China, the north especially, had bad air quality due to many things like rural people burning firewood and coal during the winter, dust storms, rapid urbanisation (and a sudden increase in car use) and less-well-regulated heavy industry during the more liberal late 90’s and early 2000s.
most of those things have been reversed. China has the best air quality in east Asia probably, and I don’t think you’ll find a major world city of over 10 million people that has better air quality than a chinese megacity. for example Taipei, so beloved by liberals, has air quality much worse than any city in the mainland
this is bullshit. i was in china 10 years ago for a week in hangzhou and i never saw the sun. i could only barely tell where it was in the sky. that was perfectly normal. in contrast, in the new york megalopolis, it is shocking when the sun is hidden by haze.
edit: i said this implying there was no way on earth they could have improved air quality that much in only 10 years. it was shocking to me how bad it was. in all my life i had never seen anything like it, even when new york was filthy. odd days where things were hazy, but nothing at all like this, and it never ended. you just did not ever see the sun. i was there for a week, but everyone there i spoke to said that it was always this way. 10 years isn’t long enough.
Why are you trying to argue that Hangzhou’s air quality isn’t improving by pointing at a source that shows it’s improving? Also, Chinese cities are obviously affected by the fact the whole world outsourced its manufacturing there, what’s the excuse for American cities with shit AQI
Plenty of places in the US have horrible air under completely normal circumstances , the point is that never gets used to argue that the country is failing
No one is arguing that China has perfect air quality dipshit
Its always gonna be challenging to improve the air quality there because its the world’s fucking factory
You came in here talking about hangzhou’s air quality a fking decade ago and using it in comparison to new york today
All im saying is that the government there has made a ton of improvements over the last fking decade and that’s supported even by the sources you posted
China has the best air quality in east Asia probably, and I don’t think you’ll find a major world city of over 10 million people that has better air quality than a chinese megacity.
maybe new york is only 8.6, but it’s famously landlocked and its megalopolis is ~50m.
ok. do the same search on tokyo. do it on jakarta. chinese cities are some of the absolute worst in the world. this whole thread is just naked ccprop.
china today is better than china 10 years ago. it would be pretty fucking hard to be worse and still have a living population. but it is significantly better than it used to be. the sun is visible on quite a few days of the year in your wonderful cities.
i’ll adjust my slightly hyperbolic suggestion that there are absolutely no megacities outside china with better air than any megacity inside china. there are probably a couple of examples of big cities with better air than the worst chinese megacity, not that any come to mind. tokyo would be similar, i guess. but new york? JAKARTA? really.
chinese cities are some of the absolute worst in the world.
Do you believe that the air quality being bad is caused by pseudo-communism poisoning reality through the corrupted minds of China’s citizens or do you think that it comes from, for example, industrial plants?
So I followed your link, because I also went to china ~10 years ago and was sceptical about how much it could change and right now, monitoring stations near Hangzhou range between 24 and 57-ish AQI, and while Tokyo stations appear to be between ~50 and 150. They’ve also, over the last ten years or so, gone from having no days in the green zone, to what appears to be about half the year. So… What were you saying? To me it looks like there has been a staggering improvement.
Talking about air quality in China is a mess because it depends so much on which time of the year and where in the country you are. Across the board you’ll find an improving trend, but air quality still tends to be bad in the winter months and generally worse in northern, inland cities. Tokyo is way ahead here, even Seoul is better despite it being an industrious, car-infested metropolis in spite of all the trains there, so “best air quality in East Asia” is definitely not true.
I got these graphs from https://waqi.info/, up top you see air quality for 2026, and below the data for previous years.
Hangzhou is a wealthy, coastal city and over ten years bad air quality has gone from two-thirds of the year to one-third (approximately); in summer most of the days are green but in winter there’s still bad air quality on many days.
Xi’an is located inland, nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains and close to the Gobi Desert and coal mines to the north. With colder winters, these months of the year are worse than in Hangzhou but in summer they’re not far off.
Tokyo has had environmental initiatives since the 1970s (look up the “Garbage War”) and has a mature and VERY extensive rail network, and urban expressways that have fewer lanes and lower speeds. Fun fact, the city with the worst traffic in Japan is Naha on Okinawa, despite a population of only 300,000 (the US made it car-dependent during their occupation of Okinawa until 1972)
Because of influence by the US and car-making chaebols, Seoul was built to be very car-dependent. Its vast rail network has been a very recent development, but it’s showing in the improving air quality when it used to have a similar reputation to Chinese cities, which sometimes gets blamed on pollution literally blowing over from China.
Interesting that Xi’an is still so poor, it really didn’t seem that bad when I visited (although it’s also just a really fascinating place so perhaps I was distracted… I swear I spent 6 or 7 hours at the Terracotta warriors)
But thanks for doing the homework! It’s super impressive how far they’ve come! (which seems to be the story of china generally)
Xi’an is a provincial capital and an international tourism destination, it’s actually a little above average for China. The country also increasingly uses wealth from the coast to invest in uplifting the inland regions, which levels out some of the discrepancy.
