MCLC: smog crisis threatens right to rule

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: smog crisis threatens right to rule
***********************************************************

Source: Slate.com (1/17/13):
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/01/china_s_
smog_crisis_poses_a_threat_to_the_legitimacy_of_the_chinese_communist.html

Is China’s Communist Party Choking?
The country’s growing smog crisis is a threat to the regime’s right to
rule.
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing has been monitoring local air quality using a
scale that officially stops at 500, with readings anywhere from 301 or
above considered "hazardous." Last Saturday one unofficial embassy reading
hit 800.Photograph by Feng Li/Getty Images.

The fact that I grew up in Los Angeles has rarely felt relevant for my
work as a China specialist. But it sure did last weekend as
record-breaking levels of smog descended on Beijing.

The smoggiest days I remember from my childhood in L.A. were no match for
the ones China’s capital has experienced lately. In the past week, smog
levels there exceeded anything seen in recent years—and Beijing is no
stranger to lung-choking air. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing has been
monitoring local air quality using a scale that officially stops at 500,
with readings anywhere from 301 or above considered "hazardous." But last
Saturday the numbers soared well beyond that, with one unofficial embassy
reading hitting 800 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-20998147>.
Bloomberg reported 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-12/beijingers-told-to-stay-indoors-a
s-pollution-hits-record.html?utm_source=Sinocism+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8f
20e82d06-The_Sinocism_China_Newsletter_For_01_13_2013&utm_medium=email>
that the head of cardiology at a Beijing hospital said that the number of
people coming into emergency rooms with heart attacks doubled last Friday.

Still, growing up in L.A. left me with an appreciation that heavy smog can
do more than just make it hard to breathe or obscure the view. In the
1960s and 1970s, it affected Los Angeles’ real estate market: Houses close
to the coast cost more, not only because of beach access, but also because
breezes coming off the ocean kept the air cleaner.

Beijing’s horrific smog has much more important unintended consequences.
In seeking to legitimate its rule, the Communist Party insists that under
its watch, especially in recent economic boom times, life in Chinese
cities has gotten steadily better in every way. This
development-equals-progress narrative has been losing purchase thanks not
just to worries about air pollution, but also tainted food scandals, the
most famous of which involved milk powder laced with melamine, and a
concern about chemical plants spewing toxic run-off into waterways, which
has inspired an uptick in not-in-my-backyard protests across China.

The declining power of this particular legitimating story matters a great
deal, since skepticism has grown about other tales dear to the party.
Since the Mao era, for example, the Communist Party has based its
legitimacy in part on the idea that its leaders are far less corrupt and
much more committed to equalizing wealth than their Nationalist Party
predecessors. These ideas have become laughable to many after a string of
corruption and nepotism scandals and a sharp increase in the inequality
separating the lifestyles of the wealthiest and poorest segments of
China’s populace.

One thing that the party has done to try to make up for this legitimacy
deficit is ratchet up references to past humiliations by foreign powers
and its appeals to nationalism. China spent a humiliating century being
bullied by other countries, party spokesmen remind the public, but when
the Communists took power the tide turned and China started on the road
back to global prominence.

This nationalism can take celebratory forms, as it did during the opening
of the Beijing Olympic Games. But it can also have a darker jingoistic
side, as the bellicose statements Beijing made toward Japan during their
ongoing dispute over a chain of islands off the coast
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19632047>. (China refers to them as
the Diaoyu Islands; Japans calls them the Senkaku Islands.)

The party’s other response has been to emphasize  that many Chinese,
especially those living in cities, now enjoy a level of comfort that
outstrips anything that their parents and grandparents enjoyed—indeed
could dream of. Life is getting better, the party claims, and those who
have not yet benefited need only wait their turn.

But public-health scares and heavy smog in Beijing and others
places—believe it or not, at times other cities have even darker skies
than the capital—are leaving some people skeptical about whether things
are really getting better simply because they can now buy things at a
mall. Is life really improving, they ask each other in private
conversations, in online forums, and at protest rallies, if doing ordinary
things like drinking milk and playing outside can cause your child to get
sick? How can we trust a government, they wonder, that tries to hide the
truth about obvious dangers, by censoring reports of doctored food and
drink and until very recently used the word fog to describe the noxious
substance that made it hard to see even nearby skyscrapers?

In most places, a smog crisis is an environmental danger and, on some
days, a public health emergency. In China, the grey skies overhead strike
at the very legitimacy of the country’s ruling party. At its worst, Los
Angeles never had anything that could compare to that.