It doesn't happen every time I go, but an extended visit to Shanghai is enough to make me sick. The throat tightens and an itch settles in causing a week or more of involuntary coughing. As much as I'd like to clear my throat, I cannot. Dr. Golden's cough drops help, but they give only limited relief.
I always recover, however, mainly because I leave the country. But apparently hundreds of thousands of urban (and surburban) Chinese do not get better, as evidenced by recent reports that lung cancer and other respiratory complications kill thousands every month in China. And it's not just the anthropogenic causes of air pollution, such as factory aerosols.
Seasonal sandstorms off the Gobi desert frequently overwhelm Beijing . Authorities say a "sand wilderness" is encroaching on the Chinese capitol. To slow the advance of "desertification" the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars in a plan to build a "Green Wall of China," a berm of trees and shrubs to act as a buffer between the expanding desert and Beijing.
While the effort is partly an obligation by Beijing to create an environmentally friendly Olympic Games, critics say it is a mere pinprick. Only ten percent of the total area is impacted by the green cordon, say some environmentalists, and the root causes of sandstorms and desertification remain unaddressed. Nothing will change unless poverty, over-grazing, overpopulation and unsustainable development are dealt with.
Meantime, don't think that Beijing's occasional plague of sand is merely a local problem. Particularly fierce storms have been known to kick up enough sand into the jet stream where it is carried all the way around the world to the United States.
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