Say what you will about China and its pollution, it's an interesting attempt at a solution.[1] Could you imagine something like that implemented easily in the US before caught within lawyer-string nets of liability?
China has many problems, but many HN readers bashing China have probably never set foot there and are formulating their understanding based off of western media and the socioeconomic + cultural dynamics of Chinese diaspora communities in the west (working in low-paying jobs, less seen as literary/communicative thanks to language barriers).
I'm not Chinese nor do I have a particular stake, but I was there for three weeks this summer and was overwhelmed by a kind of social optimism - the shared assumption that services are getting better, progress will happen, and a relentless cycle of innovation (in China's own way; see 'Shanzai').
All this is to say that - pollution sucks. China needs to get its shit together and pass clean air laws. But these devices are emblematic of a very Chinese mode of progress and innovation that I'm not quite describing properly.
[1] Yes, I know the technology is not completely new, and controlling particulates by deploying other media is common - when polishing/concrete, for example.
"I'm not Chinese nor do I have a particular stake, but I was there for three weeks this summer and was overwhelmed by a kind of social optimism"
It is normal to fall in love when you meet a different culture.
It takes 6 months or so living on a country to start seeing caveats and "not so good things" in any country.
"the shared assumption that services are getting better, progress will happen, and a relentless cycle of innovation"
It is called a "bubble", I traveled frequently to Spain(my native country) and Ireland while the shared assumption that everything was getting better was at full power and all media was talking about those "economic miracles".
When those miracles reversed it was not(and it is not) pretty.
My father lived the Japanese "economic miracle" of Japan, the country that was going to rule the world.
I lived 5 years in China at the beginning of the bubble. It is an entire world in itself, but they have BIG problems. I continue traveling and doing business in China, and it is getting worse day after day.
When I was there I could use a normal VPN without problems, and Chinese authorities could not care less, as it was necessary for the business. But now you have to use like 6 layers of VPN, change patterns of navigation...because people in power is desperate to control their own people.
There's a difference between a bubble and social optimism, and even if they're having a bubble, maybe it's better? Because compare to the West, always feeling like they're one day from Armageddon, creating economic crises out of thin air (i.e. 2008 in Europe, people hearing there's an Economic Crisis and concluding they need not invest until it's gone, therefore creating a crisis where it wasn't before).
Hell, maybe it's sort of a rose-colored view of the history, but I look at the communist propaganda in Poland from the times of my mother, and I think I liked it more than what we have now - in the past, the government would show you movies how everything is going forward, how industry is performing over expectations, how hard work of people created prosperity, etc. Yes, they lied to you. But so is every single "free" media station every single day, but now the narration is that everything is going to shit and will probably explode before the commercial break.
"because people in power is desperate to control their own people". I agree with this comment. One has to use VPN to access some websites. The restrictions are definitely getting tighter.
But 6 layers of VPN? I don't know about this. I was in China for 3 weeks this past summer. VyprVPN worked very well for my and my family.
Since Xi Jinping took power, the government has stepped up their internet censorship efforts, banning many well known VPN. According to some accounts, they also utilize some sort of dynamic filter to determine if you are accessing censored content or using non-blocked VPN.
How exactly they do that is unknown, but the fact is, it's much harder to visit censored websites now than before.
You may also have problems if you're connecting through corporate firewall. I won't name a certain Chinese well-known corporation using certain McAfee shitware that managed to block ExpressVPN and VyprVPN within a week for me, making it significantly more difficult to do my job there.
If you are flying in through HK get a china unicom hk cross border SIM. Somewhat expensive data but a life saver in those situations since there is no firewall.
He is exaggerating. You just use Astrill or ExpressVPN or one of the other VPN providers that specialize in getting around the GFW. Other than the one week of the year, around a certain anniversary, when the GFW decides to shit on everything you don't really notice it.
Not sure how exposed you were to clever soft propaganda in those 3 weeks in China :) As a Chinese, I can tell you I don't feel any social optimism at all.
1) Much political infighting at the top
2) The richer people are moving family to Canada / US / Australia
3) Credit bubble, bad debt in banks
4) Migrant workers and women from villages are constantly getting exploited without any protection
5) Pollution
6) Food is not safe to eat. People buying baby formula from overseas
7) I can go on and on...
Technological "innovations" don't solve problems in a society where there's no trust and no fairness. Please tell where those social optimism come from?
The majority of Western media are simply reluctant to give credit for any progress China has made. When they did, they never failed to emphasize that the air pollution, the products of low quality, the Communist government, the violation of human rights, etc.
