BEIJING — It was as if somebody had flipped a switch.
In the two-week run-up to a military parade in Beijing on Thursday – a massive spectacle to mark the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II – the Chinese capital’s notoriously polluted sky was an azure blue. Then on Friday morning, less than 24 hours later, a blanket of noxious smog once again covered the city, leaving many residents puzzled over how it had come back so fast.
On Monday, the government gave an explanation.
According to a Monday morning report in the state-run Beijing Times, officials cleaned up Beijing’s air in advance of the parade by suspending or restricting the operations of 12,255 coal-burning boilers, factories and cement mixing stations scattered among seven provinces. About 5,700 of the enterprises were located in Beijing and Hebei province, which surrounds the city.
Aside from closing factories, authorities restricted the city’s 5 million registered cars to driving on every other day. The measures began in late August and precipitated a 15-day run of relatively clean air.
On the day of the military parade, the city’s air quality index, a widely accepted gauge of air quality, clocked in at a healthy 17 out of 500. The day after, it hit 160 in parts of the city – levels at which “everyone may begin to experience some adverse health effects,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The controls had eased at midnight after the parade.
Last autumn, when Beijing hosted the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, a high-profile political gathering, authorities successfully enacted similar measures. The effort led Internet users to coin the term “APEC blue” – meaning something wonderful but fleeting.
According to the Beijing Times, the government’s efforts to ensure “military parade blue” were 15 times more extensive than those of the APEC summit.
In the two weeks preceding the parade, levels of PM 2.5, fine particulate matter highly dangerous to human health, were the lowest the city had on record, the Beijing Times reported.
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