Li Ning, a 33-year-old IT worker, said his child was being looked after by grandparents.
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According to data on the website of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center, concentrations of PM2.5, a particulate which is considered as most unsafe to health, was reported to be 173 micrograms per cubic meter in the past 24 hours near Tiananmen Square in the center of the capital.
At Ele.me, an online food delivery company, anti-smog face masks passed spicy chicken burgers as the product requested most by customers in Beijing, said a company spokesman, Zou Yang.
Officials at the US Embassy in Beijing told CNN that the air quality index there was at 250 on Monday morning. Most of the smog is blamed on coal-fired power plants, along with vehicle emissions, construction and factory work.
China’s capital issued its first-ever red alert for pollution on Monday, as a new blanket of choking smog was projected to descend on the city.
“An air purifier is a must at home”, said Sun Yuanyuan, 30, an employee of a foreign company.
Other measures included limiting cars to driving every other day depending on the last number of their number plate.
In the latest smog, 23 out of 35 environmental monitor stations recorded a sixth-level pollution lasting for five days, which was two days longer than what the red alert standard regulates.
Everybody knows that spending one day locked in a room with a running diesel engine is healthier than one breath of air in Beijing, but it seems that the issue has reached new heights.
“That’s a sign of a different attitude from the Beijing government”, said Dong Liansai, an energy and climate campaigner for Greenpeace who is based in Beijing.
Just so you can get an idea of the state of affairs here in Beijing at the moment, last week the mayor issued an orange alert for smog when life threatening particle matter measured in the air was 10 times over the limit determined safe by the World Health Organization.
Some places in North China have experienced regional air pollution recently, and Beijing’s air quality has remained heavily polluted due to windless and warm weather, according to Beijing Emergency Management Office.
A study led by atmospheric chemist Jos Lelieveld of Germany’s Max Planck Institute and published this year in Nature magazine estimated that 1.4 million people die prematurely because of pollution in China each year.
Most of China’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the burning of coal for electricity and heating, which spikes when demand peaks in winter and is the main cause of smog.
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“China and other developing countries are victims of climate change”.
