Air Pollution in China affect Mtn bikers

[BURCH]

This is just crazy (http://www.cyclingnews.com/mtb.php?id=mtb/2007/sep07/olympictest07).

I have a feeling that the summer games are going to pull the curtain off of how bad the conditions really are in China.

[Acotts]

When I was in china over x-mas, i did not find it that bad. Granted, it is a very big country. I was on the coast in Shenzen and I have never been to Beijing.

I thought most of the pollution was dust kicked up from the 200 sky scrapers that are being built.

[MadRocketSci]

I was in Guangzhou (in the south, by hong kong, home of lead painted toys enjoyed all over the world) two years ago in march. Most days it was cloudy, but on the couple that weren't, I was amazed that i could still look up and not see the sun. You gotta go somewhere else to visit blue skies.

[Viper]

China is a ****ing trainwreck. Of course it's much, much cooler and convenient to bash Uncle Sam, our environment and our lack of Kyoto green, but China? LOL...

[arsegas]

I lived in Beijing (and a few other places) during summer in '96. Their environmental regulations seemed almost non-existent back then...I'm pretty sure there were no catalytic converters in any cars at that time. They had these old cars shaped like a loaf of bread (hence called "bread cars" in Chinese) that spit out plumes of black smoke. It was a common sight to blow my nose after a day outside and turn the tissue grey/black.

I went back a few years ago and things of course had changed a lot...where I was (mostly Tianjin) cars were much cleaner, in general. But that's probably balanced out by the huge industrialized growth. I don't recall it was as bad as '96, but then again, I wasn't walking around in the city as much.

- Eric

[BumbleBeeDave]

I've seen this a couple of time in various bike pubs. I've also seen stories in other media about how they're going to clean up Beijing for the Games. . . tear down ugly houses, ship "undesirables" waaay out of town, sanitize Internet access and make everything clean and pretty for the Games. Very ruthless, very efficient. Making a good impression during the Games is VERY important to them. It will show they've arrived as a major world player in a very public way.

But what they can't control are the inevitable thousands of foreigners who have lived and worked in the "old" Beijing and who will let people know what the "real" Beijing is like, and was like before the Games, and what it will return to. Western media will seize on that and make it a major story. I anticipate you will see lots of stories done as "sidebars" to the regular coverage on both TV and in print. You will also see lots of little incident stories about Chinese attempts to control foreign media types who are not used to the way the Chinese bureaucracy tries to control things.

BBD