Suburbs(郊区) as a Solution to Air Pollution?

[waiguoren]

In my search for a place to settle down in China, and acting somewhat based on the recommendations of certain posters at this forum, I arrived in Qingdao yesterday afternoon. I do not want to rehash the debate about which Chinese city is best for learning standard Mandarin--if you want to do that please resurrect one of the many old threads concerning the topic. Suffice it to say that, ceteris paribus, the best place for me to go to continue improving my spoken Mandarin is Beijing. Having just spent a week in Beijing, however, I now know I am unwilling to breathe that city's air for any extended period of time.

I lived in Tongzhou(通州) last year, a suburb where the air quality seemed only slightly better than the city center. A friend of mine is from Pinggu(平谷) and claims the air quality there is significantly better than in the city itself. Can anyone vouch for this? More broadly, does anyone have experience living in the suburbs as a means of avoiding the unsavory aspects of life in Beijing proper? In particular, I'm talking about air quality, congestion, and first-world prices for third-world living.

[rivercao]

I never lived in subsurbs if big cities, so I can tell you anything in my experience.

I think the the air quality is alway correlated with conjestion...here are some resources searched by Baidu.com:

top 5 on air quality in 2010:

1.Haikou

2.Zhujiang

3.Zhanjiang

4.Guilin

5.Beihai

All of them are coastal, or close to coast.

[roddy]

You can see a break down of air quality by different monitoring stations throughout greater Beijing here. I'm dubious that moving out to the suburbs will help all that much - you're just going to have weaker enforcement of what regulations there are, fewer traffic restrictions (you think Beijing's bad now, it was plenty worse several years back when they let the big blue Liberation trucks into town during the day. Get stuck next to one of them in a traffic jam and you can actually feel yourself get heavier as the lead attaches itself to your nervous system ), and you're going to be a long commute from a lot of the stuff that makes Beijing worthwhile. I'd invest in a nice mask.

Would be interesting to see your thoughts on Qingdao in the appropriate topic.

[wushijiao]

I suppose you can say that I lived in the suburbs (Yanjiao, Hebei, near Tongzhou) back in 2002-2003. The pollution might have been marginally better, but overall it seemed fairly similar.

For Beijing, it might be more important if you can find a place that's in the midst of a significant amount of greenery (ie. near a park).

I'd also suggest buying a lot of house plants- since this could ensure that the air that you breathe at home (ie. 8-12 hours per day) will be relatively (more) clean. See info for spider plant (#12):

The spider plant was used by Dr Wolverton in his 1985 study that examined the plants removal of carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide. In a room with many spider plants the amount of carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide dropped to near zero after only 24 hours.

However, it's been my experience with Beijing that it probably wouldn't matter too much where you live, although I'd love to hear otherwise. I simply can't think of any places that still have affordable residential living combined with lots of forests and little pollution.

By the way, I basically took a similar strategy and moved to Mui Wo on Lantau Island. I figure that when Central's at around 90 on the pollution index (like today), Mui Wo's probably at around 20-30 (because it's near around 100+ sq. km of protected forests).

[zerolife]

I wouldn't recommend moving to the suburbs. I highly doubt the polution is any better, only worse. As others have said, Beijing has a much better traffic restriction, most notably truck restriction during the day.

[Erbse]

Rain is the thing that cleans the air of the bad unhealthy particles. Just check precipitation to get some idea of the air quality. Hint: there is way more rain in the south compared to the north. Also check this video:

You can see the whole Beijing basin is all the same mess.

[waiguoren]

Spent a couple days in 平谷. On those couple of days the air quality was dramatically better in 东直门, where the bus route from 平谷 ends.

(+) Quiet, good air (at least on those days and according to testimony), understandable (though funny sounding) accent, decent scenery, cheap prices, and a nice exhibition about the glorious 抗美援朝 era.

(-) Little in the way of civilization. Underdeveloped. Must take a 90-minute bus ride to get to 东直门 (although it's one of the newer, comfortable buses)

I'm actually considering moving there. For those skeptical that the air there could be that much different from the city center, look at a map--平谷 is really out there. I'd still like to see hard data like that offered by 环保部, though.