Neighbouring Gansu province is the poorest province in China, four times poorer than Xi’an. Here’s a video I found of a Brit exploring its capital city Lanzhou in early spring: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ex-puh3W70
China, the north especially, had bad air quality due to many things like rural people burning firewood and coal during the winter, dust storms, rapid urbanisation (and a sudden increase in car use) and less-well-regulated heavy industry during the more liberal late 90’s and early 2000s.
most of those things have been reversed. China has the best air quality in east Asia probably, and I don’t think you’ll find a major world city of over 10 million people that has better air quality than a chinese megacity. for example Taipei, so beloved by liberals, has air quality much worse than any city in the mainland
this is bullshit. i was in china 10 years ago for a week in hangzhou and i never saw the sun. i could only barely tell where it was in the sky. that was perfectly normal. in contrast, in the new york megalopolis, it is shocking when the sun is hidden by haze.
edit: i said this implying there was no way on earth they could have improved air quality that much in only 10 years. it was shocking to me how bad it was. in all my life i had never seen anything like it, even when new york was filthy. odd days where things were hazy, but nothing at all like this, and it never ended. you just did not ever see the sun. i was there for a week, but everyone there i spoke to said that it was always this way. 10 years isn’t long enough.
and, indeed, you can see for yourself:
hangzhou: https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:hangzhou new york: https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:usa/newyork
anyone who tells you that china’s air quality is anything but fucking terrible basically all the time is trying to work you
Turns out things can improve when a country is competently governed
lol. https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:hangzhou
compare and contrast
https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:usa/newyork
Why are you trying to argue that Hangzhou’s air quality isn’t improving by pointing at a source that shows it’s improving? Also, Chinese cities are obviously affected by the fact the whole world outsourced its manufacturing there, what’s the excuse for American cities with shit AQI
canada is on fire
Plenty of places in the US have horrible air under completely normal circumstances , the point is that never gets used to argue that the country is failing
what’s stopping us?
No, and who caused global warming? It wasn’t china that went after climate science and protection public private and pulpit since the 1970s.
What major heavy industry hubs are near new york
what’s a goalpost?
No one is arguing that China has perfect air quality dipshit
Its always gonna be challenging to improve the air quality there because its the world’s fucking factory
You came in here talking about hangzhou’s air quality a fking decade ago and using it in comparison to new york today
All im saying is that the government there has made a ton of improvements over the last fking decade and that’s supported even by the sources you posted
maybe new york is only 8.6, but it’s famously landlocked and its megalopolis is ~50m. ok. do the same search on tokyo. do it on jakarta. chinese cities are some of the absolute worst in the world. this whole thread is just naked ccprop.
china today is better than china 10 years ago. it would be pretty fucking hard to be worse and still have a living population. but it is significantly better than it used to be. the sun is visible on quite a few days of the year in your wonderful cities.
i’ll adjust my slightly hyperbolic suggestion that there are absolutely no megacities outside china with better air than any megacity inside china. there are probably a couple of examples of big cities with better air than the worst chinese megacity, not that any come to mind. tokyo would be similar, i guess. but new york? JAKARTA? really.
no
Did you mean famously not landlocked?
Neo-nazi lies, still doesn’t get invited to the mars colony.
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You are literally the one moving the goalposts
Why do you continue to embarrass yourself like this?
Do you believe that the air quality being bad is caused by pseudo-communism poisoning reality through the corrupted minds of China’s citizens or do you think that it comes from, for example, industrial plants?
lol ok
So I followed your link, because I also went to china ~10 years ago and was sceptical about how much it could change and right now, monitoring stations near Hangzhou range between 24 and 57-ish AQI, and while Tokyo stations appear to be between ~50 and 150. They’ve also, over the last ten years or so, gone from having no days in the green zone, to what appears to be about half the year. So… What were you saying? To me it looks like there has been a staggering improvement.
Talking about air quality in China is a mess because it depends so much on which time of the year and where in the country you are. Across the board you’ll find an improving trend, but air quality still tends to be bad in the winter months and generally worse in northern, inland cities. Tokyo is way ahead here, even Seoul is better despite it being an industrious, car-infested metropolis in spite of all the trains there, so “best air quality in East Asia” is definitely not true.
I got these graphs from https://waqi.info/, up top you see air quality for 2026, and below the data for previous years.
Interesting that Xi’an is still so poor, it really didn’t seem that bad when I visited (although it’s also just a really fascinating place so perhaps I was distracted… I swear I spent 6 or 7 hours at the Terracotta warriors)
But thanks for doing the homework! It’s super impressive how far they’ve come! (which seems to be the story of china generally)
Xi’an is a provincial capital and an international tourism destination, it’s actually a little above average for China. The country also increasingly uses wealth from the coast to invest in uplifting the inland regions, which levels out some of the discrepancy.
Neighbouring Gansu province is the poorest province in China, four times poorer than Xi’an. Here’s a video I found of a Brit exploring its capital city Lanzhou in early spring: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ex-puh3W70
Cheers again but I was talking about the air quality in Xi’an - I remember it being okay but I presumably got lucky:)
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
lol, lmao
This isn’t a generalization that follows from your statement.
And you would be wrong, as proven by air quality indexes.
I was in Hangzhou last year and it was absolutely beautiful.
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