.
But it turns out the party can do only so
much.
A low-pressure front is pushing industrial
and vehicle emissions from surrounding provinces into the capital, and the
humidity in Beijing is converting it into moderate-to-severe pollution. As a
result, heavy smog is forecast for Beijing over the coming week.
Beijing has issued its first “orange” alert
of the fall for heavy air pollution, causing schools in the capital to cancel
outside activities and keep children indoors Thursday.
Eleven expressways in or around Beijing were
completely or partially closed because of low visibility Friday, and many
flights from Beijing Capital International Airport were canceled or delayed.
The city’s Environmental Protection
Monitoring Center on Friday forecast that air quality in central Beijing will
be at “unhealthy” levels above 150 on the Air Quality Index for the next week —
levels that are often associated with soupy skies.
This is particularly stinging given that
recent efforts to curb air pollution are paying off. The Swiss firm IQAir
AirVisual said this month that the Chinese capital could drop out of the list
of the world’s 200 most polluted cities, with concentrations of small
particulates falling to their lowest level since record-keeping began in 2008.
Beijing’s mayor, Chen Jining, said this month
that the density of PM2.5, the smallest and most dangerous particles in the
air, had fallen by 43 percent since 2013. This is in large part due to a
precipitous drop in coal consumption in Beijing, to about a fifth of its peak
level.
“The air quality in Beijing has improved
continuously,” Chen said. “It used to be the ‘APEC blue’ or ‘parade blue,’ but
blue skies have now become normal this year.”
To try to make sure the skies are pristine
Tuesday, the Environment Ministry has called on all municipalities to swing
into emergency-response mode. The China Meteorological Administration entered
“a special working state” on Thursday, continuing through to Wednesday, for
nonstop monitoring of the parade weather.
That may not be enough.
Some experts expect the authorities to start
“cloud seeding” — spraying salt or chemicals into clouds, usually from
aircraft, to encourage condensation and make it rain faster than it otherwise
would.
“The most likely option for Beijing is to
create rain through cloud seeding one or two days before the parade,” said Tian
Pengfei, an atmospheric scientist at Lanzhou University in China’s
sandstorm-prone northwest. “If done earlier than that, air pollutants may start
to accumulate again and possibly lead to a new round of smog.”
Cloud seeding and other weather-modification
measures have become relatively commonplace before big events in China.
Authorities spent $30 million shooting salt and minerals into the
sky before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and then spent more than $1.2 billion
between 2012 and 2017 trying to clear the skies for important events like the
Group of 20 summit in Hangzhou and a Belt and Road Forum in Beijing.
In 2015, China’s top economic agency
announced a plan to build numerous weather-modification laboratories around
Beijing. By 2020, it wanted “sophisticated weather-modification systems capable
of increasing artificial rainfall and snowfall” and giving it more control over
the weather. It has not given an update on its progress.
Other pollution-prone capitals such as
Bangkok and Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur also use cloud seeding to try to disperse
hazardous particles, and drought-afflicted areas in countries including
Australia and the United States also sometimes try to induce rain in this way.
But there may be yet another quandary facing
Beijing. It might not have enough clouds in which to plant the rain seeds.
“The problem is that the autumn in Beijing is
rather dry, and we might not have enough clouds to make it rain,” said Huang
Binxiang, an air pollution researcher at China Agricultural University.
That would mean the meteorologists would need
to try to imitate rain by spraying water from aircraft to try to wash the small
particles out of the air.
“I have also heard some crazy proposals to
use giant fans to blow away the smog,” Huang said. “I wouldn’t say it is
impossible, but it has not worked so far as I know.”
Lyric Li and Liu Yang contributed to this
report.
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