My Swedish friends like to do business in China, but often state to me that they would never want to live in such a dirty city like Shanghai. They remind me that Stockholm is so clean, they can fish for salmon in the rivers going through town! This is not possible in Shanghai obviously, the water is contaminated – although the thousands of fish floating around makes the job very easy – Especially the impact of the continuous smog levels are a reason for them to hesitate. Shanghai isn’t a particular clean city; neither would I say that about Seoul, but it isn’t as bad as most people think. Yes, every week or so, I wake up and look at a spooky city with huge buildings hiding inside the fog. Honestly, the stars are often visible at night and we have blue skies here quite often too! Lastly, compared to Stockholm the temperatures are much better! Take into account that it almost never rains here, contributing to these dust levels.
There is a government website that publishes the smog levels in Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai, so I’ve taken the liberty to extract one decade of data, and put that into a graph. I’ve put a trend line to see what the numbers are averaging on. Conclusion: average Shanghai smog levels are going down! Or the measurement machine is being put further and further out of town ;-)