It is true that all of these problems exist. They can't be solved in a short time. Many Chinese think that it might take a generation to solve some, two or more generations to solve the others. They also complained a lot, but know it is not an easy job. If anybody cares to look at the history of industrialization and its affects on the society and their people's life, they know Chinese are paying the same price, maybe at less scales. It is unfortunate both for the world and for Chinese themselves. The question is, have we human beings find a feasible alternative approach to achieve the same goal while bypass all the negative stages?
At least the government establishes many monitoring stations and suggests people stay inside. China and India are similar in many aspects. People in both countries, especially the young generations, are working hard to improve their motherlands. But, how often do we hear the media talk about air pollution in India?
many HN readers bashing China have probably never set foot there
Readers of Hacker News who have been reading the Chinese press in the original Chinese since the 1970s and who have been to the Chinese-speaking world since the 1980s and thereafter (as I have) get really sick and tired of credulous Westerners believing propaganda from China, that's all. I can remember a time from the 1980s when China (by contrast with Taiwan) was praised by a French student I knew at the time for having no air pollution. I pointed out to him then that that was because China was only just beginning to develop economically at the time. (In that year, the per-capita G.D.P. of Taiwan was ten times that of China.) China has made some interesting progress on some issues, and I often appear here on Hacker News pointing out that even the United States can learn quite a bit from how China does primary school instruction in mathematics, for example.[1]
But China is still a dictatorship, with none of the free and fair elections or free press that Taiwan now has. (Taiwan was a dictatorship when I first lived there, but a thriving democracy the second time I lived there.) China's air pollution is now about the worst in the world--it could have put in pollution controls as it industrialized, as the technology for pollution control was well known by then, but the dictators of China chose to industrialize without minimizing pollution. In general, when I see a gee-whiz popular press story about China here on Hacker News, I simply don't believe the first submission. I look for comments in the thread by some of the Hacker News participants who currently live in China and who know the language well[2] (the latter criterion is more stringent, but necessary) to check whether the story is plausible at all.
Oh come on tokenadult, it's not like China's the same place it was in the 70s and 80s! Not only has government policy shifted immensely just since the 90s (start and end of one child policy, WTO joined, passports and international travel freely available for (almost) all citizens, internationalization push for the RMB just to name a few big policies) but honestly, most places are unrecognizable since Y2K!
China's mode of governance, while responsible for some horrible problems and extremely frustrating to be on the wrong side of, is not without its positive points. Hand-waving it off as a "dictatorship" implies there is no internal political change, that political terms are re-granted to the same power-base, that secret police stalk and raid the population with great frequency... something much more aking to Lee Kwan-Yew's Singapore. That's simply not the case, and I know that even my government-critical Chinese friends here on the ground believe that the reigns of power are wielded to some extent differently by different leaders, and that within the communist party exist factions and new ideas.
Almost the only thing Chinese people pretty much ever say when political issues are raised is "the population is too large ... there is no other option!" (人口太多了！没办法！) While hideously frustrating for westerners (consequently Chinese people rarely complain, disbelieving that fighting to leave feedback with bureaucracies has any effect) it is immensely pragmatic from another perspective. Remember, the population which incorporates entirely disparate language families (everything from Turkic to Tibeto-Burman to Sinitic to Tai) now effectively has total literacy and a mutually comprehensible spoken language... Mao and his legacy, for all his terrible failures, did achieve that, and nobody can argue otherwise.
Shouting "dictatorship" when basically China would have been another India without the events of the 20th century, which nobody could have foretold, falls hollow and in fact riles these ears... those without experience in the country hear too much of this fallacious drivel through the media already. You don't need to fuel it.
PS. Before I am accused of being some kind of victim of propaganda, I literally never watch TV or read Chinese government media and my 15 years in and out of the country has been tempered with roughly equal time on three other continents.
I swear there are sooo many propaganda believers that I see whenever China-related articles posted. It's always like "The Bay Area has stupid safety regulations wahhh I want to be dominated by a brutal regime, it's not so bad anyway."
The GP never asserted being an expert and made a well-reasoned argument (unlike yours). I spent three weeks in China last year and generally got the same impression.
We westerners perceive Chinese people as oppressed and poor, but the people I talked to were extremely friendly and optimistic.
Looking out my window right now at 2am in the morning, all I see is misty fog where I would usually see a city here in Beijing. I really don't see how more mist would help. They need a big giant freaking fan to create wind...powered by coal, of course, just for purposes of irony.
