Membership in the upper ranks of the Chinese Communist Party has always had a few undeniable advantages. There are the state supplied luxury sedans, special schools for the young ones and even organic produce grown on well-guarded, government-run farms. When they fall ill, senior leaders can check into 301 Military Hospital, long considered the capital’s premier medical institution.
However, even in their most addled moments of envy, ordinary residents of Beijing could take some comfort in the knowledge that the soupy air they breathe on especially polluted days also finds its way into the lungs of the privileged and pampered.
Such assumptions, it seems, are not entirely accurate.
Photo: EPA
As it turns out, the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live.
The company says there were more than 200 purifiers scattered throughout Great Hall of the People, the office of Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Zhongnanhai, the walled compound for senior leaders and their families.
“Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people,” says the company’s promotional material, which includes endorsements from a variety of government and corporate leaders, among them Long Yongtu (龍永圖), a top economic official who insists on bringing the device along for car rides and hotel stays.
“Breathing clean air is a basic human need,” Long says in a testimonial.
In some countries, the gushing endorsement of a well-placed official would be considered a public relations coup. However, in China, where resentment of the high and mighty is on the rise, news of the company’s advertising campaign is fueling a maelstrom of criticism.
“They don’t have to eat gutter oil or drink poisoned milk powder and now they’re protected from filthy air,” said one posting on Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblog service. “This shows their indifference to the lives of ordinary people.”
News that Chinese leaders are largely insulated from Beijing’s famously foul air comes at a time of unusually heavy pollution in the capital.
In recent weeks, the capital has been continuously shrouded by a beige pall and readings from the US embassy’s rooftop air monitoring device have repeatedly registered unsafe levels of particulate matter.
However, those very readings, posted hourly, have prompted a public debate over whether the Chinese government is purposely obscuring the extent of the nation’s air pollution.
Unlike the US embassy readings, Chinese environmental officials do not publicly release data on the smallest particulates, those less than 2.5 micrometers, which scientists say are most harmful because they are able to penetrate the lungs so deeply.
Instead, government data only covers pollutants larger than 10 micrometers — a category that includes sand blown in from the arid north and dust stirred up from construction sites.
Environmental officials prefer to focus on the air-quality improvements of recent years, largely achieved by replacing coal-fired stoves with electric heaters and closing heavy industry in and around the capital. Driving restrictions have slightly eased the environmental injury of the 700,000 new vehicles that last year joined the capital’s jammed roads.
However, when pressed, those same officials acknowledge that their pollution metrics willfully ignore the smaller particles, much of them generated by car and truck exhaust.
In fact, the US embassy’s monitor has become an unwelcome intrusion into China’s domestic affairs, according to a diplomatic cable released this year by -WikiLeaks, which said an official had requested that the US stop publicizing the data.
However, in September, the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection said it planned to amend the nation’s air-quality standards to include the smallest particulates, though it has not released a timetable for adopting the new standards.
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