Summer in the City of To-morrow

Line 1 of the Beijing subway system runs east-west along the latitudinal center of the capital, connecting a regular murderer's row of the city's major landmarks, including Tiananmen Square, the newly-built National Theater, Wangfujing, and the World Trade Center. Only three years ago Line 1 was a mechanical intestine of Soviet charm and mildewed white tile, one populated with a motley horde of sweating passengers, incontinent toddlers, and ticket-vending trolls whose resemblance to humanity was occasionally striking. Nowadays, after what can be conservatively described as sweeping renovations, you will find the same spaces by and large pleasant, a relative change that's both amazing and downright credulity-straining.

Nonetheless the modern world might never rid itself of its cynics. My friends and I have thus far spent a dozen-plus subway trips around Beijing feeling almost impressed with the new subway system. Even as we relished the automated, swipe-operated turnstiles and gale-force A/C, we were griping more or less continuously about how dumb it was that some station exits have two escalators going up but none going down, or how transfer hallways contain inexplicable slight inclines or abrupt zig-zags of stairs, or the fact that the monitors on Line 13 list the absolute time gap between trains but for whatever reason don't actually tell you how long you have to wait until the next train, or how if one looks hard enough one might still find a flustered parent holding a defecating child aloft over the mouth of a platform wastebasket. On numerous occasions I observed that the Beijing subway system was not quite world-class. I once described the laminate surface of a particular set of columns as Puke Formica.

I was also not above cheap shots: when asked to guess the name of a tile texture that looked something like the sand filler found in high-use institutional ashtrays, I volunteered sky blue.

Above Beijing sits an atmospheric miasma composed of coal smoke, industrial residuals, the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles, and untold errant acreages of the Gobi Desert, a floating mass that thwarts and transcends all first-world notions of smog. I'm led to believe that Beijing is built on the sort of particulate-trapping mountain basin similar to the one LA loves to blame for its own air quality issues, so the Miasma is effectively cornered over the city by the concurrence of both anthropocentric and geographic factors. On a typical day, the pollution resembles an overcast sky and screens out the sun. Blue skies come at the cost of a week or two of sustained rainfall. During bad days, you go outside and your eyes start to hurt almost immediately.

Over the last week, the city's overall air quality had dipped just low enough to stir up what's by now pretty well-worn media anxiety over Beijing's environmental fitness as a venue for a major outdoor sporting event (e.g. say a summer Olympic Games); even the official disclaimer through Xinhua, with its fussy methinks-though-dost-reassure-too-much overtones, can't help but contribute to a sense of minor panic. And at first glance, the sentiment's easy to understand. On one of those aforementioned Bad Air Days, one might behold the ubiquitous 2008 Games billboards posted all over town and wonder: what genius thought this was actually going to work?

A problem here is that the conventional wisdom underpinning these objections seems to spring from the agreeable but ultimately illusory notion that the Games are some kind of earthly realization of holy Sport, necessitating the ideal operating circumstances for maximum competition, the breaking of world records, photogenic landscapes behind the winner's podiums, etc. In the first place, the central business of the Olympics is not sport but spectacle politics and product placement, and maybe also certain affirming narratives about international goodwill; in this regard a proper Olympic host is basically one that can deliver a sufficiently impressive production. And while it's almost certainly true that the Beijing Olympics will be insalubrious without precedent, it's also true that some tens of millions of local residents have long suffered the Miasma to work or play or engage in world-class athletic activity or otherwise exist without immediately keeling over from toxic asphyxiation. I tend to worry less about the short-term health of the athletes and more about the throng of journalists and jet-set spectators who will be trying to decide whether Beijing (and really, China at large) is in fact a nice place to be.

As with any conversation about China's struggles on various ecological fronts, it's worthwhile here to attach an asterisk concerning first-world complicity in the whole affair. That's to say that the audience of developed societies, so aghast at the air quality in Beijing, is actually turning its collective nose from a horror partly of its own manufacture. A society pollutes largely because there is economic incentive to do so, and especially in the case of modern industry and energy production, this incentive is global by its very nature. If it's true that China turns a blind eye to environmental degradation, then it's also the case that the world market is freely willing to exploit that blindness while pinning the responsibility for any potential externality on the people who actually have to live with it. In spirit, it's mostly the same disingenuous maneuver made when poor nations are singled out for employing sweat-shop labor or exporting tainted foods or using paint with lead content or whatnot.

Whatever its ultimate causes, the Miasma is, and will be for all foreseeable circumstances, the exclusive property of the people of Beijing. Government measures to improve air quality for the summer have ranged from the extreme—in the period leading up to the games, trucks have been banished from the streets, cars with odd- and even-numbered license plates have been forced to trade road privileges every 24 hours, and large portions of industry in northern China have been halted entirely—to the plainly outlandish—Chinese meteorologists fire dry ice and silver iodide from artillery pieces into the clouds in a kind of 21st-century technophile raindance.

This morning, when it was windy and the pollution seemed to have calmed down, my roommate asked me if I'd heard the news: apparently the city administration had finally had enough with the worsening air quality, and had ordered the military to circle its fleet of helicopters around the city in an attempt to accelerate the flow of air over the city. I said I didn't think that would work. My roommate replied that he was disappointed in my lack of faith. Actually it took me a while to realize that he was joking.