A few, not enough to make a dent in coal usage. And I'm not sure how many self-heated homes in the villages can be converted from coal to nuclear (electric heating is too inefficient...but maybe they can use a waste core like they did in the Martian?).
Electric-powered heat pumps are much more efficient than any kind of coal burning - they run at 500%+ efficiency (they move heat around instead of generating it).
It's 6:30AM here in the Chinese city of Kunming. I just returned from a 5AM trip to a market to buy some herbs for Christmas dishes. On the way I passed one of our many street cleaning water-tank trucks, which basically drive around all Chinese cities spraying the road and nearby traffic with water and a fine mist (just what you want at 5AM on an e-bike in the winter morning!). While they most operate in the early mornings and are no doubt targeted at dislodging and collecting road-top detritus, they have been about for ages and are very much ubiquitous. A separate fleet of trucks drive about spraying water on roadside gardens, which in some kind of cuddly holdover from socialist central planning are in fact very numerous compared to most western cities (with the exception of the center of older French cities, perhaps). Despite the construction boom going on, it's all Himalayan blue skies here! I pity the poor people in those polluted east-coast cities, and those in the north with their wintery outlook, and particularly those in the northeast like Beijing where not only do you have both problems, but the time dedicated to negotiating traffic every time you leave your house is soul-crushing...
Yeah, it does seem like an "out of the air, into the groundwater" solution. But sometimes you have to stop the bleeding before the injury can heal, and China is making progress [1] on the root cause also.
When the root cause is bad government that can't enforce environmental laws due to corruption...and you are the government who doesn't want to change (say by more accountability via elections and a free press), looking for something that instead treats the symptoms is attractive.
Make no mistake, China's pollution problem is very much a political one.
The root cause is focusing on economical development over everything else, including staggering inequality, pollution, and others.
The central governments' inability to enforce local municipalities to do whatever they want, is actually result of the shifting political structure from a single autocratic ruler during Mao's era to a more technocratic/autonomous style of ruling. This is a good thing, although it does create inefficiencies when central government interests conflict with local ones.
While this at least sounds encouraging, it masks regional variations, and perhaps most glaringly the impact of China:
China’s poverty rate fell from 85% to 15.9%, or by over 600 million people
China accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty
Excluding China, poverty fell only by around 10%
"""
There has indeed been a tradeoff with pollution here which they need to fix. However, I don't see why income inequality is a problem here. If you are starting from massive amounts of extreme poverty, then how would you possibly alleviate that without making some people wealthy?
... and precisely the sort of issue that only the Chinese government face. Hand-waving external commentators are quick to identify differences and ascribe guilt and blame, but often decisions must be made with consequences no honest and empathetic person would wish to set in motion. Look at the hydropower projects versus US military dominance of global oil... China (1.4 billion) is about 32% of Asia's (4.3b) population and 19% of the world's (7.3b). Imagine: one in five humans depends on your decision.
Reply to sean as out of posties: You want transparency in decision making? The west pretends it has it, but in reality even on matters of fiscal policy it doesn't. For example, look at central bank interest rate setting. It's done by secret departments. As another example, I asked Australia's body why it didn't embrace the IBAN like Europe, Israel and a growing list of other countries. I got no reply. Pot, kettle, black.
We all get that the Chinese government has to make tough decisions. All we are asking for is transparency and accountability, which would lead to better (less corrupt) decisions in the long term.
Much of this pollution has very little economic benefit in the short term and massive downsides in the long term. The real issue is corruption means it's cheaper for polluters ignore the problem than implement even cheap mitigation strategies.
It isn't that simple, right now it is a basic prisoner's dilemma: if factory A & B follow the law, they both have higher costs but these can be passed on; if A follows the law and B does not, then A goes out of business as their costs are higher than B; if A & B don't follow the law, then the environmental costs are passed on. Right now, the last case wins because the laws aren't enforced evenly.
China is not a dictatorship, but it is definitely autocratic even if the autocracy is distributed. Local party leaders are just as autocratic as central party leaders, and generally are more corrupt (getting more for their family, for example).
The biggest relevant fact on that page is half hidden. China pumps out 10 gigatonnes of CO2 every year. India? Just 2 gigatonnes tons. In fact, you could combine the U.S, E.U and India's C02 annual output, and it still wouldn't be as much as China. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Why does that matter? Because India has roughly the same population size as China, but pumps significantly less C02 into the atmosphere.
