What is China Doing to Clear the Air?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2016
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The air in much of China is so bad the government has repeatedly declared "war" on it. The enemy are tiny particulates which spew forth from countless cars, coal-fired power stations and steel plants to create a dense, putty-coloured smog. Known as PM2.5s, after their length in micrometres, the particulates contain toxic droplets so small they embed deep in the lungs and sometimes even the bloodstream. A former Chinese minister of health has estimated that as many as 500,000 Chinese citizens die prematurely because of them every year. Others have suggested the figure is far higher. Campaigners speak of an ‘airpocalypse’. Public anger is rising, and winning this war has become a top priority for the Communist Party. Beijing recently issued its first pollution 'red alert', closing schools, factories and construction sites. It ordered half of all private cars off the road. But such draconian measures were only temporary. The real question, in a country where millions of people still look to industrialisation to lift them from poverty, is this: what can China do to clear the air? Guests include a man who used to write China's environmental laws and a leading activist with some surprising answers. (Photo: A man and his child wear masks to protest against pollution. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, thanks for downloading the Inquiry from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:04.1 | We're a weekly program. Our job is to add in-depth analysis to one question from the |
| 0:09.9 | news. We hope you like it. |
| 0:11.9 | BBC World Service. |
| 0:14.0 | This is Neil Rouselle with the inquiry. |
| 0:17.0 | This week, what's China doing to clear the air? |
| 0:24.0 | December 2015, the news came as a shock. |
| 0:35.0 | Red alert, he says, the cloud of toxic smog, |
| 0:40.0 | he says, the cloud of toxic smog is forecast to settle over Beijing's 20 million people. |
| 0:46.6 | For protection, schools, construction sites, and some factories must close for three days. |
| 0:52.2 | And the number of cars on the road be cut in half. |
| 0:55.0 | The shock was not the smog. |
| 1:01.0 | That was hardly new. The shock was the alert itself. |
| 1:08.0 | They'd never issued one like this before. |
| 1:10.0 | The idea that we've seen the whole story. for. Everybody has been repeatedly asking why a red alert was not issued last week, he says, |
| 1:27.0 | when the air was worse. China's air is so bad the governing communist party has declared war on it. |
| 1:40.0 | How bad? We'll play a tone that represents what the WHO considers to be the maximum safe level for the worst air pollutants. |
| 1:50.0 | This is the level recorded in Beijing during the Red Alert. |
| 1:54.0 | And this is a level recorded in the city of Shenyang two weeks before. It's painful, isn't it? That's more than 50 times the WHO guideline. So this week we're asking, what's China doing to clear the air? Part 1 in the soup. People just desperate because you know your eyes are itching you were coughing. |
| 2:40.4 | Before we look coffee. |
| 2:47.0 | Before we look at what China is doing about pollution, we need to know what pollution is doing to China. |
| 2:50.0 | It's like a soup when the pollution level is really high. It's a very, very rich sort of a dense soup. |
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