Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun played an important role in a recent successful effort to force the government to more strictly monitor air pollution in Beijing. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he talks about the daunting challenges of China’s anti-pollution battle and how social media is helping lead the fight to improve the nation’s air.
On a rare Beijing blue-sky day in late March, Ma Jun, one of China’s leading environmentalists, sat down to discuss a small but important victory: On January 6, China’s government announced that it would begin releasing previously unavailable daily readings of fine particulate pollution — called “PM 2.5” because the particles are less than 2.5 microns in diameter — in Beijing.
Although small in size, such pollution is especially detrimental to human health because the particles are minute enough to burrow into the lungs and bloodstream. Air pollution is hardly a new issue in China’s capital — remember the near-daily news broadcasts about smoggy skies in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics — but in the past year, public concern over urban air pollution in China has clearly reached a new level.
Ma Jun — the former journalist, author, and founder of the leading Beijing-based nonprofit Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs — thinks the timing of the growing alarm is no coincidence. In an interview with Yale Environment 360 contributor Christina Larson, he said that one reason air pollution has recently become such a pressing public issue is because of the concurrent rise of social-media platforms in China — especially the microblogging sites Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. While public demonstrations organized by citizens are in most cases illegal in China, microblogging sites have provided a new kind of public forum — a way to share information, quickly. An avid Weibo user himself, Ma Jun explains how new media has been a positive force for environmental-data transparency in China and why stricter government air pollution monitoring is a significant step in the long struggle to clean up up China’s air.
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