It probably has more to do with the fact that China is the worlds factory (Foxconn?), while India has a lower portion of their economy in heavy industry.
As to why that's the case - again, this could be attributed to a political issue - government looks aside as BigCo craps on the country's environment, as long as it fuels the massive economy, keeping everyone optimistic.
Autocratic governments aren't exactly known for their forward seeking vision. Problems come up and half assed solutions come down. There's no democratic element to demand a higher level of service, say with how the US had its environment movement which led to many laws protecting the land, air, and water and ultimately culminated into several state agencies, federal guidelines, the EPA, etc. These are large holistic changes brought about by the democratic process in Western states. Autocratic states don't have this mechanism so its a lot of basic face saving moves because politically this issue isn't that important and/or interferes with the CCP's ability to grow its economy. This creates a real victimization of innocents who don't have a voice because they're governed without consent.
Birth defects have increased about 70 percent in China over the past two decades, now reaching about 900,000 per year, according to the country's Ministry of Health.
Air pollution is killing about 4,000 people in China a day, accounting for 1 in 6 premature deaths in the world's most populous country, a new study finds.
You realize that the level of environmental protection that we currently have in the US is only possible at the current level of consumption because we exported most of our polluting industry to China, right?
This is absolutely untrue. Even in the US's manufacturing heyday we had strict environment laws. In fact, this all happened because people were seeing what industry was doing the environment in the 40's, 50's, and 60's. Some light reading here:
During this period a great many new environmental laws were passed and some old ones resurrected and refurbished as well as energy legislation that impacted on the environment. Other environmental type laws were enacted, such as the Coastal Zone Management Act (1972), the Marine Protection Research and Sanctuaries Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1976), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Deepwater Ports and Waterways Safety Act (1974), the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act (1974), the Water Resources Planning Act (1977), the Water Resources Research Act (1977), the Environmental Quality Improvement Act (1970), several amendments to the Food Drug and Cosmetics Act, and the Environmental Education Act. There was renewed enforcement of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899.
The Rules and Regulations issued under these laws numbered into many thousands. In its early years EPA alone placed about 1500 rulemaking notices in the Federal Register annually.
>> You realize that the level of environmental protection that we currently have in the US is only possible at the current level of consumption because we exported most of our polluting industry to China, right?
> This is absolutely untrue. Even in the US's manufacturing heyday we had strict environment laws.
Which, combined with wage laws, resulted in the offshoring of dirty industry. We still produce nearly as much as China, but our industries of choice are generally cleaner industries. It is cheaper to pollute China than to adhere to US manufacturing laws. We could not produce the same quantity of "dirty" goods here for prices that would allow for current levels of consumption. Arguing otherwise is a bit like saying manufacturing moved to China for no reason.
Presuming no stealth edits, what the parent claims is
> There's no democratic element to demand a higher level of service, say with how the US had its environment movement which led to many laws protecting the land, air, and water and ultimately culminated into several state agencies, federal guidelines, the EPA, etc.
So you've very effectively slaughtered that strawman detailed in your claim about the original claim.
I don't think per capita is a valuable number here.
China's got a twofold problem: They pollute a lot, and that pollution happens over a much smaller area of land, while the USA has it spread out a lot more. Per capita emissions doesn't tell us if the air in the largest cities is going to be the consistency of pea soup...
My link gives a bunch of other measures, and the US is lousy on most of those too.
I'm not saying the US is worse than China. Parent poster said that the US's democracy meant that it wasn't a big polluter, but that's clearly bollocks, the US has been, and is, a huge polluter.
Excuse me but I have to go downstairs where half of my 4000 sqft house is, as my coal-powered heat source is better there, and then I need to get in one third of my vehicles to drive, by myself, an hour to work. I will read your "research" later while sipping on my latte. I will google "polluter" later so I understand better your article.
You're totally underestimating the Chinese government but you don't fail to see the trade off they have decided to go for.
As you said China has decided that financial growth beats the consequences of pollution. You can discuss that direction as much as you want but that's the direction of overall Asia. It has nothing to do with forward vision or full-assed solution.
Pretty easy for you to say that considering the U.S. economy was already developed/grown (as you say) when this environmental discussion came to the forefront. It's always easier to forfeit when your whole hand is not on the table..
Why does there have to be a difference? Clearly not having smog in the first place would prevent this, but how does that help Beijing right now? If you have an open wound the doctor does not prescribe staying away from sharp things, they treat the wound.
Sure. With the mist, you get dilute sulfuric acid settling on buildings and streets and attacking the concrete, or maybe being washed away. Without the mist, the dilute sulfuric acid forms in the noses and lungs of your citizens instead, damaging their sense of smell and ability to absorb oxygen. The mist sounds like an improvement.
But this is mostly aimed at particulate pollution, not sulfur dioxide.
Yes! I lived in Poland in 70's-90's and we got nice massive acid rain which dissolved buildings and anything it landed on. No water cannons present, the natural rain was enough to ruin everything.
> Why aren't the coal-burning energy utility companies paying for them, out of pocket?
Because no-one has the power to make them, I think. If it's easier (and probably cheaper) to take measures to address the problem yourself than it is to force compliance, then that's the sensible way to go.
I don't know if this is a joke, but China is more like unregulated capitalism than communism, it's probably more capitalistic than most European countries.
You really really don't know what you're talking about.
The State in China explicitly picks winners and losers from state companies (in particular banks), tightly controls currencies, tries to resist movement of labour, and attempts to hide moral hazard through censorship. All the while guaranteeing full employment.
There are definitely still some communist elements there, like large state owned enterprises and a very controlling/authoritarian government.
But some of the key definitions of capitalism is quite entrenched in the society:
- means of production are privately owned
- profit-motive
- market-driven economy / competition
- inequality
- minimal government interference
China definitely does not fit all the hard-core capitalism definitions, especially the minimal government interference part, but it's closer to a capitalist economy than a communist one.
Lastly, no, the state does not guarantee employment, that has not been true for at least 30 years.
inequality as part of the definition of capitalism? talk about intellectual dishonesty. has inequality gone up or down since when China had more "communist elements"?
You ask a question that was already answered: inequality is entrenched in society. Yes, it has obviously gone way up during and since the transition from traditional communism, when almost everyone was pretty much equally Mao-suit + rice + red-book poor.
With the right connections you can get away with ridiculous crap, but rules as written are not that friendly. Which creates lots of problems for small companies.
I'm in Beijing this week. The pollution here has to be seen (and felt, as you breathe) to be believed. I'm not surprised that all sorts of technical solutions are being discussed, just because it's so crazy terrible. Whether such proposals (such as a mist cannon) is a real solution is a good question, but it's worth trying lots of stuff.
It occurs to me, after reading this story a second time and reviewing the latest comments posted to this thread, that this is a science story that wasn't reported by a science journalist. It's not at all clear--only a company spokesman is quoted on the point--that the machine even WORKS. It's also not at all clear, even if the machine is effective at reducing air pollution (where is the independent evidence?), that it is as good for that or as inexpensive for that as other measures that might be taken to reduce air pollution. The town I grew up in has much less air pollution today than it had when I was young. The newly industrialized countries of east Asia (I am most familiar with Taiwan, but the fact is the same in other countries in the region) have less air pollution today than they had in their worst years. There is a lot known about technology and a lot known about effective regulation for reducing air pollution. This story really needs an experienced science reporter, not a rookie in international reporting, to tell the accurate story about what's the best thing to do to handle China's horrific problem with air pollution.[1]
[1] "Study Links Polluted Air in China to 1.6 Million Deaths a Year" (New York Times 13 August 2015)
China 9,679.30 GHG emissions (MtCO2e)[1], United States 6,668.79 GHG emissions (MtCO2e)[1] - population China ~1.3 billion[2], population United States ~330 million[3]
Mist may be able to "catch" the visible particles and go to some length to then putting it into groundwater, but all of the dangerous stuff is in the small particulates that will remain in the air.
Out of sight, out of mind seems to the aim of this.
China has many problems, but many HN readers bashing China have probably never set foot there and are formulating their understanding based off of western media and the socioeconomic + cultural dynamics of Chinese diaspora communities in the west (working in low-paying jobs, less seen as literary/communicative thanks to language barriers).
I'm not Chinese nor do I have a particular stake, but I was there for three weeks this summer and was overwhelmed by a kind of social optimism - the shared assumption that services are getting better, progress will happen, and a relentless cycle of innovation (in China's own way; see 'Shanzai').
All this is to say that - pollution sucks. China needs to get its shit together and pass clean air laws. But these devices are emblematic of a very Chinese mode of progress and innovation that I'm not quite describing properly.
[1] Yes, I know the technology is not completely new, and controlling particulates by deploying other media is common - when polishing/concrete, for example.